Responsible innovation through ethics education: educating to change research practice

The Global Perspectives program sought to empower engineers to ask ethical research questions and to examine the ethical dimensions of their current research practices. To enable this line of questioning, the program offered a safe zone in which listening, free discussion and reflection had their place. We spent much time together as a group, having both content-driven as well as personal conversations. In this setting we had the opportunity to, far from the usual power dynamics of our research settings, reflect on our own working environments and the role of ethics therein.

Sunderland and colleagues argue that exposing students to such interdisciplinary and international experiences fosters a more inquiring attitude in ethics education. On several occasions during the program the participants started comparing each other's research context, simply by telling ‘how things were done’ at somebody else's lab or office. This helped us reflect on the practices and disciplinary standards of our own fields, without imposing our own views on others. As such the program created a (necessary) critical distance that facilitated inquiry and reflection.

However, when returning back to ‘the real engineering world’ this safe environment often does not exist. It is an old problem in ethical engagement activities that change of individuals does not automatically lead to changes in their institutional and social context, especially when these individuals are not in powerful positions. Back in the lab or in the office, there is often no time or place for similar discussions, let alone opportunity to radically change research practices.

During this one-week program, we collected several examples of institutional and social burdens that impede ethical reflection and action. Sunderland et al. emphasize the role that students' supervisors and departments play in enabling and/or preventing ethical reflection. This is not only a problem for the recruitment of students, but also for implementing their findings and experiences. For instance, students who participated in the program lost their initial enthusiasm after embarking on failed attempts to share their experiences and ideas with their engineering colleagues. Other students mentioned that even though they were often aware of the ‘right thing to do’, funding arrangements do not allow for the alterations of research practices based on ethical justifications. Sustainability considerations, for example, often fail to convince funders that a project should change its research materials. Another example has less to do with students' low position in academia's power hierarchy and more to do with the competitive forces within universities. Tenure structures, for example, are hurdles to ethical inquiries, especially when ethical considerations are relegated to the ‘broader impacts’ sections of research proposals. Interestingly, most faculty members involved in Berkeley's Minner program in Engineering Ethics seemed to be well established in their field, supporting the view that those still building their careers have less opportunity for non-scientific ventures.

Despite these institutional barriers to ethical action, ethics education materials rarely discuss how to address such institutional and organizational challenges. Many engineering ethics textbooks focus on ethical reasoning; ethics is defined as the systematic reflection on morality and through ethical reflection we can determine the right thing to do. While students are not typically asked to analyze a case's broader context, some institutional barriers are well documented (van der Poel and Royakkers 2011). For instance, the often-used Challenger case demonstrates the role of management structures and power relations in engineering decisions, and discussions of whistleblowing acknowledge all sorts of institutional barriers to doing the right thing. However, rather than opening a discussion about how to change one's ethically problematic organization, textbooks instead offer guidelines for gauging when whistleblowing may be permitted.

If we want to fully realize the empowering effects of ethics educations and take seriously the social hurdles to ethical action, we should offer opportunities for students to develop skills that might enable them to change existing practices and address social barriers.¹ In addition to strong reasoning skills, addressing these broader institutional issues requires knowledge of change management and social change. Such knowledge might be cultivated by incorporating local ethical organizational research into course design with the aim of empowering students to become true partners in realizing the responsible innovation project.

Notes on contributor

Shannon Spruit is a doctoral candidate in Ethics of Technology at Delft University of Technology. Within her PhD project, she is developing a relational view on responsible innovation in the field of nanotechnology and is involved in teaching graduate students engineering ethics. Her participation in the Global Perspectives Course was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant number 016.114.625).

Notes

1. One may also wonder whether the responsibility for changing research practice is with those people educated in ethics education, those in lower parts of the academic ladder. Instead one may aspire structural institutional changes instead to make sustainable change instead of frustrating and burdening individuals with such great responsibility.