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Written by: Julia Harper

As engineers, our creations have an immeasurable effect on the world, often one that continues to evolve after us in unimaginable ways. From bridges that tragically collapse to robots that are used as weapons, once our work is put out into the world we have little authority over how others use it. Thus, it is important to understand and consider when our creations are in all stages of the design process so that its long lasting impact is well thought out. This is one of many elements of engineering ethics, a field that has been growing, but has yet to make an established mark on engineering as a whole. Often misdefined and misunderstood, ethics are a crucial part in ensuring engineering is used in productive, positive ways. It is difficult if not impossible to assign a single definition to “productive and positive”, but further development of ethics as a fundamental part of undergraduate engineering curricula could help elicit more investigation and incorporation into engineering as a field. Although engineering ethics should be vital at all parts of life as an engineer, an essential first step starts within undergraduate education where, despite the importance, the ethics of a technology are often overlooked by students and educators.  A possible avenue to do this is to split ethics education into two overarching components: first, to teach engineering students fundamental ethical concepts and task them to build their own ethical framework and, second, to challenge engineering students to apply that framework through the design process. It is important that engineering ethics education is multifaceted. Students must learn both the fundamentals of ethics, their own perspective on ethics, as well as the ability to combine these into a meaningful application. 

Engineering ethics began to develop as a field after World War II with the adoption of the Canons of Ethics for Engineers by National Society of Professional Engineers, but formal research into engineering ethics and incorporation of it into engineering academics didn’t begin until the 1970s (Martin 2021). Only then did textbooks and academic journals begin to include it as a critical part of engineering. Currently, many engineering undergraduate programs incorporate ethics into the curriculum. However, this integration has been done non uniformly across universities and even within individual programs. Undergraduate introduction into ethics heavily depends on the school, year, even section of a class. Martin also argues that despite ethics beginning to be incorporated, meaningful inclusion on many levels, from undergraduate to faculty levels, hasn’t occurred. On a surface level, despite almost a century of engineering ethics in the United States, students still often perceive ethics as secondary to their technical education, potentially due to ineffective or inconsistent incorporation. Thus, this largely negative view of ethics permeates engineering culture as students graduate and begin to work in the real world. Students do not acknowledge their personal ethical opinions or apply them in classroom and real life situations. Many universities may have a required ethics course, but according to Peth Panitz in “Ethics Instruction: An Undergraduate Essential”, “The disadvantage of freestanding ethics courses is that they make ethics look like an optional rather than an integral part of engineering.” In addition to classes that solely teach engineering ethics, students must be challenged to recognize their ethical opinions and apply them within their technical classes, rather than just skating by. 

Often people have their own ethical sense which generally begins to develop in childhood, first from observing their parents, then their peers, and finally the world as a whole. They have a plethora of examples available to them, demonstrating when, how, and why ethics are considered. Children may base their own sense on their parents values and have the ability to test these ideas as they grow into independent adults. So, if everyone has a baseline ethical sense, why is it so difficult to apply in engineering? Although there is effort put in by educators, it is difficult to have a fully fleshed out approach when not all of the steps to teach ethics are completed. For example, the addition of ethics classes within engineering curricula is an important step and gives students and educators the opportunity to understand ethics on a baseline level, but it is not the only step necessary for students to truly learn ethics. If students are not fully engaged, it doesn’t continue throughout the rest of the engineering process. Additionally, if students are only analyzing ethical case studies and not being tasked with applying what they have learned, they can only view ethical challenges in hindsight. Similarly, a student studying for a calculus exam by reading through practice exam solutions doesn’t gain as much as a student who does the practice exam, grades their work, and then does another attempt. Instead of being challenged to understand the framework ethics students have developed since childhood and apply that to new problems, they shirk away the responsibility because it is too difficult, too complex, or not important in the moment when they are juggling STEM classes, internships, and clubs. 

Developing a Conscious Ethical Framework

Most people unconsciously develop their own personal ethical code throughout their life. Every day we make ethical decisions, whether that be calling out a friend for saying something rude or choosing to ride our bike to school instead of driving to generate less pollution. Ethical decisions are made constantly, imperfectly, and often subconsciously. For example, people who were raised by parents who composted all of their food scraps may continue that into adulthood without recognizing that the decision to compost has ethic components such as wanting to decrease food waste in the trash because they believe that it is good for the environment. In general, ethical decisions aren’t perfect. Although you might be making what appears to be the ethical decision to compost, it could get accidentally thrown in the trash down the line by someone else. Similarly, engineers don’t necessarily have control of what their company produces, but they have control over themselves and the choices they make. Every decision may have an ethical component, but how important your ethical beliefs are to your daily life is up to each individual. We develop this ethical sense throughout our lives, often without realizing that our sense of right and wrong has been shaped by our families, our environments, and our life experiences. It is easy to see the ethical component of an action when the implications are immediate and easily understood. However, in engineering this is not necessarily always true. For example, when the Wright brothers were testing their plane, they would not have imagined the way planes are used today with far reaching positive and negative impacts. 

