Toward an Horizon in Design Ethics

This paper suggests that design ethics can be enriched by considering ethics beyond the traditional approaches of deontology, teleology, and virtue ethics. Design practice and design ethics literature tend to frame ethics in design according to these approaches. The paper argues that a fundamental and concrete ethical understanding of design ethics can also be found in Sartrean Existentialism, a philosophy centered on the individual and his/her absolute freedom. Through the analysis of four core concepts of Sartrean Existentialism that define a specific ethics, the paper illustrates why such philosophical approach is relevant to design ethics. The paper also shows how Sartrean Existentialism and its ethics apply to critical issues of professional practice in design such as professional engagement and design decision-making. The paper finally argues that Sartre’s philosophy and ethics is a perspective that offers the designer in design practice a solid ground to engage his/her ethical dilemma.     

A Preliminary Survey of Relationships Between Counselor Educators' Ethics Education and Ensuing Pedagogy and Responses to Attractions With Counseling Students

Literature suggests that counselor education does not consistently teach ethics and that ethical violations currently occur between trainees and faculty. The literature also suggests that ethical dilemmas during training strongly influence later ethical counseling practice. A survey examined the ethics training of counselor educators and ensuing attitudes and actions in professional practice. The author discovered that ethics pedagogy during training was related to later pedagogical strategies and to reactions to attraction with students. Furthermore, no single pedagogical strategy seems to guarantee best teaching or ethical professional practice. This survey reinforces the need for ethics education for counselor educators and suggests directions for research.     

Integrating emotion and other nonrational factors into ethics education and training in professional psychology

ABSTRACT

Any professional or scientific discipline has a responsibility to do what it can to ensure ethical behavior on the part of its members. In this context, this paper outlines and explores the criticism that to date the emphasis in ethics training in professional psychology, as with other disciplines, has been on the rational elements of ethical decision making, with insufficient attention to the role of emotions and other nonrational elements. After a brief outline of some of the historical background to the development and understanding of ethical decision making, relevant theoretical and empirical literature on the influence of emotional and other nonrational factors on our ethical decisions is reviewed. The implications of this literature for ethics education and training are outlined, particularly with respect to the use of case studies. An integrative approach is proposed, and conclusions and recommendations are offered with respect to such an approach.     

Ethics,Alterity, and Psychotherapy: A Levinasian Perspective

Current psychologies of religion reflect the modernist context in which they are situated. Religion is reduced to what is researchable, generalizable, individual and “thin.” This essay suggests that a psychology of religion which takes seriously the implications of Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on ethics and the alterity of the Other would result in a different model of psychotherapy. Levinas’s view of the Other as the trace of the transcendent radically changes our understanding of the client within the therapeutic relationship. Levinas begins with ethics and so healing would be, by implication, an ethical enterprise. In a highly secularized, individualized, objectivized culture, a therapy which recognizes the sacred, which models how to view the Other as transcendent, and which does not presume to know, is a gift to the client.     

Scientific societies and whistleblowers: the relationship between the community and the individual

Formalizing shared ethical standards is an activity of scientific societies designed to achieve a collective goal of promoting ethical conduct. A scientist who is faced with the choice of becoming a “whistleblower” by exposing misconduct does so in the context of these ethical standards. Examination of ethics policies of scientific societies which are members of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) shows a breadth of purpose and scope in these policies. Among the CSSP member societies, some ethics policies chiefly present the ethical culture of the community in an educational context and do not have enforcement procedures. Other policies are more comprehensive and include standards for certification, procedures for addressing ethical issues, and established sanctions. Of the 36 member societies of CSSP that have developed a code or adopted a code of another professional society, 18 specifically identified a responsibility to expose ethical misconduct, demonstrating an acknowledgment of the possible critical role of the whistleblower in addressing ethical issues. Scientific societies may revise their ethics codes based upon experience gained in addressing cases of ethical misconduct. In most cases, the action of a whistleblower is the initial step in addressing an ethics violation; the whistleblower may either be in the position of an observer or a victim, such as in the case of someone who discovers that his or her own work has been plagiarized. The ethics committee of a scientific society is one of several possible outlets through which the whistleblower can voice a complaint or concern. Ethical violations can include falsification, fabrication, plagiarism and other authorship disputes, conflict of interest and other serious violations. Commonly, some of these violations may involve publication in the scientific literature. Thus addressing ethical issues may be intertwined with a scientific society’s role in the dissemination of new scientific results. For a journal published by a scientific society, the editor can refer at some point to the ethics committee of the society. Whereas, in the case of a journal published by a commercial publisher, the editor may be without direct support of the associated scientific community in handling the case. The association of a journal with a scientific society may thus direct a whistleblower towards addressing the issue within the scientific community rather than involving the press or talking to colleagues who may gossip. A formal procedure for handling ethics cases may also discourage false accusers. Another advantage of handling complaints through ethics committees is that decisions to contact home institutions or funding agencies can be made by the ethics committee and are not the responsibility of the whistleblower or the editor of the journal. The general assessment is that the establishment of ethics policies, especially policies covering publication in society journals, will promote a culture supportive of whistleblowers and discouraging to false accusers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium entitled “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: What the Scientific Community Can Do About Whistleblowing” held during the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Seattle, Washington, 15 February, 1997.     

