601,606 research outputs found

    Teaching ethics to engineering undergraduates - lessons learned and a guide for lecturers: perspective from an English University

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    The issue of ethics within engineering profession has been gaining more and more importance due to globalisation, increasing awareness of sustainability and the fast changing business culture within engineering organisations. As a direct result of such factors the accrediting bodies such as the IMechE and the ABET are very vocal about explicit ethics content in relevant undergraduate engineering programmes. However it is a very challenging exercise to deliver the topic in an effective way due to a number of reasons. First and foremost is the general reluctance of today’s lecturers who themselves were not taught such topics and hence the vast majority are not very keen to consider such ‘softer’ topics very seriously. It is also difficult to accommodate the contents within the engineering curriculum which is already filled with various technical subjects. At the same time, a significant proportion of students find it difficult to relate ethics to real life working environment due to inexperience and hence would consider ‘ethics’ to be ‘not so rigorous’ a subject resulting in poor engagement. The present paper discusses the complete journey of how engineering ethics has been incorporated into an accredited BEng programme in Mechanical engineering. The three steps in course design i.e., breadth and depth of content, detailed planning for effective delivery and assessment and feedback – are all critically discussed by reference to available literature. The author also provides more than one pathway such that the experience may prove useful to the wider communit

    Against the fallacy of Education as a source of Ethics

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    For centuries, the major story of enlightenment was that education is and should be the cornerstone of our society. We try to educate people to make them respectable members of society, something which we inherently relate to being "better persons", firmly believing that education makes humans less prone to evil. Today, modern research seems to validate that premise: statistics verify that more education results to less crime. But is this picture accurate and does this mean anything regarding morality per se? This paper tries to examine the facts with a more critical eye and determine whether education is indeed a source of ethics or not. The results of the analysis show that what we understand as education is not only unrelated to ethics but can also be a factor resulting in the degradation of morality in humans. Rousseau's arguments against science and arts are re-enforced with arguments stemming from other great philosophers and from modern experience itself. Using modern statistical analysis regarding the correlation of crime and education and through the examination of the modern regression in ethical issues, it becomes evident that education cannot and should not be a source of ethics. Knowing what is ethical is not as important as living an ethical life. Pharisees were the first to be denied the entrance to the kingdom of God. As Oscar Wilde once said, "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught"

    A Narrative of Uncertain Intent: Communication Ethics Literacy and FBI Counterterrorism Practices

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    This project works in the horizon of one driving question: What value does communication ethics bring to counterterrorism practices in this current moment? Following insights of communication ethics scholars that have come before, this work understands communication ethics as practices that yield social literacy about what matters to an other. This work adds to communication ethics scholarship the following finding: When applied to current and future events, communication ethics literacy affords one a lens for opening and sustaining spaces for creative communicative response. Through five chapters—which work in tandem to perform an application of communication ethics literacy to the current and ongoing practices of FBI counterterrorism—this project finds that what one ends up with is not solution-based answers, but reflective communicative practices that sustain counter responses to terrorism. These reflective practices, performed with attentiveness to communication ethics literacy, validate the importance of communications ethics for thinking about and responding to terrorism. Communication ethics literacy affords professionals a lens for exploring the questions that shape counterterrorism. And while this application does not provide answers for the demands that terrorism places on professionals in this historical moment, it provides meaningful assistance for navigating threats in a manner that does justice to the diverse nation it seeks to protect. In this moment where solution-based answers are not an attainable reality, and the demands of terrorism are ongoing, reflective communicative practices offer a space for learning and adapting to challenges in real-time

    Evaluating ethics in planning : a heuristic framework for a just city : a thesis presented for partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University, Manawatū

