PHIL402 FA26
Engineering Ethics (PHIL402)
Dr. John Vella
Tuesdays & Thursdays · 11:00am–12:15pm (section 01) · LA2–206
Tuesdays & Thursdays · 12:30pm–1:45pm (section 02) · LA2–206
Engineering Ethics investigates the practical application of normative ethics to real-world issues in engineering professions. Engineers and other technical experts face a host of ethical issues. This course seeks to provide a normative ethical framework to help professional engineers analyze and resolve the practical ethical challenges they confront.
In this framework we will first rehearse some of the concepts and principles of these theories in the moral domain. Common examples are Aristotelian virtue, Pricean intuition, Kantian maxims, Millian utility, etc. The course emphasizes practical application: how shall we deploy these concepts and principles about the moral standards of rightness and wrongness that govern action into workaday professional circumstances? Along the way, the course will also involve the analysis of an array of case studies from aeronautical, civil, electrical, mechanical, chemical and biomedical, agricultural, and architectural engineering. Topics may include technological malfunction; civil disasters; the regulation of vehicular systems; weapons delivery systems; value-sensitive design in machine learning; ethical issues in human × robot interaction; feeding overpopulation; geoengineering; ethics of chemical synthesis; plastics and leaded gasoline; bacteria-resistant drugs; growing in vitro meat; the value of off-grid living; and, finally, the development, maintenance, and dismantling of techno-industrial aspects of society.
GE/GR areas: upper-division C (humanities) and WI (writing)