Robert Kirkman

One goal of environmental ethics is to recommend changes to patterns of human life so as to bring inhabited landscapes into line with a vision of the good. However, the complex intertwining of nature and culture in inhabited landscapes makes this project much more difficult, complicating ethical judgment and limiting the efficacy of ethical action. Technological momentum, a model introduced by historian Thomas P. Hughes to describe the development of complex technological systems, can shed some light on these difficulties. The process of metropolitan growth in the United States will serve to illustrate the consequences of technological momentum for environmental ethics and policy.

On the way to a phenomenology of the moral space within which people make decisions about the built environments they inhabit, I take up Bryan Norton’s proposal for a non-linear, multi-scalar approach to environmental ethics. Inspired by a recent development in ecology, hierarchy theory, Norton’s key insight is that ethical concerns play themselves out across distinct spatio-temporal scales. I adapt this insight to the context of the built environment by way of a phenomenology of constraint as a scaling criterion, then go on to specify how ethical concerns might be mapped onto the complex scalar relationships thus revealed.

Ethical choice and action in the built environment are complicated by the fact that moral agents often get stuck as they pursue their goals. A common way of getting stuck has its roots in human cognition: the failure of moral imagination, which shows most clearly when moral agents stand on either side of a sharp cultural divide, like the traditional divide between city and suburb. Being stuck is akin to bad moral luck: it is a situation beyond the control of the moral agent for which that agent might nevertheless be held responsible.

We believe that the professional responsibility of bioscience and biotechnology professionals includes a social responsibility to contribute to the resolution of ethically fraught policy problems generated by their work. It follows that educators have a professional responsibility to prepare future professionals to discharge this responsibility. This essay discusses two pilot projects in ethics pedagogy focused on particularly challenging policy problems, which we call “fractious problems”. The projects aimed to advance future professionals’ acquisition of “fractious problem navigational” skills, a set of skills designed to enable broad and deep understanding of fractious problems and the design of good policy resolutions for them. A secondary objective was to enhance future professionals’ motivation to apply these skills to help their communities resolve these problems. The projects employed “problem based learning” courses to advance these learning objectives. A new assessment instrument, “Skills for Science/Engineering Ethics Test”, was designed and administered to measure the success of the courses in doing so. This essay first discusses the rationale for the pilot projects, and then describes the design of the pilot courses and presents the results of our assessment using SkillSET in the first pilot project and the revised SkillSET 2.0 in the second pilot project. The essay concludes with discussion of observations and results.