Design, Development, and Evaluation of an Interactive Simulator for Engineering Ethics Education (SEEE)

Societal pressures, accreditation organizations, and licensing agencies are emphasizing the importance of ethics in the engineering curriculum. Traditionally, this subject has been taught using dogma, heuristics, and case study approaches. Most recently a number of organizations have sought to increase the utility of these approaches by utilizing the Internet. Resources from these organizations include on-line courses and tests, videos, and DVDs. While these individual approaches provide a foundation on which to base engineering ethics, they may be limited in developing a student’s ability to identify, analyze, and respond to engineering ethics situations outside of the classroom environment. More effective approaches utilize a combination of these types of approaches. This paper describes the design and development of an internet based interactive Simulator for Engineering Ethics Education. The simulator places students in first person perspective scenarios involving different types of ethical situations. Students must gather data, assess the situation, and make decisions. This requires students to develop their own ability to identify and respond to ethical engineering situations. A limited comparison between the internet based interactive simulator and conventional internet web based instruction indicates a statistically significant improvement of 32% in instructional effectiveness. The simulator is currently being used at the University of Houston to help fulfill ABET requirements.     

If and Then: A Critique of Speculative NanoEthics

Most known technology serves to ingeniously adapt the world to the physical and mental limitations of human beings. Humankind has acquired awesome power with its rather limited means. Nanotechnological capabilities further this power. On some accounts, however, nanotechnological research will contribute to a rather different kind of technological development, namely one that changes human beings so as to remove or reduce their physical and mental limitations. The prospect of this technological development has inspired a fair amount of ethical debate. Here, proponents and opponents of such visions of human enhancement are criticized alike for engaging in speculative ethics. This critique exposes a general pattern that extends to other nano-, bio-, or neuroethical debates. While it does not apply to all discussions of “enhancement technologies” it does apply to all ethical discourse that constructs and validates an incredible future which it only then proceeds to endorse or critique. This discourse violates conditions of intelligibility, squanders the scarce and valuable resource of ethical concern, and misleads by casting remote possibilities or philosophical thought-experiments as foresight about likely technical developments. In effect, it deflects consideration from the transformative technologies of the present.

Die Zukunft gestalten im Angesicht der Vergangenheit

We report on the 4th Nazareth Conference with Jewish and German participants, most of whom are psychoanalysts. As Herman Beland has observed, these Conferences are intended to be “something like a self-experiment by Germans and Israelis to become, in the presence of the other group, aware of the unconscious identity of both people after the Holocaust.” There is still a widespread inability to mourn for the consequences of the terrible events in the years between 1933 and 1945 and deal satisfactorily with their effects. None of the groups, neither the German, nor the Israeli / Jewish, can do their own inner work without the other. For this reason, the method chosen as appropriate was the Tavistock-style “group relations conference”. This approach was developed by the Institute of Human Relations in London and does not focus on the individual’s behaviour but uses large and small groups to investigate group processes in the here and now. -The present work describes, among other things, the unexpectedly strong resistance towards changes of the conscious and unconscious inner images both of one’s own group and of the other. This process led to a feeling of hopelessness and paralysis within the German group that, due to the presence of the Jewish group, we could not avoid. For the Germans, it was hard to bear and observe the mutually shared history. Jewish participants were not able to accept their own German–Austrian childhood memories as a part of their own identity and connect them to the Germans. Each participant across the groups experienced the fantasy of destruction and the unfruitful effects of division. We had to feel how much the fate of the Germans and the Jews were interlocked to understand the participants’ tensions and efforts for opening new pathways.