Changing Engineering Ethics Education: Understanding Ill-structured Problems through Argument Visualization in Collaborative Learning

As a committee organized in 2009 by the National Academy of Engineering recognized, ethics education should foster the ability to analyze complex decision situations and illstructured problems. This presentation aims to build on the NAE‘s insights and reports about an innovative teaching approach that has two main features: first, it places the emphasis on deliberation and on self-directed, problem-based learning in small groups of students; and second, it focuses on understanding ill-structured problems. The first innovation is motivated by an abundance of scholarly research that supports the value of deliberative learning practices. The second results from a critique of the traditional case-study approach in engineering ethics. A key problem with standard cases is that they are usually described in such a fashion that renders the ethical problem as being too obvious and simplistic. Any description that already ―frames‖ a case in this kind of way tends to trivialize the ethical challenge. The practitioner, by contrast, will mostly face problems that are ill-structured and for which it is not even clear if they include a real ethical challenge. In the collaborative learning environment described here, groups of students use interactive and web-based argument visualization software called ―AGORAnet: Participate – Deliberate!‖. The function of the software is to structure communication and problem solving in small groups. The software guides students step by step through a process of argument mapping. Students are confronted with the task of identifying possible stakeholder positions and reconstructing their legitimacy by constructing justifications for these positions in the form of graphically represented logical argument maps. The argument maps are then presented in class so that these stakeholder positions and their respective justifications become visible and can be brought into a reasoned dialogue and deliberative process. Argument mapping in engineering ethics courses provides an exciting opportunity for students to collaborate in teams and to develop critical thinking and argumentation skills. A New Focus in Engineering Ethics Education Traditionally, the main objective of engineering ethics courses has been to foster awareness of and to stimulate reflection on the special responsibilities of professionals in technological fields. A well-established method to pursue this learning objective is to provide students with case studies from engineering practice. The case studies typically focus on common ethical issues such as taking a bribe from a vendor. However, a key problem with standard cases is that they usually describe the ethical problem in such a fashion that renders it as being something that is too simplistic. The more obvious the wrongdoing is, the easier it is to determine what should have been done. Thus, there may be no true ethical ―challenge‖ presented in the case. Clearly, the simplicity of ethics cases stands in contrast to the complexities of the real-life situations students will encounter after graduation. Aristotle astutely recognized in the first sentence of his Nicomachean Ethics that ―every action and undertaking seems to seek something good‖ [1]. No professional wants something bad to happen. At times, the problem is not the engineer‘s intentions but his or her inability to predict a bad outcome in spite of all P ge 25300.2 the good intentions. The most fundamental challenge from an ethical perspective is thus the fact that we need to realize, first of all, that there is an ethical challenge connected to one‘s decisions. Engineering ethics education needs to better prepare students for this kind of challenge. This conviction is conveyed within a workshop report on ―Ethics Education and Scientific and Engineering Research‖ that the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) organized in 2009. The report emphasizes that the following skills should be developed in ethics education [2]: 1 Recognizing and defining ethical issues. Identifying relevant stakeholders and socio-technical systems. Collecting relevant data about the stakeholders and systems. Understanding relevant stakeholder perspectives. Identifying value conflicts. Constructing viable alternative courses of action or solutions and identifying constraints. Assessing alternatives in terms of consequences, public defensibility, institutional barriers, etc. Engaging in reasoned dialogue or negotiations. Revising options, plans, or actions. This list highlights the complexity of the issues that engineers confront. An engineer‘s actions can have effects on stakeholders whose existence, perspectives, and values she does not necessarily see. An engineer does not always directly interact with the people whose lives are being altered as result of her decisions. Obviously, engineering students need to refine their technical competence. But it is crucially important that they develop ―soft skills‖ as well [3]. Among these skills is the ability to identify hidden ethical challenges. Ill-Structured Problems A key intellectual challenge is acquiring the ability to identify and structure complex situations. This ability is an important precondition for problem solving, for decision making, for designing, and for planning. Several decades ago, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber recognized this as ―one of the most intractable problems‖ in their seminal paper ―Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning‖ [4]. Rittel and Webber came to the conclusion that the real challenge is not ―tame‖ or ―benign‖ problems that are clearly specified and that allow for a clear determination as to whether a solution has been achieved—for example, a standard ethical problem in a textbook. The real challenge is what they called ―wicked problems‖ or what we refer to as ―ill-structured problems,‖ a term that is also used by other authors in the engineering ethics literature [5, 6]. We prefer ―ill-structured‖ because in common parlance, the term ―wicked‖ carries with it the connotation of something being ethically wrong and this could be misleading; it is not a feature that we intend to capture. However, even though we are using different terminology, ―ill-structured problems‖ is intended to mean the same thing as Rittel and Webber‘s ―wicked problems‖ (see also [7, 8]). Among the ten defining characteristics of a wicked problem that Rittel and Webber delineated, the most important for our purposes is the first one: ―There is no definitive 1 See also National Research Council. The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004. P ge 25300.3 formulation of a wicked problem‖ [4]. Any sufficiently detailed description of what the problem ―is‖ is already predetermined by a certain vision of its solution—a vision that is often biased by diverse values and interests. This results from the fact that in pluralist societies, in which a multitude of world views and values compete, the determination and formulation of a problem as well as the assessment of its ―solution‖ are in themselves controversial and open to discussion. Based on differing belief and value systems, problems and solutions can be ―framed‖ in a variety of ways, and it is contentious whether anyone can legitimately claim the authority to decide who is right and who is wrong. We call this the ―perspectivity‖ of ill-structured problems. It depends on the perspective, the vantage point, of who is involved in a complex situation how exactly a problem is perceived and framed. Further characteristics of wicked problems are a direct consequence of perspectivity. As Rittel and Webber state, ―Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-orbad‖ [4]. This is because there are many parties with potentially varying interests, value-sets, and ideological predilections who are more likely to assess a solution as ―better or worse‖ or ―satisfying‖ or ―good enough.‖ In addition [4]: Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan. The fact that certain perspectives on an ill-structured problem might be overlooked is important because of two other characteristics of Rittel and Webber‘s wicked problems that are crucial for engineering in particular [4]. There is ―no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution‖ to it because any ―solution, after being implemented, will generate waves of consequences‖ which ―may yield utterly undesirable repercussions which outweigh the intended advantages.‖ And: ―Every solution to a wicked problem is a ̳one-shot operation‘...It leaves ̳traces‘ that cannot be undone. One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance.‖ The concept of an ―ill-structured problem‖ presented here refers to the fact that engineers are often confronted with situations that require structuring. Most worrisome are those situations that seem to be straightforward but are not. For the professional, the biggest challenge is to realize, first of all, that there might be perspectives on a problem other than his or her own. As Coughlin notes, it can be difficult to imagine, and take seriously, a perspective that is in opposition to one‘s own ([9]; see also [5, 6]). The challenge is to identify the ethical dimensions of a decision especially in those situations where they are not obvious or are hidden, and where available descriptions do not contain any hint of the complexity and multiperspectivity of the problem. According to Rittel and Webber, the multi-perspectivity of wicked problems implies that they should be approached ―based on a model of planning as an argumentative process in the course of which an image of the problem and of the solution emerges gradually among the participants, as a product of incessant judgment, subjected