Ethics has been widely recognized as essential to effective engineering, highlighting the importance of ethics education to engineering curricula. However, developing and delivering effective engineering ethics education is difficult, given the increasingly global environments of contemporary engineering. In contemporary engineering, people from different places and background are studying and working together as never before. National and cultural backgrounds can affect understandings of appropriate conduct within engineering, as well as conceptions of right and wrong in general. Further, while much of the research on engineering ethics education in the US has tended to focus on ethical reasoning and knowledge as learning outcomes, it is unclear whether ethical reasoning or knowledge result in moral judgments or behaviors, and whether ethical reasoning is the same across different national and cultural groups. In addition to national and cultural backgrounds, research has found that foreign language affects ethical reasoning. For example, people are more likely to make sacrificial decisions in a foreign than a native language.

To improve ethics instruction for global engineering education, a study is being conducted exploring the development of ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in the US, Netherlands, and China. This paper reports partial, preliminary results from that study, regarding the natures of and relations between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in the Netherlands and China, and how English as a foreign language affects this reasoning and these intuitions. To do so, engineering students in the Netherlands and China (n = 51) completed measures of ethical reasoning (the Engineering and Science Issues Test – ESIT) and moral intuitions (the Moral Foundations Questionnaire – MFQ) in Dutch and English, and Chinese and English, respectively. Descriptive statistics and statistical hypothesis testing will be carried out. Country and language will be treated as input variables, while responses on the ESIT and MFQ will be treated as output variables.@en

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose ways of learning and making sense of the world may not be best supported through these traditional forms of pedagogy. As we discuss in this chapter, we, as engineering ethics educators, designed and implemented a new engineering ethics exercise with which we aimed to promote inclusivity at the levels of form and content. At the content level, students were invited to critically engage with inclusivity-undermining ableist assumptions in technology development. This took shape, at the form level, through a hands-on ‘material tinkering’ workshop in which students collaboratively and creatively altered (or ‘hacked’) artifacts used in contexts of disability and healthcare, so as to operationalize values of inclusivity and accessibility. Our hunch was that this hands-on tinkering workshop would simultaneously encourage a meaningful way of engagement with these ethical issues and values, while also enacting a more inclusive learning environment by enriching the range of pedagogical activities and learning formats available to our students.

As we aim to show in this chapter, we believe this hunch largely panned out – though there are clear areas for future improvement pertaining to the pilot exercise itself and the research we conducted on the exercise. We begin by offering a description of our tinkering exercise. We discuss the exercise’s source of inspiration (Sect. 16.2.1) and its implementation (Sect. 16.2.2), which is visually captured via photographic documentation. We then discuss (Sect. 16.3) how we utilized a triangulated research method to assess the pedagogical value of the exercise. After we discuss our findings, we conclude by identifying areas for future improvement (Sect. 16.4).@en

While 4E approaches to cognition are increasingly introduced in educational contexts, little has been said about how 4E commitments can inform pedagogy aimed at fostering ethical competencies. Here, we evaluate a 4E-inspired ethics exercise that we developed at a technical university to enliven the moral imagination of engineering students. Our students participated in an interactive tinkering workshop, during which they materially redesigned a healthcare artifact. The aim of the workshop was twofold. Firstly, we wanted students to experience how material choices at the levels of design and functionality can enable morally significant reimaginings of the affordances commonly associated with existing artifacts. We term this type of reimagining world-directed moral imagination. Secondly, through the design process, we wanted students to robustly place themselves in the lived embodied perspectives of (potential) users of their selected artifacts. We term this person-directed moral imagination. While student testimonies about the exercise indicate that both their world-directed and person-directed moral imagination were enlivened, we note that the fostering of robust person-directed moral imagination proved challenging. Using 4E insights, we diagnose this challenge and ask how it might be overcome. To this end, we engage extensively with a recent 4E-informed critique of person-directed moral imagination, raised by Clavel Vázquez and Clavel-Vázquez (2023). They argue that person-directed moral imagination is profoundly limited, if not fundamentally misguided, particularly when exercised in contexts marked by emphatic embodied situated difference between the imaginer and the imagined. Building upon insights from both the 4E field and testimonies from critical disability studies, we argue that, while their critique is valuable, it ultimately goes too far. We conclude that a 4E approach can take on board recent 4E warnings regarding the limits of person-directed moral imagination while contributing positively to the development of moral imagination in engineering ethics education.

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This full research paper develops a framework for using comparative case studies to triangulate with quantitative survey data in engineering ethics education research.Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments of contemporary engineering present challenges to effective engineering ethics training. An overarching goal of our team’s larger project is to examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States, China, and the Netherlands to assess how this training impacts students’ ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs cross-culturally. To gauge students’ moral dispositions and ethical reasoning skills and to measure any change in these, we administer the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Engineering & Science Issues Test to engineering students longitudinally over four years. Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating institution, interpreting and analyzing survey quantitative data will require understanding the contextual conditions of education at each institution. In this paper we ask the question what and how can case study methods contribute to longitudinal and cross-cultural ethics educational research with large data sets? To answer it, we develop conceptual and methodological foundations for the design of comparative, multi-institutional case studies to contextualize, complement, and interpret quantitative and qualitative data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. We develop comparative case studies to supply missing contextual information for triangulation with quantitative and qualitative data and to provide a more complete picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and practices at each of the participating universities. In this project, case studies provide informational and contextual significance to the other sources of data our research produces, elucidating conditions required to understand and make sense of the results of the research. In the paper we introduce our research project, motivate the use of case studies in our research by reviewing literature on case studies and multi-method triangulation in educational research. We explain how specific cases will be designed, and by providing the first step of two cases, timelines of ethics interventions for two degree programs, demonstrate the informational and interpretive need for comparative case studies in triangulating with other data sources. By using multiple case design to compare universities’ approaches in this frame, our analysis can respond to particular institutional educational contexts and cultural and language factors, make cross-cultural comparisons, and offer recommendations about responsible and culturally responsive engineering ethics education.@en

