The following websites offer resources on engineering ethics and research ethics:
The NSF Ethics Education in Science and Engineering program offers opportunities to develop new activities to educate engineering graduate students on ethics. This focuses mostly on the conduct of research and issues of intellectual property, but awards have also focused on a wide range of topics such as humanitarian engineering ethics and nanotechnology in society.
GILEE at Virginia Tech
GILEE is a graduate interdisciplinary liberal engineering ethics curriculum developed at Virginia Tech by an interdisciplinary team of educators. It is supported by the National Science Foundation. The GILEE curriculum addresses how issues of engineering ethics and cultural identities are intertwined within a globalized workplace. Our transformative graduate curriculum eliminates an important disconnect between contemporary ethical issues in technology and engineering practice. It is a collaborative effort with the Virginia Tech Graduate School and its dean, Dr. Karen P. DePauw.
Launch of the Globethics.net Library - A Global Digital Library on Ethics
A new global digital library on ethics was launched on 9 October 2008. This library provides users free access to full text versions of about 200 journals and more than a million documents in the field of applied ethics. The digital library on ethics was developed by Globethics.net, a global network organization with the objective of empowering people in all regions of the world to reflect and act on ethical issues. They developed the Globethics.net Library to ensure that persons and institutions - especially in Africa, Asia and Latin-America - have access to good quality and up to date knowledge resources. There is no cost involved in using the library. Individuals only need to register (free of charge) as participants on the Globethics.net website (www.globethics.net) to get access to all the full text journals, encyclopedias, e-books and other resources in the library. More information on how to access the library as well as on how to submit documents to the library is available at www.globethics.net.
Click here for the AAAS-NAS Compilation of Resources.
Engineers work in multi-national corporations and in countries all around the world. The work of the ASCE Committee on Global Principles for Professional Conduct can be found at: http://content.asce.org/global/principles/GlobalHomePage. html. The Engineer's Charter, signed by over 150 engineering leaders worldwide, is translated into 4 languages and can be found at: http://content.asce.org/global/principles/Charter.html.
Emerging technologies create new attention to ethical issues associated with them. One development that has incited both public and expert interest is the field of nano-science, nano-engineering, and nano-technology. Resources concerning nano-ethics can be found at NanoEthicsBank.
A recent workshop in Golden, Colorado, addressed the question why scientists and engineers ought to address the "broader impacts" of their research. More information on it can be found at "Making Sense of the ‘Broader Impacts’ of Science and Technology."
Several research projects focus on teaching and learning ethics in udergraduate and graduate engineering education. Two that may be of interest are:
Please send suggestions for additional ethics resources to Rachelle Hollander.