Qin Zhu

Engineering ethics education has undergone significant development across institutions worldwide over the last three decades. While earlier analyses have examined aspects of this development, few integrated accounts have traced the evolution of a leading institution’s approach to engineering ethics education across this period. This paper addresses this gap. It presents an integrative review of engineering ethics education at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), one of Europe’s most influential institutions in this field. Drawing on peer-reviewed articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, and institutional documents published by TU Delft scholars over three decades, we trace the historical development of the institution’s approach, analyze its core theoretical assumptions and examine its learning goals and evolving pedagogical practices. The review identifies two distinct stages in the institution’s development. It reflects a deepening of learning goals and, most notably, a shift toward experiential and non-cognitive pedagogical approaches. These findings offer a reference point for discussing how ethics should be taught to engineers, how to integrate it into technical curricula, and which kinds of normative stances institutions should adopt in their ethics programs.

Just as philosophy of technology has distinctive origins in Europe and in the United States, so too in China. Here we aim to give an introductory narrative account of Chinese origins for English language readers, anchored in the lives and thought of Chen Changshu 陈昌曙 and Yuan Deyu 远德玉, two leading influences on what is sometimes been called the “Northeastern School” in the philosophy of technology. A general introduction to this school is developed through a narrative account of Chen’s and Yuan’s interactive lives and work in historical context followed by appreciations of their philosophical achievements, most particularly Chen’s 1999 _Jishu zhexue yin lun_ 技术哲学引论 [Introduction to philosophy of technology] and two Yuan interviews from 2018 and 2022. Our claim is that Chen and Yuan were much earlier paying attention to the empirical experience of engineers than Western counterparts who later started the “empirical turn” movement and that their originary contributions are pertinent for anyone in the West who desires to engage with Chinese thinking about engineering and technology, if not in fact to the placing of Western philosophy of technology in a more global perspective.

This paper explores the roles of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals in AI policymaking, addressing the urgent need for informed governance in emerging technologies. With AI's complex sociotechnical impacts, STEM expertise is crucial for balancing benefits and mitigating risks like bias and privacy concerns. Despite their potential influence, the specific contributions of STEM professionals in AI policy remain underexplored. To address this gap, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 STEM professionals who have both educational and professional experience in STEM and policy, and have actively participated in AI policymaking. The data revealed two primary role groups: (1) advisors, gatekeepers, and influencers, who leverage their expertise in STEM and policy to guide stakeholders and actively influence policy decisions, and (2) facilitators and brokers, who facilitate connections and manage the flow of information between stakeholders. This typology highlights the varied contributions of STEM professionals to AI governance and policy development.

Research in engineering ethics has assessed the ethical reasoning of students in mostly the US. However, it is not clear that ethical judgments are primarily the result of ethical reasoning, or that conclusions based on US samples would be true of global populations. China now graduates and employs more STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) majors than any other country in the world, but the moral cognition and ethics education of Chinese engineers remains understudied. To address this gap, a study was conducted examining the relations between ethical reasoning, moral intuitions, and ethics education among engineering students in China. Engineering students at a university in Shanghai, China completed measures of ethical reasoning and moral intuitions before and after a course on global engineering ethics. Among engineering students in China, (1) ethical reasoning is positively related to an emphasis on care and fairness and (2) global ethics education results in significantly higher levels of ethical reasoning, as well as a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. Whereas the relation between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in China is similar to that of students in the US, ethics education affects engineering students in China differently from their US counterparts.

The use of AI in weapons systems raises numerous ethical issues. To date, work on weaponized AI has tended to be theoretical and normative in nature, consisting in critical policy analyses and ethical considerations, carried out by philosophers, legal scholars, and political scientists. However, adequately addressing the cultural and social dimensions of technology requires insights and methods from empirical moral and cultural psychology. To do so, this position piece describes the motivations for and sketches the nature of a normative, cultural psychology of weaponized AI. The motivations for this project include the increasingly global, cross-cultural and international, nature of technologies, and counter-intuitive nature of normative thoughts and behaviors. The nature of this project consists in developing standardized measures of AI ethical reasoning and intuitions, coupled with questions exploring the development of norms, administered and validated across different cultural groups and disciplinary contexts. The goal of this piece is not to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the cultural facets and psychological dimensions of weaponized AI but, rather, to outline in broad terms the contours of an emerging research agenda.

