Ethical Reasoning, Moral Intuitions, and Foreign Language in Global Engineering Education [Global Engineering Ethics Education]

Abstract

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.