The literature on ethics in science and engineering tends to dwell on the negative, emphasizing disasters, scandals, and problems of wrongdoing in everyday practice. This paper shifts to the positive, focusing on the exemplary. After outlining different possible conceptions of responsibility (ranging from a minimalist view of “staying out of trouble” to “going above and beyond the call of duty”), the paper discusses the importance of certain virtues for scientists and engineers. Finally, a broad range of examples of exemplary practice (...) is offered. (shrink)

To design effective and socially sensitive systems, engineers must be able to integrate a technology-based approach to engineering problems with concerns for social impact and the context of use. The conventional approach to engineering education is largely technology-based, and even when additional courses with a social orientation are added, engineering graduates are often not well prepared to design user- and context-sensitive systems. Using data from interviews with three engineering students who had significant exposure to a socially-oriented perspective on production systems (...) design, this paper argues that engineering students may have difficulty integrating in their own practice the technology-based and the socially-oriented perspectives on production. To enhance engineering students' ability to create systems that integrate both perspectives, and to relieve the intense cognitive and emotional pain that can be experienced by students exposed to both perspectives but unable to reconcile them, this paper reinforces the importance of teaching students the meta skill, design. A design perspective can help students integrate varied, sometimes conflicting, perspectives, and reach beyond customer-defined constraints to consider workplace and social impact. (shrink)