Reflexive Principlism as an Effective Approach for Developing Ethical Reasoning in Engineering.

Sci Eng Ethics

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, Martin Jischke Drive, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA.

Published: February 2016

AI Article Synopsis

  • Teaching ethics to engineering students aims to improve their ability to make informed ethical decisions in line with professional codes of conduct.
  • Despite various methods explored by educators, there hasn't been a widely accepted model for developing ethical reasoning skills in engineering.
  • The paper advocates for Reflexive Principlism, a structured yet adaptable approach that focuses on four core ethical principles, enhancing ethical decision-making in engineering contexts.

Article Abstract

An important goal of teaching ethics to engineering students is to enhance their ability to make well-reasoned ethical decisions in their engineering practice: a goal in line with the stated ethical codes of professional engineering organizations. While engineering educators have explored a wide range of methodologies for teaching ethics, a satisfying model for developing ethical reasoning skills has not been adopted broadly. In this paper we argue that a principlist-based approach to ethical reasoning is uniquely suited to engineering ethics education. Reflexive Principlism is an approach to ethical decision-making that focuses on internalizing a reflective and iterative process of specification, balancing, and justification of four core ethical principles in the context of specific cases. In engineering, that approach provides structure to ethical reasoning while allowing the flexibility for adaptation to varying contexts through specification. Reflexive Principlism integrates well with the prevalent and familiar methodologies of reasoning within the engineering disciplines as well as with the goals of engineering ethics education.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9633-5DOI Listing

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