Ethics by the Dose: Medical Treatment Metaphor for Ethics in Engineering

Developing effective ethics training for engineers is an important but challenging proposition. When engineering educators teach ethics, we hope we are doing so in ways that will have powerful effects for our students: not just familiarizing them with tools they can use to navigate workplace legal structures, but also changing how they perceive engineering as a field for ethical action. In this paper, we consider the degree to which ethics are integrated into engineering courses. To this end, we examine the popular use of the medical metaphor of “dosage” in relation to ethics in the engineering classroom. We identify this usage pattern and use thematic analysis to consider its implications in engineering education literature. Taking medical metaphors seriously can sensitize us to certain troubles related to the limited integration of ethics into engineering classrooms. This has implications for projects related to education research and engineering education reform. Focusing on what we expect ethics education to do can help us to undertake, evaluate, and communicate about our work as educators, and to imagine new possibilities. Concluding, we reflect on the ethical “wellness” of a whole engineer–and, indeed, whole communities in which engineers live and work—to frame questions about what ethics education could mean if we approached it differently.