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Full-Text Articles in Engineering Education

A Systems View Of Time-Dependent Ethical Decisions, Hamid A. Rafizadeh, Brad Kallenberg Aug 2015

A Systems View Of Time-Dependent Ethical Decisions, Hamid A. Rafizadeh, Brad Kallenberg

Brad J. Kallenberg

Every ethical situation has a "system" characteristic with a group of human and nonhuman elements linked in a variety of interactions and interdependencies. The system allows the elements to act in part or as a whole towards achieving a spectrum of goals, objectives, or ends. The systems view asserts that any local and bipolar understanding of an ethical situation would be deficient as it would neglect certain interactions and interdependencies as well as overlook differing orientations of agents towards different goals and objectives. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need for a systems-based view of ethics.


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 …