Dealing with the learning process of professional ethics
2. hermeneutic and dialogical: suitable approaches for the learning process
2.1. Hermeneutic ethics and dialogical ethics background
Engineering profession is an inherently moral profession. The good professional exercise of an engineer involves choosing a moral position when moral dilemmas arise in their daily
profes-sional practice. The definition of morally good exercise of the profession is an ongoing contextual process, based on concrete experiences with different stakeholders (engineer, manager, cus-tomer, organization, etc.). In this process, all of them are, and will be, confronted with moral issues. Although all the participants involved in a situation are facing moral issues every day, normally the opportunity for dealing with moral issues is lacking. For this reason, specific moral deliberation methods are needed in order to support participants taking on these moral issues in a more reflective, dialogical and understandable way.
Hermeneutic and dialogical ethics appear as very suitable approaches for students learning engineering ethics. By com-bining these two approaches in helping to solve moral dilem-mas, stakeholders are involved in the process of reflection and analysis, which takes place in a dialogue between participants.
To begin such reflection and analysis we take, as a starting point, the works of: Socrates, Gadamer and Habermas. So next we are going to comment, broadly speaking, on the essential ideas on which our work is based (more information about these thinkers can be found in Chapter 3).
Socrates (Socratic dialogue)
Dialogue promotes the identification and examination of our assumptions and tacit beliefs and, at the same time, allows us to prepare and evaluate our arguments. These elements are impor-tant in the practice of professional ethics (for instance, engineer-ing ethics).
The Socratic dialogue, through a set of questions, allows us to provoke a state of confusion in the people involved in a conversation, offering the opportunity to develop the skills of argumentation. Therefore, it is possible to learn something from the experience, as this confusion can be the precursor to a profound change in one’s conversational attitude from which a
dialogical attitude may follow, or in other words, an attitude of open mindedness towards what others have to say to us. Without this open conversational attitude it is difficult to deal with ethical issues well.
In this light, Socratic questions are fundamental and closely related to ethical issues. The stakeholders involved not only need to come to grips with these questions, but they are also forced to practice the insights gained during the inquiry and learn from them. Thus, they should take the opportunity to learn from the whole experience in dealing with ethical dilemmas while working and living together in the everyday life. Besides this, the use of Socratic dialogue in engineer ethics helps and indeed forces peo-ple to clarify their own aims and goals, in fact their true interests.
In practice, all kinds of tensions appear. People working and liv-ing together inevitably develop all kinds of interdependencies. The actions of everyone depend on the way they deal with their own interests (as engineer, as client or as manager). The use of Socratic Dialogue can help one to learn from the failures and successes of oneself and others through genuine inquiry in order to settle: conflict analysing and mediation or policy making. To successfully carry out Socratic dialogue, it is necessary to feed it with the new participants’
questions and experiences. Instead of excluding people’s voices, it is important to form a group to exchange perspectives, work and live together and account for all attempts. Dialogue shows the way to share experiences, develop common communicative rules, and maintain manners of doing and including newcomers.
Gadamer (Hermeneutics) and Habermas (Dialogical ethics)
Dialogue is crucial in order to find consensus towards moral dilemmas and for developing shared understandings and improv-ing social praxis. This idea is present in hermeneutic ethics, which is grounded in the hermeneutic philosophy of Gadamer (Gadamer, 1988).
In the first place, hermeneutic ethics aims to articulate and explore the various, sometimes conflicting, perspectives and interpretations in a morally complex situation. Consequently, hermeneutics can help the engineering students to develop new and richer ways of dealing with actual moral dilemmas.
According to Gadamer, understanding a text belonging to a certain tradition is a similar process to understanding a person in a dialogue or conversation. Thus hermeneutics can be seen in dialogical sense, in which we open ourselves, not only to receiv-ing the message of another, but in a sense transformreceiv-ing our con-sciousness after contact with him or her. In other words, being open to what the other has to say in her context, instead of ignor-ing the response, and beignor-ing prepared to accept it as potentially relevant and valid for oneself. Because of this, language becomes a means of communication in which concepts and ideas are relat-ed to other view points throughout time, life, experiences, etc. As a result, a dialogical approach emphasizes the fact that ethics is concrete and contextual and human beings interpret their situa-tion and try to make sense of it.
In addition, hermeneutic ethics implies a set of elements such as the notion of perspective, dialogue as a learning process, and practical rationality. Hermeneutics starts from the idea that human life is a process of interpretation. Human actions are not caused by the environment; they embody a specific understanding of the situation. One sees the situation from a certain perspective, which is the result of both prior experiences and current views. From a hermeneutic view point, perspectives on a situation at hand are not rigid and closed. They can change through dialogue.
Dialogue is not seen as an instrument or technique to reach better decisions; it is rather understood as an ongoing, social learning process in which people develop new and richer understandings of their practices. This process of developing more enriched practical understandings is grounded in concrete experiences. Hermeneutic ethics assists various stakeholders to
understand their practice from multiple perspectives. In dialogi-cal interactions these multiple perspectives may evolve into new horizons, in terms of Gadamer. Communication as horizon fusion is possible because of language. In this case, language reveals itself as a way of opening up the meaning of being and without it nothing can be understood.
Secondly, from the Habermas position, hermeneutics allows us to understand the motives, values, feelings, and thoughts of oth-ers through of the concept of inter subjectivity which is entered through socialization, especially language acquisition (Habermas, 1984). Habermas says that speech must constitute an unconstrained exchange of opinions in which all speakers enjoy equal rights of par-ticipation. Participants are involved not only in a continuing search through ideas but in a comprehensive process of mutual agreement or consensus through common deliberation on shared goals. For this reason, this dialogical approach is important for us, as educa-tors, when training students. In this way they are invited to develop new, shared ways of seeing and acting. Therefore, dialogue plays an important role in helping students to feel the essential empathy involved within a conversation on values, norms and virtues in order to make “good” choices when making decisions about cases that will arise in their professional world.