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    Many urban planners are engaged with the idea that cities should be ‘Just’: that is, planning should facilitate good outcomes for the people who choose to live and work in cities, particularly the least advantaged. The concept of a just city is an evolving planning paradigm which focuses on the needs of the least advantaged. This thesis revisits existing ideas of what constitutes a just city and explores why planners should care about the effects of ethics on its realisation. It extends conceptual understandings of what constitutes a ‘just city’, through a focus on care ethics and kindness. Then, by developing and applying the Just City Plan Evaluation Approach (JCPEA), it presents a heuristic framework to surface embedded ethics invoked in planning policy. Ethics in urban planning have not been systematically considered in practice for decades. This inattention can be partially attributed to the distancing of planners from their role as public interest advocates, the multiplicity of competing views about what ethics should or could inform planning policy, and the lack of a systematic, formal approach to evaluate them. Yet normative views of what constitutes right and wrong are central to theoretical debates about planning and are used to inform arguments for or against policy. For decades, ethics of justice have dominated these debates. However, increasing calls for virtue ethics to complement justice ethics present an opportunity for the planning profession to reimagine its role as advocates for the public interest. The JCPEA is based on a theoretical understanding of: (a) theories of justice (b) care ethics, and (c) Fainstein’s concept of the just city and her three just city principles (equity, diversity, and democracy). It enables ethical arguments in planning discourse to be evaluated against four criteria – extent, focus, merit, and power, using both political discourse analysis and a Foucauldian-type discourse analysis. The application of this dual-method approach, to a suite of planning documents from Auckland, New Zealand, proved useful in identifying and evaluating ethics and power in planning. The current intention to replace the Resource Management Act 1991, provides an opportune time to begin a conversation about ethics in plans, to focus on particular ethics, to address the silences, ruptures, and subsequent power imbalances in planning discourse, and to take steps not just towards the realisation of just city ethics and principles in practice, but also to reflect on planning more broadly. Drawing on and extending existing just city narratives, this thesis posits kindness, a practical response to the needs of others, as a principle to invoke in planning policy. This principle of kindness is grounded in an ethic of care, but also sits within an emerging post-secular and intersectional approach to address injustice. It is an ethic that was first signaled by New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2018, when she called for ‘kindness’ as a means of pursuing peace, prosperity, and fairness, and which subsequently became part of the New Zealand response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Invoking kindness represents a step-change in ethics informing government policy and was a signal to the world that there is another way of governing. It is also an ethic that lends itself to planning practice. This thesis argues that exposing and discussing the ethical basis of planning discourse using this heuristic framework provides the means to give agency to planners to act as non-neutral arbiters of the public interest, and as parrhesiastes focussing on the needs of the least advantaged

    Virtue Ethics and Corporate Governance

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    The purpose of this interpretative phenomenological study was to explore directors’ lived experience of ethics in their task of corporate governance so as to capture some of the multiple facets of this phenomenon: specifically how directors understand the role of ethics in their task of corporate governance and how they understand and practise ethics. The focus of the investigation was the role and relative importance of directors’ personal ethics as opposed to corporate governance rules or regulations and to what extent their understanding and practise of ethics as such, resembled Kantian ethics, utilitarianism and Aristotelian virtue theory (AVT). Such issues have implications primarily for the influence of leaders’ personal ethics in the context of corporate governance failure and whether AVT in particular can contribute to the achievement of best-practice governance. AVT differs from the other two ethical theories because it focuses on the importance of a good character for the making and carrying out of sound ethical judgments. It assumes that human nature contains the seeds of ethics and that a good character can develop over time with the help of role models and experience. The study also discusses the subjective aspects of the ethical experience and the debate about the relationship between descriptive and philosophical branches of business ethics. The researcher chose to take an interpretive phenomenological approach using an AVT conceptual framework. The focus of the inquiry was what the individual’s narratives imply about what he or she experiences every day. This allowed the researcher to go further by interpreting the meanings for the purposes of practice and research. The use of the AVT conceptual framework facilitated the examination of the relevance of philosophical ethics for business practice in general and in particular to investigate the relevance of AVT as opposed to the two other ethical theories. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty-four directors, eight of which were interviewed a second time. The Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) technique was used to interpret the data. The findings revealed that directors understand ethics to be integral to their task and that they rely on their personal ethics in carrying out their corporate governance activities. Moreover their experience of ethics resonated with the key features of AVT, aspects which on the whole were not addressed by Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. What is more, directors’ understandings seem to point to an innate objective element underpinning their personal code developed over time through learning and experience. This finding highlights the need to accommodate the subjective-objective complexity of the lived experience of ethics. The findings also indicate that philosophical ethics is needed to adequately account for the lived experience of ethics; directors’ descriptions of their experience contained and were inseparable from ethical standards, the realm of philosophical ethics. In light of the resemblance between AVT and directors’ lived experience of ethics, corporate governance reformers and educators should place just as much emphasis on the development of good character as on learning about ethical duties and how to balance outcomes

