Tinkering with Technology: How Experiential Engineering Ethics Pedagogy Can Accommodate Neurodivergent Students and Expose Ableist Assumptions

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose...

Hic sunt leones. User orientation as a design principle for emerging institutions on social media platforms

The phenomenon of missed interactions between online users is a specific issue occurring when users of different language games interact on social media platforms. We use the lens of institutional theory to analyze this phenomenon and argue that current online institutions will necessarily fail to regulate user interactions in a way that...

Toxic Online Environments are what Makes Rational Persuasion Become Wrongful

Suppose you wanted to switch to a healthier diet and searched for ideas online. You will unavoidably find some posts and videos where various influencers weigh in on this topic on social media platforms. Going down the rabbit hole of online searches, you see that the most vocal debate occurrs between two camps: the high fat versus the high...

Fostering responsible anticipation in engineering ethics education: how a multi-disciplinary enrichment of the responsible innovation framework can help

It is crucial for engineers to anticipate the socio-ethical impacts of emerging technologies. Such acts of anticipation are thoroughly normative and should be cultivated in engineering ethics education. In this paper we ask: ‘how do we anticipate the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies responsibly?’ And ‘how can such responsible...

Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome Systematic Misunderstandings Through Shared Meaning-Making

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital...

Learning to Reframe Problems Through Moral Sensitivity and Critical Thinking in Environmental Ethics for Engineers

As attention to the pervasiveness and severity of environmental challenges grows, technical universities are responding to the need to include environmental topics in engineering curricula and to equip engineering students, without training in ethics, to understand and respond to the complex social and normative demands of these issues. But as...

Performing ethics of technology: Using improvisational performance-based techniques in engineering ethics education

The paper explores the potential for improvisational techniques used in ethics tutorials with the aim of fostering moral sensitivity. Recently there has been an increased interest in researching how performance-based techniques can foster certain ethical competencies. In ethics education for engineering, role-playing games have been an example...

How to Teach Engineering Ethics?: A Retrospective and Prospective Sketch of TU Delft’s Approach to Engineering Ethics Education

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach...

Ethics education for engineers, creating open educational materials

We propose a workshop on creating Open Educational Materials for teaching ethics to engineering students, based on a project encouraging the reuse, creation and open publication of Case-Based Exercises within a community of ethics and philosophy of technology scholars in the Netherlands.

Workshop on open-access educational materials

This workshop is targeted at anyone interested in teaching ethics to engineering students. It aims to introduce the participants to the 4TU. Centre for Ethics and Technology method of building up Case-Based Exercises by having them apply it to create a Case-Based Exercise of their own. Participants will work in small groups (break-out rooms),...

Before Responsible Innovation: Teaching Anticipation as a Competency for Engineers

This paper focuses on engineering ethics education utilizing Responsible Innovation (RI). As a forward-looking approach aiming to embed ethics within innovation practices, RI strives to align technology development with societal values. However, when teaching the concepts and methods of RI, we face two intertwined challenges. First, RI...

Ethical reflection or critical thinking? Overlapping competencies in engineering ethics education

Ethical reflection is considered to be an important competency for engineering ethics education. However it has no clear definition, which makes it difficult to effectively incorporate it into engineering ethics education. This paper proposes an operationalisation of ethical reflection into four learning goals which can help educators explicitly...