Summary Of Integrating Ethics And Design

Engineering work touches on all aspects of everyday life. For this reason engineers are held to a high moral standard. This sense of responsibility and morality should be instilled in engineers from their formation. Gerald McLean focuses on the formative nature of engineering student's ethical instruction in his article, "Integrating Ethics and Design". McLean's purpose for writing this article is to convince the reader that the study of ethics should be integrated in engineering students' curriculum throughout their formation, rather than reserved to one or two courses taken during senior year.
McLean presents a few arguments to defend his premise. First, he argues that students may experience an "intellectual vertigo" when learning about …show more content…
He lists three levels of ethics: technical, professional, and social. Technical ethics ties in the closest to an engineer's background as it concerns decisions made throughout the design process. These decisions include safety factors, material types, fabrication methods, etc. Technical ethics is usually directed by codes, standardizing the design process. Professional ethics deals with the interaction between engineers and other groups within industry such as lawyers and project managers. Ethical issues may arise when dealing with contracts, patents, deadlines, etc. The final level, social ethic, deals with engineers serving the public. Armed with relevant data, engineers should be able to speak up and influence public policy when necessary. As a whole, McLean wanted to convey that ethics for an engineer should be about "doing the right …show more content…
I agree with his total view of ethics and his interpretation of the three levels of ethics. I am however unconvinced by his arguments supporting the premise that ethics should be integrated into engineering students' technical curriculum. He says that student will be forced to question every assumption they have built up over the course of their four year education. I would argue that as an engineer, one should always be questioning assumptions, and finding ways to refine them in order to increase their accuracy. McLean mentions the perpetuation of a culture of expertise, which may lead engineers to regard ethics a second class course, or field reserved to philosophers. I do not think this argument makes very much sense for two reasons. First, a culture of expertise is a necessity in our world because nobody is expected to know everything. That is why we have engineers, lawyers, philosophers, etc., who are expected to be experts in their respective fields and serve the public with their knowledge. Second, ethical instruction is mandatory for engineering students. This implies that it is not second class, but absolutely essential for our formation as