Professional Codes of Practice and Ethical Conduct

ABSTRACT This essay is an attempt to examine the idea that a professional code of practice can entail ethical conduct. It is focused around two differing perspectives on ethics. It will be argued that the professions have, perhaps too hastily, adopted one theory without considering the merits, or the objections offered by the alternative account. This alternative, a 'cognitivist' theory, is sketched, and the possible advantages of such an approach are discussed. Such a perspective means adopting a radically different approach to the nature of ethics and what it is to be a moral agent, and could have interesting consequences for professional practice. Even if a cognitivist account is ultimately unconvincing, it does provide a number of worrying arguments for those professionals who believe that ethical conduct is generated by following a code of practice, and these arguments need to be addressed.     

Ethical Challenges for Military Psychologists: When Worlds Collide

Despite the mental health needs in the military and improved access to military psychologists, many in need do not seek psychological services. The military policies, culture, and environment pose considerable barriers to help seeking. In turn, military practices often conflict with the psychologist’s professional ethics, leading to a range of ethical dilemmas including multiple relationships, multiple agencies, and limited confidentiality. To address ethical concerns and encourage service members to seek mental health services, this article proposes maintaining an understanding of military rules, law, and professional ethics; identifying multiple relationships and establishing boundaries up front; and collaborating with the patient in disclosures of information.     

Beyond the Classroom Wall: Theorist-Practitioner Relationships and Extra-Mural Ethics

In this paper I investigate the theory-practice relationship in ethics by using the lens of theorist-practitioner relationships. In particular I discuss the contrasts between theorist-practitioner relationship inside and outside the classroom, the ‘extra-mural’ expertise of theorists, and the ethical issues which arise when theorists act as co-practitioners. I argue that understanding these social and ethical issues is essential to understanding the relationship between theory and practice in ethics, and shows the need for more emphasis on practice-oriented forms of ethical theorising.     

The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological Ethics in Hell

Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technological university, I need to explain to my students—future engineers and architects—the motivations and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals of the Third Reich. I need to educate my students in the ethical practices of this hellish regime so that they can avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the Nazi engineers. In their own professional lives, my former students should not only be good engineers in a technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense. In this essay, I examine several arguments about the ethical judgments of professionals in Nazi Germany, and attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for contemporary engineers and other technological professionals. How does an engineer avoid the error of the Nazi engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology underlying their technological creations? How does an engineer know that the values he embodies through his technological products are good values that will lead to a better world? This last question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the understanding of engineering ethics.     

Identification of shareholder ethics and responsibilities in online reverse auctions for construction projects

The increasing number of companies providing internet services and auction tools helped popularize the online reverse auction trend for purchasing commodities and services in the last decade. As a result, a number of owners, both public and private, accepted the online reverse auctions as the bidding technique for their construction projects. Owners, while trying to minimize their costs for construction projects, are also required to address their ethical responsibilities to the shareholders. In the case of online reverse auctions for construction projects, the ethical issues involved in the bidding technique directly reflects on the owner’s ethical and social responsibilities to their shareholders. The goal of this paper is to identify the shareholder ethics and responsibilities in online reverse auctions for construction projects by analyzing the ethical issues for the parties involved in the process. The identification of the ethical issues and responsibilities requires clear definition and understanding of professional ethics and the roles of the involved parties. In this paper, first, the concept of professional ethics and social responsibility is described in a general form. To illustrate the ethical issues and responsibilities, a sample case of bidding for a construction project using online reverse auction techniques is presented in which the shareholders were actively involved in questioning the ethical issues. The issues involved in the bidding process and their reflection on the shareholder responsibilities are described and analyzed for each stage of the process. A brief discussion of the overall process is also included to address the general ethical issues involved in online reverse auctions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