    Apprenticeship and Conservation Incentives

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    Apprentice programs offer a method to encourage responsible individual behavior by laying the foundation for successful collective property rights. Apprenticeship has three purposes: to restrict the rate of entry, to affect the quality of the participant, and to create the conditions for collective action for sustainability. Apprenticeship could be an important fishery management tool, particularly in decentralized, adaptive management regimes that require ongoing, multi-party negotiation for success. It is not vocational training; instead it serves a public purpose: to create the conditions for stewardship and participation in management. This perception of collective property right mimics customary practice in some successful traditional fisheries such as the Maine lobster fishery where customary practice has been demonstrated both to have conservation benefits and to lower enforcement costs. Case information from Maine’s new, statutory lobster apprentice program is discussed. Apprenticeship creates conditions for responsible behavior by creating a stable population that can develop long term assurances about expected behavior and can develop credible internal monitoring and sanctions. In addition to requiring a personal investment of time, it provides information about fishing ethics and non-fishing information about basic biology, ecology, and participation in the management system. This, because it changes the frame of reference, should affect individual behavior both fishing and as participants in management. Apprenticeship focuses on the individual fishing as the principal actor in conservation. The apprenticeship approach bolsters both co-management and, for that matter, conventional limited entry programs as well

    WHAT IS IT TO BE AN ETHICAL ENGINEER? A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ENGINEERING ETHICS PEDAGOGY

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    Two concerns are prominent in engineering ethics pedagogy and, together, pose a conundrum for ethics educators: 21st century technologies raise daunting ethical questions that require a strong engagement with and understanding of ethics by engineers; at the same time, however, engineering students don’t care much about studying ethics. Ethics instruction, however, seems nonresponsive to these issues. It continues to rely on Western ethical theories using case studies to analyze professional engineering conduct. And, although instructors want better student learning outcomes, assessment continues to use quantitative measures of ethical knowledge and ethical reasoning skills which disregard students’ emotional engagement with ethics and underestimates ABET’s Engineering Criterion 3(f) which requires that engineering students have an understanding of professional and ethical responsibilities. In the end, dissatisfaction with instruction and student learning outcomes persists. Given the epistemological foundations of engineering – that engineering is applied science using knowledge that is universal, objective, certain, and discoverable through reason – it is unsurprising that engineering ethics is taught the same way science is taught using a linear, positivistic, problem-solving approach that assumes reason will yield correct and usually quantitatively determined answers to ethical questions. In this dissertation, I argue that, contrary to the dominant thinking passed on to generations of students that engineering is applied science and, as such, largely ethically neutral beyond safe an d efficient design, the practice of engineering actually arises from a contingency model of knowledge and is, correspondingly, imbued with both uncertainty and ethics. I contend that the way we teach engineering ethics must change if we expect different learning outcomes from undergraduate engineering students. In this research, I introduce an engineering ethics pedagogy informed by phenomenology, the study of human meaning from the standpoint of experience. Students are asked to research the phenomenological question, “what is it to be an ethical engineer?” and employ principles of hermeneutic phenomenology to interpret and understand that experience. Quantitative measures test changes in students’ ethical sensitivity and ethical reasoning skills, and qualitative methods informed by philosophical hermeneutics are used to assess changes in students’ emotional engagement with ethics and their understanding of professional and ethical responsibilities. I draw two principal conclusions from my work on this project. First, a one-credit ethics course using a phenomenology-informed engineering ethics pedagogy can contribute to undergraduate engineering students’ improved ethical sensitivity, ethical reasoning skills, emotional engagement with the study of ethics, and understanding of professional and ethical responsibility. Second, qualitative assessment revealed that we educators of engineering ethics are not attuned to what is important to our undergraduate engineering students. While we are intent on imparting ethical knowledge, our students worry about how they will fit into the world of engineering as ethically competent professionals when they move from undergraduate student to practicing engineer. This is a gap we must fill if we expect our students to graduate with an understanding of their professional and ethical responsibilities. A phenomenological approach to engineering ethics education – where students are given the opportunity to investigate, encounter, and understand the real, lived experience of what it is to be an ethical engineer – can help fill this gap