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased toward Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit from focusing on user behaviours from the joint perspective of values and norms, especially across cultural contexts. As such, it proposes Norm Sensitive Design as a complement to value-sensitive approaches when designing and implementing new technologies. Versus values, norms serve as more accurate predictors or descriptors of behaviours and can thus support value-sensitive approaches to realize the aspiration of informing user behaviour via design. The article makes two key contributions. On the theoretical side, it promotes the consideration of norms in design. On the practical side, it offers designers and instructors prompts for reflecting on design ethics from the perspective of norms.

As artificial intelligence and robotics are increasingly integrated in graduate research and education, graduate students across disciplines need to develop a “technological literacy” in how they work along with the ethical understanding needed to navigate these technologies responsibly. To satisfy this need, the corresponding and last author has developed a graduate-level course on AI ethics and human-robot interaction (HRI) designed for students from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. The paper offers an overview of the course, detailing its content, institutional context, and the rationale behind its development. It describes the curriculum structure, including key themes and learning objectives, and the pedagogical approaches and assessment methods utilized in the course. The paper concludes with reflections from the instructor on the lessons learned from teaching the course and the experiences gained throughout the learning process.

This chapter serves as an initial endeavor to investigate the potential utility of the idea of self-cultivation in constructing an alternative approach to prevalent approaches in engineering education, which predominantly concentrate on the development of employable skills for individual engineers. To achieve this goal, this chapter first conceptualizes a challenge central to dominant approaches to engineering education which is the lack of the self-dimension. It then provides a brieft introduction to the Confucian theory of self-cultivation by comparing it with the Western concept of Bildung. Finally, this chapter discusses the implications of this self-cultivation theory for engineering education practice and research. It explores how teaching, learning, and assessment in engineering education can be defined and implemented differently. This chapter is expected to be of particular interest to engineering educators, administrators, and policymakers who are unsatisfied with dominant approaches to engineering education that focus on the attainment of measurable technical knowledge and skills.

By taking the Ethics Across Campus Program (EAC) at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) as an example, this paper discusses how institutional, social, and policy contexts provide opportunities—and challenges—for ethics centers and programs to create effective moral learning experiences for students. This paper begins by depicting the historical background and institutional context within which this EAC program was founded and has evolved. It then introduces the major campus programs and curricular initiatives (e.g., the Daniels Fund Faculty Fellows Program) that aim to enhance students’ learning opportunities. Finally, this paper reflects on some major challenges faced by the program, including how to bridge physical and intellectual distances between faculty, and how to best cultivate an ethical climate for STEM education and research.

This chapter serves to introduce the reader to the purpose and background of Philosophy and Engineering: Exploring Boundaries, Expanding Connections, and to the chapters that make up this work. Section 1.1 describes why, rather than being divided into parts, the book was deliberately organized to be a fluid whole. Section 1.2 addresses how fluidity is reflected in the contribution of the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology to the development of the philosophy of engineering as a discipline, and in the ongoing debate over what engineering will look like in the future. This discussion points to a new perspective on what it means to do philosophy of engineering in a context of bridge-building between philosophers and engineers. Section 1.3 offers a window into the contents of the volume through brief chapter introductions.

This paper describes the motivations and some directions for bringing insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology to bear on how engineering ethics is conceived, taught, and assessed. Therefore, the audience for this paper is not only engineering ethics educators and researchers but also administrators and organizations concerned with ethical behaviors. Engineering ethics has typically been conceived and taught as a branch of professional and applied ethics with pedagogical aims, where students and practitioners learn about professional codes and/or Western ethical theories and then apply these resources to address issues presented in case studies about engineering and/or technology. As a result, accreditation and professional bodies have generally adopted ethical reasoning skills and/or moral knowledge as learning outcomes. However, this paper argues that such frameworks are psychologically “irrealist” and culturally biased: it is not clear that ethical judgments or behaviors are primarily the result of applying principles, or that ethical concerns captured in professional codes or Western ethical theories do or should reflect the engineering ethical concerns of global populations. Individuals from Western educated industrialized rich democratic cultures are outliers on various psychological and social constructs, including self-concepts, thought styles, and ethical concerns. However, engineering is more cross cultural and international than ever before, with engineers and technologies spanning multiple cultures and countries. For instance, different national regulations and cultural values can come into conflict while performing engineering work. Additionally, ethical judgments may also result from intuitions, closer to emotions than reflective thought, and behaviors can be affected by unconscious, social, and environmental factors. To address these issues, this paper surveys work in engineering ethics education and assessment to date, shortcomings within these approaches, and how insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology could be used to improve engineering ethics education and assessment, making them more culturally responsive and psychologically realist at the same time.