The Metaphysics of Ethical Love: Comparing Practical Vedanta and Feminist Ethics

In this paper I compare two very different deployments of love in ethics. Swami Vivekananda's concept of ethical love ties into the project of constructing an alternative masculinity for a colonized people; while feminist care ethics uses love to escape the perceived masculinity of traditional ethical theory. Using Kenneth Goodpaster's distinction between ‘framework questions’ and ‘application questions,’ I try to show that love in Practical Vedanta addresses the former while feminist care ethics concerns itself with the latter. Even though this difference, I suggest, could be a function of their varying historical-political contexts, the two issues need to be taken together for a more complete understanding of the ethical subject.     

Ethical Orientations and Attitudes of Hispanic Business Students

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attitudes and orientations of Hispanic business students regarding ethical and unethical actions as well as what rewards or punishments are considered appropriate for specific scenarios. A survey was developed using a 2 × 2 randomized experimental design to measure students’ ethical orientations and 38 items were developed to measure students’ attitudes regarding factors that can influence the decision to cheat or not to cheat. The results suggest that Hispanic business students are predominantly concerned with the ethical dimension of an act relative to the outcome of the act. Also, contrary to previous studies findings, some Hispanic business students are likely to cheat on any type of graded work based on the reason for cheating rather than the type of graded work. The paper utilizes an established framework for measuring ethical attitudes and orientations. The study offers a preliminary inductive path towards a more in depth understanding of Hispanic business students which is a rapidly growing population segment whose influence will become more widespread in the coming decades. Some of the findings are not consistent with previous research that examined student bodies as a whole. This might suggest that student ethics researchers may be missing valuable information regarding differences between student body segments that can further inform our understanding of students’ ethical views. Further, this insight may provide an avenue for a more effective approach to guiding the ethical development of students.     

Speaking for Oneself: Wittgenstein on Ethics

In the “Lecture on ethics”, Wittgenstein declares that ethical statements are essentially nonsense. He later told Friedrich Waismann that it is essential to “speak for oneself” on ethical matters. These comments might be taken to suggest that Wittgenstein shared an emotivist view of ethics—that one can only speak for oneself because there is no truth in ethics, only expressions of opinion (or emotions). I argue that this assimilation of Wittgenstein to emotivist thought is deeply misguided, and rests upon a serious misunderstanding of what is implied by the nonsensicality of ethical claims on Wittgenstein's view. I develop a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks in the “Lecture on ethics” on which ethical statements, despite their nonsensicality, reveal the perspective of the speaker. The purpose of ethical language is to elucidate a speaker's perspective. Such elucidations, and the perspectives they reveal, can be evaluated, criticized, and respected on principled grounds even if, as Wittgenstein insists, no ethical judgment can be (objectively) justified by any fact. I contrast Wittgenstein's comments on ethics with some comments made by Frank Ramsey (from the same period), which appear similar to Wittgenstein's remarks on value. Contra Ramsey's insistence that there is “nothing to discuss” about (or within) ethics, a proper understanding of Wittgenstein's views does not commit us to passing over ethics in silence.     

A psychological model that integrates ethics in engineering education

Ethics has become an increasingly important issue within engineering as the profession has become progressively more complex. The need to integrate ethics into an engineering curriculum is well documented, as education does not often sufficiently prepare engineers for the ethical conflicts they experience. Recent research indicates that there is great diversity in the way institutions approach the problem of teaching ethics to undergraduate engineering students; some schools require students to take general ethics courses from philosophical or religious perspectives, while others integrate ethics in existing engineering courses. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to implement the integration of ethics in engineering education that is pedagogically based on Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development.     

