This paper describes the motivations and some directions for bringing insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology to bear on how engineering ethics is conceived, taught, and assessed. Therefore, the audience for this paper is not only engineering ethics educators and researchers but also administrators and organizations concerned with ethical behaviors. Engineering ethics has typically been conceived and taught as a branch of professional and applied ethics with pedagogical aims, where students and practitioners learn about professional codes and/or Western ethical theories and then apply these resources to address issues presented in case studies about engineering and/or technology. As a result, accreditation and professional bodies have generally adopted ethical reasoning skills and/or moral knowledge as learning outcomes. However, this paper argues that such frameworks are psychologically “irrealist” and culturally biased: it is not clear that ethical judgments or behaviors are primarily the result of applying principles, or that ethical concerns captured in professional codes or Western ethical theories do or should reflect the engineering ethical concerns of global populations. Individuals from Western educated industrialized rich democratic cultures are outliers on various psychological and social constructs, including self-concepts, thought styles, and ethical concerns. However, engineering is more cross cultural and international than ever before, with engineers and technologies spanning multiple cultures and countries. For instance, different national regulations and cultural values can come into conflict while performing engineering work. Additionally, ethical judgments may also result from intuitions, closer to emotions than reflective thought, and behaviors can be affected by unconscious, social, and environmental factors. To address these issues, this paper surveys work in engineering ethics education and assessment to date, shortcomings within these approaches, and how insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology could be used to improve engineering ethics education and assessment, making them more culturally responsive and psychologically realist at the same time.

Ethics has been widely recognized as essential to effective engineering, highlighting the importance of ethics education to engineering curricula. However, developing and delivering effective engineering ethics education is difficult, given the increasingly global environments of contemporary engineering. In contemporary engineering, people from different places and background are studying and working together as never before. National and cultural backgrounds can affect understandings of appropriate conduct within engineering, as well as conceptions of right and wrong in general. Further, while much of the research on engineering ethics education in the US has tended to focus on ethical reasoning and knowledge as learning outcomes, it is unclear whether ethical reasoning or knowledge result in moral judgments or behaviors, and whether ethical reasoning is the same across different national and cultural groups. In addition to national and cultural backgrounds, research has found that foreign language affects ethical reasoning. For example, people are more likely to make sacrificial decisions in a foreign than a native language.

To improve ethics instruction for global engineering education, a study is being conducted exploring the development of ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in the US, Netherlands, and China. This paper reports partial, preliminary results from that study, regarding the natures of and relations between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in the Netherlands and China, and how English as a foreign language affects this reasoning and these intuitions. To do so, engineering students in the Netherlands and China (n = 51) completed measures of ethical reasoning (the Engineering and Science Issues Test – ESIT) and moral intuitions (the Moral Foundations Questionnaire – MFQ) in Dutch and English, and Chinese and English, respectively. Descriptive statistics and statistical hypothesis testing will be carried out. Country and language will be treated as input variables, while responses on the ESIT and MFQ will be treated as output variables.