Defining the purposes of engineering ethics education (EEE) is paramount for the engineering education community, and understanding the purposes of EEE can be a catalyst for actively involving students in the learning process. This chapter presents a conceptual framework for systematically describing and comparing various approaches to the purposes of EEE. Such a framework is inherently embedded with a tension between a normative approach and a pragmatic approach regarding the purposes of EEE. The normative approach focuses on what the purposes of EEE should be, an ‘ideal world’ scenario, given the needs of the engineering profession and of society at large. Conversely, the pragmatic approach starts from the question ‘What can be achieved through educational practice?‘ and results from ‘actual world’ situated outcomes of stakeholder negotiations. The authors’ framework balances these. They – scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds – assert that the purposes of EEE are socially constructed and vary from country to country based on unique historical, political, and cultural contexts. Their framework embraces both the individualistic and holistic aspects of EEE, incorporating perspectives from both Western and non-Western traditions. It identifies six purposes of EEE (knowledge, actions, personal traits, relationships, etc.), aligning these with examples (e.g., moral knowledge, desirable actions, ethical skills or competencies, care ethics, etc.) and theoretical frameworks (moral epistemology, moral psychology, virtue ethics, objects or qualities of relations, etc.). It is problematic and potentially dangerous when engineering educators design ethics-learning activities without critically examining the purposes of these activities and assessing whether these purposes are justified for educating ethically and professionally competent engineers. This chapter provides tools to help avoid such pitfalls.

This study aims to reveal the nature and motivation of human cooperation. By adopting the public goods game paradigm of competition and repetition, and introducing factors such as punishment and heterogeneous contributions, an experiment was conducted at Nanjing University in China, where 224 undergraduate students participated in seven games, including intragroup and intergroup competition. Meanwhile, participants’ social value orientation (SVO) was measured. The results indicated that cooperation (non-zero contribution) was the common choice for participants, but their contributions varied across rounds and games. Individuals generally act as conditional free-riders in intragroup competition games, i.e., they use the “small for big” strategy. In contrast, individuals generally act as conditional cooperators in intergroup competitive games, i.e., they use the “tit for tat” strategy. Although SVO should theoretically be related to contribution, analysis revealed that participants’ contributions were not significantly dominated by SVO, but were primarily driven by self-interest. Specifically, individuals switch back and forth between conditional cooperators and conditional free-riders to seek maximum self-interest. Our results not only reveal the complexity and strategic nature of human behavior in competitive contexts but also highlight the central role of self-interest in driving individual decision-making, reflecting the balance between individuals’ pursuit of self-interest and adaptation to the environment in social interactions.

In this paper, we argue that engineering ethics education does have moral implications. More specifically, practices in engineering ethics education can lead to negative moral consequences if not conducted appropriately. Engineering ethics educators are often passionate about teaching students ways to examine the ethical implications of engineering and technology. However, ethics educators may overlook the moral significance of their instructional classroom practices. In this paper, we discuss two issues: First, we discuss the moral impacts of ethics curriculum and pedagogies on students’ learning experiences. Then we discuss the professional responsibilities of educators who are involved in designing ethics learning experiences for engineering students. The reflections presented in this paper will serve as catalysts for more comprehensive discussions regarding the impact of engineering ethics education on the ethical development of engineering students.

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased toward Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit from focusing on user behaviours from the joint perspective of values and norms, especially across cultural contexts. As such, it proposes Norm Sensitive Design as a complement to value-sensitive approaches when designing and implementing new technologies. Versus values, norms serve as more accurate predictors or descriptors of behaviours and can thus support value-sensitive approaches to realize the aspiration of informing user behaviour via design. The article makes two key contributions. On the theoretical side, it promotes the consideration of norms in design. On the practical side, it offers designers and instructors prompts for reflecting on design ethics from the perspective of norms.

