Teaching engineers Kant or communication skills?

Ethics is a mandatory course in the program of virtually all students at Delft University of Technology (TUD). But assuming that the ultimate goal of these courses is not to contribute to ivory tower philosophizing, but to delivering engineers that will make the world a better place (or at least not a worse one), what exactly should we be teaching students in those courses? “Not Kant, but communication skills”, said TUD science communication professor Patricia Osseweijer when the topic briefly came up during the reception after the book launch Philosophy and Engineering – An Emerging Agenda, last Thursday in The Hague. Had she said the same publicly during the book launch itself, an interesting discussion might have arisen.

Osseweijer had been invited as a commentator to a presentation concerning one of the book chapters. It is a pity that she did not really reply to this chapter, in which authors Otto Kroesen and Sybrand van der Zwaag share their experiences with teaching ethics to aerospace engineering students. They created a new role game for their course, about a risky maiden flight of a new aircraft. The role descriptions that students get are very rich - they not only contain functional information, but also information about their character (“a man of little words that stands his grounds”) and their personal relations with other characters in the game (“a good relationship with and full trust in the head of engineering”). Students apparently played their roles with vigor and creativity, leading the authors to say that “the performative dimension of communication is the big surprise of this role game and it also appears to be the most difficult part both to enact and to digest”.

Could – as Kroesen and Van der Zwaag suggest – the experience with this role play “affect the learning goals of courses on ethics in general”? Could or should we even ignore Kant completely in those courses? Questions that were raised, but not answered at the book launch. They will have to wait for another occasion for in-depth discussion. The book Philosophy of Engineering – An Emerging Agenda will unfortunately not be helpful in answering them – judging from the table of contents, before mentioned chapter is the only one that addresses education in engineering ethics. But this is certainly not meant as a disqualification of the book. A wealth of other topics is covered in no less than 28 chapters, some written by philosophers and others by engineers – so certainly everybody can find something here to suit him.

Presentation by engineer David Goldberg at the book launch