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.

While 4E approaches to cognition are increasingly introduced in educational contexts, little has been said about how 4E commitments can inform pedagogy aimed at fostering ethical competencies. Here, we evaluate a 4E-inspired ethics exercise that we developed at a technical university to enliven the moral imagination of engineering students. Our students participated in an interactive tinkering workshop, during which they materially redesigned a healthcare artifact. The aim of the workshop was twofold. Firstly, we wanted students to experience how material choices at the levels of design and functionality can enable morally significant reimaginings of the affordances commonly associated with existing artifacts. We term this type of reimagining world-directed moral imagination. Secondly, through the design process, we wanted students to robustly place themselves in the lived embodied perspectives of (potential) users of their selected artifacts. We term this person-directed moral imagination. While student testimonies about the exercise indicate that both their world-directed and person-directed moral imagination were enlivened, we note that the fostering of robust person-directed moral imagination proved challenging. Using 4E insights, we diagnose this challenge and ask how it might be overcome. To this end, we engage extensively with a recent 4E-informed critique of person-directed moral imagination, raised by Clavel Vázquez and Clavel-Vázquez (2023). They argue that person-directed moral imagination is profoundly limited, if not fundamentally misguided, particularly when exercised in contexts marked by emphatic embodied situated difference between the imaginer and the imagined. Building upon insights from both the 4E field and testimonies from critical disability studies, we argue that, while their critique is valuable, it ultimately goes too far. We conclude that a 4E approach can take on board recent 4E warnings regarding the limits of person-directed moral imagination while contributing positively to the development of moral imagination in engineering ethics education.

On the face of it, the conservation strategy of rewilding is inimical to human places and the histories and identities that constitute them. 'We live in a shadowland, a dim, flattened relic of what there once was, of what there could be again', laments George Monbiot (2013a), a staunch advocate of rewilding and an outspoken critic of the human projects of agriculture, husbandry, and even conservation to blame for Great Britain's impoverished ecology. But even without pointing fingers, the idea of rewilding (especially laden with the conceptual baggage attendant to questions of wilderness and wildness) is centrally non-human: it is about self-willed landscapes, the return of extirpated species, and the remaking of landscapes in their pre-agricultural forms. Thus, rewilding seems antithetical to themyriadways humans appropriate the world: our landscapes, timescales, practices, and ways of inhabitation all are thereby challenged. Rewilding unsettles traditional landscapes in that it can exist only in the absence of human settlements, but further, the concept of place-as humanized and humanizing-seems called into question. Others have, in effect, argued against this stance on a practical level by pointing to rewilding projects that do not exclude but foster and even enhance a sense and understanding of place (Drenthen, 2009; Feldman, 2011). I supplement these examples with a conceptual argument against the stance I have just articulated. I argue that rather than undermining or unsettling the concept of place, rewilding itself is place-making. Though premised precisely on human absence from the landscapes and environmentswe have previously inhabited, rewilding is not antithetical to human meanings of these landscapes. This is because conceptually, rewilding relies on the specific ways humans are and are not involved in a landscape, ways which have specific meaningful content which has been pre-defined by historical ideas about wilderness and appropriate human relations to it. Rewilding necessarily preserves specific ways of relating (or not) to landscape, for instance, uses like recreation, or as source of inspiration or natural beauty are promoted, agriculture and resource extraction are not. For this reason, I argue that rewilding allows for, and in fact depends on, the kind of meaningful appropriation that makes a place. Thus, despite its emphasis on non-human wildness at the exclusion of humans and our practices, rewilded places will indeed be places, humanized, even if un-peopled.