ABSTRACT
Engineers generate ethical issues as the systems and products produced by engineering work permeate social, digital, and natural spaces. Motivated by a desire to improve the impact of teaching ethics in engineering, this chapter argues that assessing epistemic cognition offers important insight into how students solve ill-structured ethical problems. Epistemic cognition is the practical application of our ideas about the nature of knowledge – how we identify optimal answers and the roles we allow ourselves in generating or validating knowledge. This chapter examines the interaction between epistemic cognition and van de Poel and Royakkers’ model of moral argumentation skills, which outlines the cognitive steps in a robust ethical decision-making process. Applying Isaac's recently developed epistemic micro-practices model based on direct observations of engineering students’ interactions with knowledge, the chapter considers potential obstacles and pedagogical accelerators of students’ moral argumentation. Given engineering students’ comparatively weak epistemic sophistication, the authors advise ethics instructors to employ pedagogical activities that engage students in the more sophisticated epistemic micro-practices of exercising their own judgment, setting and applying criteria to evaluate competing solutions, and working with more uncertainty. The speed at which new technologies and technological capabilities evolve means that engineers need moral leadership skills to address emerging issues proactively. This chapter argues that epistemic micro-practices offer a tractable way to assess engineering students’ development of epistemic skills for engaging responsibly with ethical problems and, therefore, for evaluating the effectiveness of pedagogical interventions that teach ethics.