Theoretical and methodological elements for integrating ethics as a foundation into the education of professional and design disciplines

The paper addresses the integration of ethics into professional education related to the disciplines responsible for the conception and creation of the artificial (artefactual or technology). The ontological-epistemological paradigm of those disciplines is understood within the frame of the sciences of the artificial as established by Herbert Simon (1969). According to that paradigm, those sciences include disciplines not only related to the production of artefacts (technology), such as engineering, architecture, industrial design, etc, but also disciplines related to devised courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones, like medicine, law, education, etc. They are centered on intentional action and at their core is the activity of design, which is their common foundation and attitude, or their common culture. The science of design becomes the broader foundational discipline for any professions engaged in the intentional transformation of the world. The main distinction between design disciplines and scientific ones rests on the object-project dichotomy. Indeed, contrary to Science that sees the world as an object to be observed, Design sees the world as a project and acts upon the world through projects, which are grounded in intentions, ends, and values. Design disciplines are meant to transform the world, or part of it, and are teleological. Being so, they are embodied in an act that is ethical and their ontology-epistemology must be addressed also through practical reason to resituate all professional disciplines according to their involved nature. The paper introduces theoretical, methodological, and ethical elements to establish a model that integrates ethics into the education of the professional disciplines, design-based disciplines, responsible for the creation of the artificial, artefactual or technological, world. The model is articulated around the notions of ethical engagement and responsibility through the act of design understood as action with intention situated in a project, common in all professional disciplines. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Getting Beyond Form Filling: The Role of Institutional Governance in Human Research Ethics

It has become almost a truism to describe the interaction between research ethics committees and researchers as being marred by distrust and conflict. The ethical conduct of researchers is increasingly a matter of institutional concern because of the degree to which non-compliance with national standards can expose the entire institution to risk. This has transformed research ethics into what some have described as a research ethics industry. In an operational sense, there is considerable focus on modifying research behaviour through a combination of education and sanctions. The assessment of whether a researcher is ‘ethical’ is too often based on whether they submit their work for review by an ethics committee. However, is such an approach making a useful contribution to the actual ethical conduct of research and the protection of the interests of participants? Does a focus on ethical review minimise institutional risk? Instead it has been suggested that ethics committees may be distorting or frustrating useful research and are promoting a culture of either mindless rule following or frustrated resistance. An alternative governance approach is required. There is a need for a strong institutional focus on promoting and supporting the reflective practice of researchers through every stage of their work. By situating research ethics within the broader framework of institutional governance, this paper suggests it is possible to establish arrangements that actually facilitate excellent and ethical research.     

Teaching Ethics to Engineers: Ethical Decision Making Parallels the Engineering Design Process

In order to fulfill ABET requirements, Northern Arizona University’s Civil and Environmental engineering programs incorporate professional ethics in several of its engineering courses. This paper discusses an ethics module in a 3rd year engineering design course that focuses on the design process and technical writing. Engineering students early in their student careers generally possess good black/white critical thinking skills on technical issues. Engineering design is the first time students are exposed to “grey” or multiple possible solution technical problems. To identify and solve these problems, the engineering design process is used. Ethical problems are also “grey” problems and present similar challenges to students. Students need a practical tool for solving these ethical problems. The step-wise engineering design process was used as a model to demonstrate a similar process for ethical situations. The ethical decision making process of Martin and Schinzinger was adapted for parallelism to the design process and presented to students as a step-wise technique for identification of the pertinent ethical issues, relevant moral theories, possible outcomes and a final decision. Students had greatest difficulty identifying the broader, global issues presented in an ethical situation, but by the end of the module, were better able to not only identify the broader issues, but also to more comprehensively assess specific issues, generate solutions and a desired response to the issue.     

Teaching Medical Law in Medical Education

Although the teaching of medical ethics and law in medical education is an old story that has been told many times in medical literature, recent studies show that medical students and physicians lack confidence when faced with ethical dilemmas and medico-legal issues. The adverse events rates and medical lawsuits are on the rise whereas many medical errors are mostly due to negligence or malpractices which are preventable. While it is true that many medical schools teach their students medical law and ethics, there are wide variations in what is being taught because there is no universally agreed syllabus. Yet the knowledge of medical law and ethics is closely relevant to the medical profession and that failure in abiding the law may result in serious civil or even criminal consequences. While this paper does not propose to lay detailed analysis of the relevant areas of law or ethics, it proposes to cover some legal areas so as to highlight and bring to attention the need for a medical law and ethics course. This article also considers the problems faced and recommendation as to future directions to be taken with respect to teaching medical law and ethics. It concludes with a suggested course outline for the teaching of medical law and ethics.     

Ground zero for a post-moral ethics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Julia Kristeva’s melancholic

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee’s text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva’s rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel’s vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species.     

Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics

Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we mean by empirical adequacy, either virtue ethics has no need to be empirically adequate or where it does have such a need, the psychological evidence fails to show that it is empirically inadequate. An additional contribution the paper intends to make is to provide a more detailed discussion of the explanatory nature of virtue ethics.