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Full-Text Articles in Ethics and Political Philosophy

Teaching Engineering Ethics By Conceptual Design: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, Brad Kallenberg Aug 2015

Teaching Engineering Ethics By Conceptual Design: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, Brad Kallenberg

Brad J. Kallenberg

In 1998, a lead researcher at a Midwestern university submitted as his own a document that had 64 instances of strings of 10 or more words that were identical to a consultant's masters thesis and replicated a data chart, all of whose 16 entries were identical to three and four significant figures. He was fired because his actions were wrong. Curiously, he was completely unable to see that his actions were wrong. This phenomenon is discussed in light of recent advances in neuroscience and used to argue for a change in the standard way engineering ethics is taught. I argue …


By Design: Ethics, Theology, And The Practice Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg Jul 2015

By Design: Ethics, Theology, And The Practice Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg

Brad J. Kallenberg

Both engineering and human living take place in a messy world, one chock full of unknowns and contingencies. "Design reasoning" is the way engineers cope with real-world contingency. Because of the messiness, books about engineering design cannot have "ideal solutions" printed in the back in the same way that mathematics textbooks can. Design reasoning does not produce a single, ideally correct answer to a given problem but rather generates a wide variety of rival solutions that vie against each other for their relative level of "satisfactoriness." A reasoning process analogous to design is needed in ethics. Since the realm of …