On a personal and professional level, the older you get the more complicated the questions and situations become. We begin to understand how to navigate the lines other people have drawn for us, and how to draw our own. Even something seemingly black and white becomes more complicated. Although the situations become more complex as you grow, you are continuously challenged. The questions become more difficult, but your ability to navigate them becomes increasingly advanced and your framework becomes seemingly innate. By building off of this basis, engineers can bring this seemingly innate sense to the forefront of their thought process, which aids in purposefully incorporating ethics. Although standalone ethics classes likely don’t provide the necessary depth or time, having required ethics classes build upon the undergraduate's prior knowledge to shape their ethical framework with an engineering mindset. For example, students can begin to imagine the dangers of technology that is allowed too much influence over individuals. It allows engineers to understand their ethical thought process within other situations and apply that thought process to engineering. Tasking students to read, analyze, and discuss a variety of perspectives within ethics gives them the opportunity to gain formal knowledge and explore other’s ethical frameworks that they agree or disagree with. If you believe that your ethics are simply just an innate sense that everyone possesses to the same degree, you cannot understand why people make different decisions than you and you cannot understand why you make the decisions you do. The challenge of forming an applicable framework is that it is ever changing and always questioned. While having a conscious ethical framework is a step in the right direction, incorporating ethics into engineering education, on a variety of levels, is necessary to create a meaningful and clear impact.

Through the further development of already existing ethics classes, specifically ensuring they are consistently thorough, students can be reached on a wider, more in depth scope. At CU, students are required to take several humanities classes, a writing class, and for some freshmen classes, a first year seminar. Students were instructed for five and a half weeks by a variety of professors who took on a wide range of focuses, including ethics. Similarly, students in the Engineering Honors Program take engineering leadership classes that closely tie into engineering ethics. While this is an introduction for incoming engineering students, it wasn’t a comprehensive effort. Not every student in the first year seminar has an ethics focused professor. Not every student is in the honors program. Additionally, many professors throughout engineering colleges did not learn ethics during their undergraduate education either and so do not pass the knowledge down to their students. In order to have fundamental changes to giving students a baseline ethical sense, the curriculum would need to be modified to be consistent and thorough. In a first year class, they could be introduced to generalized ethics and asked to consider their perspective on the arguments made. For example, they could read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and be tasked with questioning the purpose of the allegory  and how it connects to issues they see in the modern world. By the end of the class, they could be asked to write a short self discussion on the issues they see in the world, why they are important to them, and how they can see themselves using their engineering degree to work to solve those issues. Although this may seem like an intimidating ask for some, college students are continuously being tasked with learning, growing, and questioning the world around them in a variety of manners. Adjusting this effort would give all students the same background regardless of their education before college, similar to how a calculus 1 class gives all students the same basic mathematics skills regardless of prior experience.

Incorporating Ethics Practice Into Engineering Education

Although engineering schools beginning to require ethics classes is a good start to encouraging this, practicing engineering ethics isn’t just a semester-long project, one that you can finish and forget. It has to be incorporated, challenged, and applied in all parts of engineering classes because that is what occurs in real engineering careers. From a first year physics class discussing coefficients of friction to ensure a car stays on the road to a senior design class creating prosthetics to faculty considering the ethics of their research. William Lynch in Engineering Practice and Engineering Ethics argues that, “Ethical instruction is sometimes understood as providing a systematic guide for individual moral thinking rather than inculcating a specific set of values.” The ethical challenges that engineers face aren’t just simply solved and move on from, they occur in any part of the engineering process. There isn’t a strict framework to follow when faced with an ethical challenge. Instead of becoming neglectful of these ethical values, students can be taught to incorporate these ideas into their engineering lives. 

Ethics is a skill that can be daunting at first, but that can be learned and developed over time and practice. Just like any other skill in engineering, such as calculus or CAD, you start with a basic understanding in first and second year classes. In math you start with basic arithmetic and then move onto algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc. Similarly, engineers start with a basic understanding of ethics. Ethics education is just another lens to view and challenge the world around us. Engineering colleges can develop this skill in their students just like any other, through focused classes that teach them more of the basics and adjacent classes that, while not teaching ethics directly, instead ask students to apply what they have learned previously. If students started in a differential equations class before learning derivatives and integrals, they would likely be lost and feel that they cannot do engineering and their time is better spent on something else. But if they are brought through the basics and gradually the complexity is increased until they are fully capable of solving problems.