Groundbreaking in its range of disciplines and cultural backgrounds, _Thinking through Science and Technology_ explores how individual and societal beliefs, values, and actions are transformed by science, technology, and engineering. Practical and theoretical insights from philosophers, policymakers, STS scholars, and engineers illuminate the promise, perils, and paradoxes that arise with technoscientific change. This collection of original research develops a philosophical understanding of technology and its inscription in a wider web of social and political meanings, values, and civilizational change. It explores foundational beliefs at the core of engineering education and practice, with an emphasis on the movement of ideas between Western and Chinese scholars, as well as the complex interwoven relationship between ideas from religion, science, and technology as they have evolved in the West. Contributors also critically examine the forces and frameworks that shape the development and evaluation of scientific practice and the innovation and adoption of technology, with an emphasis on national and global policy. The volume offers a critical and timely reflection on science and technology that counters trends toward technological optimism, on the one hand, and disciplinary and cultural regionalization, on the other. Chapters written by prominent and promising scholars from around the world make this a global resource; its breadth and clarity make it a superb introduction for those new to its fields. It serves as an essential reference for established scholars as well as anyone seeking a more comprehensive understanding of social and technoscientific entanglements that permeate contemporary life. List of contributors: Gordon Akon-Yamga, Jennifer Karns Alexander, Andoni Alonso, Pamela Andanda, Larry Arnhart, Li Bocong, Albert Borgmann, Adam Briggle, Jose A. López Cerezo, Mark Coeckelbergh, Daniel Cérézuelle, Neelke Doorn, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Andrew Feenberg, Jose Luís Garcia, Tricia Glazebrook, Janna van Grunsven, J. Britt Holbrook, Helena Jerónimo, Tong LI, Yongmou LIU, Lavinia Marin, Glen Miller, Carl Mitcham, Suzanne Moon, Byron Newberry, Jean Robert, Sabine Roeser, Taylor Stone, Sajay Samuel, Daniel Sarewitz, Jen Schneider, José Antonio Ullate, Carlos Verdugo-Serna, Nan WANG.

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded.

Ethics is crucial to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning the form engineering ethics education should take. In part, this results from disagreements about the goal of this education, which inhibit the development of and progress in cohesive research agendas and practices. In this regard, engineering ethics faces challenges like other professional ethics. To address these issues, this paper argues that the ultimate goal of engineering ethics education should be more long-term ethical behaviors, but that engineering ethics must more fully engage with the fields of empirical moral and cultural psychology to do so. It begins by considering reasons for adopting ethical behaviors as the ultimate goal of ethics education, and moves on to discuss why ethical behaviors have not been adopted as the goal of ethics education. The paper ends by considering responses to these problems, why ethical behaviors should still be adopted as the ultimate goal of ethics education.

The idea of technocracy has been widely criticized in Western literature in the philosophy and sociology of technology. A common critique of technocracy is that it represents an “antidemocratic” and “dehumanizing” ideology. This paper invites Western scholars to reconsider their oppositions to technocracy by drawing on resources from Confucian ethics. In doing so, this paper synthesizes the major ethical challenges of technocracy mainly concerned by Western scholars in philosophy, political theories, sociology, and policy studies. This paper argues that incorporating Confucian resources such as the rule of virtue into technocracy may be helpful for reexamining these ethical challenges to technocracy that are deeply rooted in Western liberal democratic ideologies. The Confucian rule of virtue means that social policies should be made by the virtuous and capable and these policies need to have impacts on the moral progress of the society. Confucian values provide ethical guidance for technocrats in assessing the moral quality of the sociotechnical systems they build. From the Confucian perspective, sociotechnical systems are often assessed based on the criterion whether and how these sociotechnical systems contribute to a process of harmonization. This paper will introduce some practical cases that demonstrate how technical experts and expertise contribute to organizational and social management. In these cases, virtues and the rule of virtue do play a crucial role: virtues either determine the selection of technocrats and the legitimization of their political power or are embedded in engineering design and affect human behavior in the use context.