Ethics takes its place in science and technology, contribut-ing, substantially, towards giving them sense in human life. Both domains, science and technology, are recognized as key forms of human activity, and stand alongside the arts and social sciences as fundamental to human achievement and expression. In relation to this work, technological practices, knowledge and outcomes can provide mechanisms for science to gain a better view of its defined world, and in fact can provide serious challenges to the defining of that world. Thus, the development of technological artefacts which extend and, very often, change the perception and behavioural capabilities of human beings, make available new relationships with the world in which we are living. For instance, these new relationships reflected in the intersection between technology and human being can be found in the first part of this work. In this light, ethics will help us to develop sensitivities and imagination, not formal knowledge and, at the same time, it will create a framework that allows us to improve basic social and environmental skills to turn future engineers into committed professionals, with the willingness to involve themselves, with social awareness, in their profession.
So far the ethics applied to engineering has been particularly directed at explaining or advising how to prevent some damaging situations and how these situations can be avoided, taking into account the engineer’s responsibility and its appropriate manage-ment. However, this management goes beyond the fact of know-ing technological regulations as established by various agencies and institutions. It is necessary to emphasize that ethical behav-iour is always desirable in the exercise of a social profession such as engineering, and not only when things goes wrong. For this reason, we need to incorporate an ethical dimension that allows us to analyse the actions, the outcomes and the responsibilities with regard to the relationship established between technology
and the engineer’s profession, taking into account the social con-text where it is deployed. The combination of both parties, tech-nical regulation and serious ethical reflection, should improve the decision-making within the profession. In this way, engineers will have more confidence and security, in other words, they will feel more autonomous when integrating ethics into the daily practice of their profession.
Therefore, next I am going to present the aims I hope to achieve in this work, focused particularly on the training of con-tents belonging to the knowledge area “the ethical and profes-sional commitment” as applied to technical degrees.
Regarding the definition of these contents and learning proc-ess, our task lies in:
• Exploring the meaning and importance of ethics within the engineering profession.
• Showing the students the rights and the professional duties of the engineer through the deontological codes. These codes will set the standard for the minimum attitudes and desirable behaviours acting as guidelines for future engi-neers, even though its isolated and exclusive use is not enough to achieve the ethical training that we pursue.
• Expounding the values embedded in the daily practice of technology (engineer’s workplace) within the technical-scientific environment, taking into account the social reper-cussions of their actions in the exercise of their profession.
• Showing how to teach to identify these values and how to manage them in relation to technical-scientific, envi-ronmental, economic, political, corporate and, above all, social surroundings.
• Studying the axiology and the possibilities, limitations and requirements, (such as pedagogical and methodological issues) that these values demand within a technical-scien-tific context.
• Providing resources, tools and strategies to enable students to find suitable answers to the moral questions related to tech-nological development and its social consequences in order to become aware when facing engineering ethical issues.
• Establishing strong links between the ethical discussions achieved in the classroom and the ethical issues of the real world. In this way, students will be able to believe in this kind of content and will see that these are a part of their training as future engineers.
• Designing the academic, pedagogical and scientific base typical of a university discipline in order to properly imple-ment this kind of subject within new technical degrees.
• Providing this knowledge area with formal validity with the purpose of promoting an integral and transverse train-ing for the student.
• Giving a representative sample of technological resources belonging to Internet and ICT technologies framework with which the ethical conversational practices can be combined for leveraging the effectiveness of the ethical training and to offer new ways or formats of learning (i.e.: desktop video conferencing, streaming video, live chats, video conferences and web based technologies) to complement traditional learning resources (i.e.: magisterial lectures and e-mail or text based communications).
In relation to the students’ learning process and the content they need to acquire, our purpose is:
• To show the students that this kind of content demands willingness and commitment, maturity and reflection when learning and, in the future, in the exercise of their profession.
• To prove to the students of engineering that their profes-sion has an strong social component and therefore they
are required to answer with technical and ethical quality (human lives are at stake).
• To provide the students with sufficient ability in order to develop the skills necessary to grasp the problematic elements existing in the exercise of their profession as engineers, taking into account the public threats (environ-mental and personal) and the apparent, but perhaps not immediately noticeable, risks.
These study attempts, through making desirable recommen-dations, to show what the responsible exercise of engineering entails as a clearly defined subject. Thus, we should show an ethics with its typical features and we should find the appro-priate methods and resources needed to carry out its learning process, all of this with the aim of achieving good practice together the ethical sensitivity we aspire to produce among students of engineering. Concretely, the study’s principal con-tribution is to provide an appropriate applied ethics which the educational engineer profile requires. This ethics should be as follows:
• Applied to the professional context. Abstract and formal when it is required.
• Practical, meaning based on the study of real or realistic cases. Theoretical when it is required.
• Pragmatic, so it has to be oriented to the development of abilities in order to determine and assess, ethically, the dif-ferent alternatives that occur in complex situations.
• Rational and reasonable. It always has to consider the means (rational) and the ends (reasonable) in an integrated way. In no case doctrinaire.
• Attentive to social, cultural and technological changes and needs with a critical eye. In no case dogmatic.
The ethics that we promote should be understood as praxis.
A praxis whose meaning is to do well what we do (Ricoeur, 1989;
Aristotle) in order to obtain a result of quality within the exercise, in our case, of the engineering profession.
The model for the values of the student of engineering is set up from the conception of an appropriate technology in the profes-sion, which is expressed from different points of view: intellectual, technical, ethical, aesthetic and ideological for this professional. It is necessary to look for the interaction and the integrity of all these factors to achieve the exercise of good practical training. Thus, the ethical dimension of the engineering profession underlines the responsibility that the professional takes on with his context (natu-ral or social). At this point, we will have to highlight human dignity as a supreme value to respect in order to cultivate respect for the profession. This respect is closely tied to a proper understanding of the reality in which we live and a great commitment to it.