Engineering Commons^™

The Psychology Of 'Ought', Trevor S. Harding

Materials Engineering

As educators, we would like to believe that we can influence the ethical growth of our students. If we are to do this, it seems worthwhile to first understand what ethical decision-making is and how it happens. For millennia, ethical decision-making has fallen within the domain of philosophy. However, recent evidence suggests that the average person does not consider ethical dilemmas in the abstract. Instead, ethical decision-making appears to be a complex dance between an individual’s rational calculus of the ethical dilemma and their emotional response to the context of the dilemma. I will present an argument that in the …