As attention to the pervasiveness and severity of environmental challenges grows, technical universities are responding to the need to include environmental topics in engineering curricula and to equip engineering students, without training in ethics, to understand and respond to the complex social and normative demands of these issues. But as compared to other areas of engineering ethics education, environmental ethics has received very little attention. This article aims to address this lack and raises the question: How should we teach environmental ethics to engineering students? We argue that one key aspect such teaching should address is the tendency of engineers towards technical framing of (social) problems. Drawing then on engineering ethics pedagogy we propose that the competencies of moral sensitivity and critical thinking can be developed to help engineering students with problem (re)framing. We conclude with an example from our teaching that operationalizes these competencies.@en

Ethics has been recognized as critical to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning the form engineering ethics education should take. In part, this results from disagreements about the goals of engineering ethics education, which inhibit the development of and progress in a cohesive research agenda and educational practices. To address these issues, this paper argues that the ultimate goal of engineering ethics education should be more long-term ethical behaviors. To do so, however, engineering ethics must engage with the field of empirical moral psychology. This paper begins by considering reasons for adopting ethical behaviors as the ultimate goal of ethics education, and why this would be problematic: Behaviors are what the public cares about, as well as professional organizations, and accurately assessing the effects of education on ethical behaviors is difficult if not impossible. Instead, curricula have tended to adopt ethical understanding and reasoning as the goals of ethics education, although it is unclear that these result in more ethical behaviors. The paper goes on to consider responses to these problems: Empirical moral psychology has resources for assessing the effects of education on ethical behaviors. A growing body of cross-cultural research has identified features of ethics that are and are not shared across cultural groups, as well as factors that contribute to ethical behaviors. Rather than assessing behaviors directly, proxies for behaviors can be identified and assessed. The nature of engineering itself can be used to formulate guidelines of ethical behaviors, which would transcend national and cultural groups.@en

On the face of it, the conservation strategy of rewilding is inimical to human places and the histories and identities that constitute them. 'We live in a shadowland, a dim, flattened relic of what there once was, of what there could be again', laments George Monbiot (2013a), a staunch advocate of rewilding and an outspoken critic of the human projects of agriculture, husbandry, and even conservation to blame for Great Britain's impoverished ecology. But even without pointing fingers, the idea of rewilding (especially laden with the conceptual baggage attendant to questions of wilderness and wildness) is centrally non-human: it is about self-willed landscapes, the return of extirpated species, and the remaking of landscapes in their pre-agricultural forms. Thus, rewilding seems antithetical to themyriadways humans appropriate the world: our landscapes, timescales, practices, and ways of inhabitation all are thereby challenged. Rewilding unsettles traditional landscapes in that it can exist only in the absence of human settlements, but further, the concept of place-as humanized and humanizing-seems called into question. Others have, in effect, argued against this stance on a practical level by pointing to rewilding projects that do not exclude but foster and even enhance a sense and understanding of place (Drenthen, 2009; Feldman, 2011). I supplement these examples with a conceptual argument against the stance I have just articulated. I argue that rather than undermining or unsettling the concept of place, rewilding itself is place-making. Though premised precisely on human absence from the landscapes and environmentswe have previously inhabited, rewilding is not antithetical to human meanings of these landscapes. This is because conceptually, rewilding relies on the specific ways humans are and are not involved in a landscape, ways which have specific meaningful content which has been pre-defined by historical ideas about wilderness and appropriate human relations to it. Rewilding necessarily preserves specific ways of relating (or not) to landscape, for instance, uses like recreation, or as source of inspiration or natural beauty are promoted, agriculture and resource extraction are not. For this reason, I argue that rewilding allows for, and in fact depends on, the kind of meaningful appropriation that makes a place. Thus, despite its emphasis on non-human wildness at the exclusion of humans and our practices, rewilded places will indeed be places, humanized, even if un-peopled.

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In this paper, I (1) offer a general introduction of rewilding and (2) situate
the concept in environmental philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I work
from definitions and typologies of rewilding that have been put forth in the
academic literature. To these, I add secondary notions of rewilding from outside
the scientific literature that are pertinent to the meanings and motivations
of rewilding beyond its use in a scientific context. I defend the continued use
of rewilding as a single term, despite its seemingly disparate usages, and I
advance a clustered concept of eight overlapping characteristics as a way to
conceptualise these. I argue that this breadth helps in understanding the wider
interest in rewilding as an emerging environmental phenomenon. In the paper’s
second part, I turn to three key issues in environmental philosophy in order to
connect rewilding with the historic themes of: (1) the exclusion of humans
from wild or wilderness places, (2) the ontological purity of wilderness areas
through their non-human origins and history, and (3) cultural landscapes and
notions of place. I suggest that rewilding carries on some of the main themes
of the wilderness debate, but considering rewilding broadly allows tensions
and novel questions to manifest that are important to how rewilding should be
discussed and understood going forward.@en