Over the course of four plus years in college, engineering students are taught to think and solve problems in very specific manners. They are taught the necessary tools and released to solve real, but initially small scale problems. According to Professor Iso Van De Poel, “...students should learn that there are questions that don't always have one right answer; students should also become aware that asking questions itself is sometimes more important than answering them” (Smuga-Fries 2014). Engineers are taught to solve problems in a set order and throughout their college career they are tasked with solving increasingly open ended problems. However, by the time you get to senior level classes and beyond, the issues engineers solve don’t necessarily have an end point. It is up to the engineers to decide what reasonable parameters are. For example, a class designing prosthetic limbs would have to progress through each step of the engineering design process, but throughout each step they will have to consider the ethical implications that arise and apply their previously developed framework. Students might consider issues related to the sustainability of their prosthetic for the user. Is it easy to get it repaired? What if they lived in a rural area and couldn’t go to a specialist for repairs, would they be able to fix it themselves? In the final stages of the design, the students might create a thorough user manual. Teaching students ethics doesn’t necessarily lead to different outcomes every time, but it does encourage students to think more deeply about the end product. As Van De Poel argues, the answer isn’t always the important part; the consideration of the question is.

Consideration must come at a variety of levels, small and large scale. As mentioned above, it is incredibly easy to include a few minutes of discussion about ethics within coefficients of friction in a first year class. This is what builds a foundation of ethics in engineering education, starting simple and often, from the beginning, allowing students to begin to see ethics in the foundation of engineering. In classes with more flexibility, such as a project class, taking time to teach an interactive lesson on ethics in the beginning allows students to “play” with ethics in a sheltered setting. The University of Iowa for example includes an Engineering Ethics section in its lesson guides. To sustain this effort, professors must continuously question the ethics of the student’s projects. For example, if they were to create an automated water garden, the professor could ask them to consider the ethics of the materials used. How do they degrade over time? Are they safe for long term human use? Are they safe for household pets? As students move through the curriculum, ethics are presented to them consistently in a variety of ways. That is what makes ethics education simple in theory, a constant effort throughout education is easier than a disorganized, inconsistent effort only at the beginning or end of an engineering degree. 

Although these steps are easy in theory, ensuring that engineering education faculty are on the same page about the importance of ethics is difficult. Professors don’t necessarily need to agree with other faculty or students to teach ethics effectively, if anything, it is more important for students to see a variety of perspectives. However, even just a couple of faculty putting in the effort will create a wide reaching ripple effect, demonstrating to other faculty and students that ethics education can be done well.

Other examples of teaching ethics throughout engineering may include a fluid mechanics professor teaching about ethics within medicine and how students that focus in fluid mechanics may work to create artificial heart valves. In their jobs, they may have to consider how often the system needs to be repaired or how it may extend people's lives, but not with a better quality of life. Similarly, in a class like MCEN 2000, Mechanical Engineering as a Profession, often brings in engineers in research, industry, etc. Someone that worked for aerospace or military industries can easily discuss why they chose to work in those fields and how they dealt with the relevant ethical dilemmas. Not every student will agree, some may never work in military adjacent industries, while others might choose to work in order to shape the fields into more ethical futures. Being tasked with actively using their individual ethical frameworks helps to develop them, so they can make decisions in their career that are well thought out.

Studying various ethical perspectives from different times, people, and cultures should enable students to develop their own set of ethics, just as they build an understanding of calculus that can be applied in every other facet of engineering. Ethics are not meant to be a set of strict rules, but rather a tool and a guideline for navigating the world. Everyone has their own ethical framework, whether they realize it or not. Many students don’t connect with the ethics they’re learning because of ethics’ reputation as impractical and complex. However, ethics can be applied in every part of life, from resolving friend conflicts to choosing a reusable thermos instead of using paper cups for morning coffee. The impact of engineering on the world is continuous and seemingly infinite. Engineering ethics can seem daunting because of the potential severity of making mistakes. However, by drastically modifying the manner in which engineering students are taught ethics, it can become another part of the engineering process. It doesn’t necessarily make it less daunting, but creates pathways for engineers to create solutions that consider the fullest scope of application possible and to create technology that has been fully considered for its impact on the future of humanity.

Works Cited

Lynch, William T., and Ronald Kline. “Engineering Practice and Engineering Ethics.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, pp. 195–225. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/690111. Accessed 28 June 2025.

Martin, D.A., Conlon, E. & Bowe, B. A Multi-level Review of Engineering Ethics Education: Towards a Socio-technical Orientation of Engineering Education for Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 27, 60 (2021). 

“University Libraries: The University of Iowa.” Activities for the Classroom - Engineering Ethics - Guides at University of Iowa, guides.lib.uiowa.edu/c.php?g=1226951&p=8977868. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025. 

van de Poel, Ibo, and Eulalia Smuga-Fries. “TEACHING ETHICS TO ENGINEERING STUDENTS.” Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy, vol. 63, no. 1, 2015, pp. 213–16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43410429. Accessed 28 June 2025.