ABSTRACT
Engineers have great power to design, test for, and make things of great value, but usually at great cost.Because of this, we are moved to mindfully educate future engineers, as well as in the technical skills required for successful practice in their chosen fields. We also endeavor to instill a knowledge of the professional ethical codes for their specific engineering discipline as well as an appreciation of various cases of ethical design and implementation failures. If we expect our students to be ethical professionals when they enter the professional arena, we must provide them with a solid foundation in ethics and an understanding of the meaning of ethical behavior. In this chapter, we discuss some of the cross-disciplinary methods we use at the Missouri University of Science and Technology to engage our students as we inform and educate them on proper ethical behavior. This chapter also strives to show that thinking of engineering ethics merely as a system of rules regarding how to be a “good employee” is perhaps too limiting, and that engineering as a profession might have a responsibility to grapple with what the purposes of it, as a profession, are supposed to be. This chapter concludes with brief discussions of several case studies involving ethics violations and how they were resolved. These case studies can be used in discussions with engineering students from any discipline to enhance their ethical awareness.