    Information Science and Philosophy

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    Looking out of Information Science (IS) it®s a dangerous attempt to compare this relative new science direct with Philosophy. Here you find a first circumspective trial of an investigation of the traditionally named “queen of science”, Philosophy, two thousand years old and - direct opposite - the only a half century old Information Science. For me it is till now not yet clear how to do this in a serious scientific manner. I worked in Applied Informatics for 30 years and make Information Science since about 15 years. Here I dare to publish for first time the results. SOKRATES (469 – 399 b.Chr.), PLATON (428/27- 348/47 b.Chr.) und ARISTOTELES (384 - 322 b.Chr.) as inventors of our traditional occidental Philosophy, have founded the search of the sense of our Human Life, Thinking and Acting as an own science. They set the Joy of Life on top of their way of thinking. PLATON has separated this special new thinking from the „Sophists“ who had a very good public image too at his time. But they were thinking more about common business facts and knowledge only. Today we would call them manufacturer, qualified skilled workers or even bachelors of special sciences. Philosophy has (since over 20 centuries) till today first of all the smart and high duty to serve Religion and Ethics as mental, spirit- and language-grounded science-base. In other direction it was used to overthink our whole surrounding nature theoretically and completely by our best Human Mind. It®s our traditional science on our mental highest level. All sciences can be related by Philosophy. That®s possible by our human ability to Learn, Think, Understand and finally Know any interesting new fact. Where and how do we have now to integrate this new own science Information Science? We search consciously term-oriented and make an abstract science-theoretical comparison to find answers and definitions

    Are managers ready for HRM 4.0?: the potential role of blockchain technology in HRM

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    As most professions, the field of Human Resources, henceforth HR, has changed considerably over time. To the best of my knowledge, no previous research has been made about the effects of blockchain technology into the HR field, from the perspective of ethics. This research will therefore aim to contribute to the existing literature about blockchain technology and HR by exploring whether managers are ready for new technological implementations, along with a broad matter of ethics behind the implementation. A qualitative and exploratory research design using semi-structured interviews was adopted in order to gain more knowledge with respect to this topic. The paper uses a model from scratch that Business Ethics is the umbrella, due to the reason that ethics have the main role when talking about HR. The research provides insights into the synthesis of blockchain technology and HR managers and how their tasks may threaten the privacy, confidentiality or security of the organisation or the people working in it. The main findings of this paper were that managers are thrilled that an existing technology could help them automate some steps that need more time. However, at the same time, they are not willing to compromise the security, confidentiality and privacy. Therefore, the implementation of blockchain is going to be a rather slow process. It is hoped that the findings of this research will further contribute to the field of HR

    Let’s Play! Gamifying Engineering Ethics Education Through the Development of Competitive and Collaborative Activities

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    Engineering ethics is an extremely important topic that needs to be focused on more in engineering curricula, as many of the projects that engineers work on have a profound impact on society. There are many pitfalls with the traditional ways in which ethics is taught to engineering students as an abstract philosophical topic, rather than personal decision making situated in complex real contexts. The three main approaches that are used for engineering ethics include being taught by a professor outside of the engineering space, being taught late in their curriculum such as during a senior capstone project, and being taught in a short period of time as a module of another class. The downsides to these approaches are that students do not see ethics as equally important as some other topics, they do not see it consistently integrated throughout the curriculum, nor do they see ethical decisions as complex nuanced, and situated in context,. Game-based learning is a means to actively engage students in interrogating the complexities of ethical decision making. Game play can align with student learning objectives as well as improve student knowledge, behaviors, and dispositions. Our paper introduces three games that are designed to assist in the development of students’ ethical awareness and reasoning. Three engineering ethics games have been developed as the foundation for an NSF-funded project that investigates the empirical impacts of game play on ethical reasoning and decision making. Cards Against Engineering Ethics, Toxic Workplaces, and Mars: An Ethical Expedition have all been in development for the last few years. Each game targets specific ethics learning outcomes as well as different play mechanics. These outcomes include identifying the complexities of ethical dilemmas, evaluating responses to ethical situations in context, and promoting ethical discussions among peers. The time required to play each game varies, ranging from 20 minutes, to 75 minutes, to 5 minutes once a week for 15 weeks. The benefits that these games include an enriched learning experience, student engagement, and a greater connection between ethics and real life
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