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Using Civic Professionalism to Frame Ethical and Social Responsibility in Engineering

Citation

Graeff, Erhardt. 2023 (April 20). Using Civic Professionalism to Frame Ethical and Social Responsibility in Engineering. 2023 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, & Technology (fPET 2023), TU Delft, Delft, The Netherlands. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p17wdt2GriQ.

Presentation Recording

Slides

Abstract

In recent years, professional societies, scholars and educators, and corporations within the fields of engineering and computer science have been grasping for better principles and frameworks for the ethical and social responsibility that engineers, computer scientists, and technologists should embody. Many professional societies (e.g. NSPE, IEEE, ACM) have revised their codes of ethics. Scholars and educators have launched numerous research projects and educational experiments to determine the values and ethical competencies professionals should learn and apply. Corporations have publicized their ethical commitments and formed consortia to govern ethical approaches to research and development areas like artificial intelligence.

We know there are fundamental problems. In 2014, Erin Cech identified a “culture of disengagement” in engineering that weakens engineering students’ commitments to public welfare during their undergraduate years. She argued that ideologies of 1) depoliticization, 2) technical/social dualism, and 3) meritocracy were key pillars of engineering’s disengaged culture. These ideologies undermine engineers’ social responsibility by positioning technical expertise as supremely relevant and perceiving existing social, economic, and political structures as fair and just. In subsequent studies, Cech and co-authors call for engineering education and epistemologies of engineering that repoliticize the profession and its work. I believe civic professionalism answers that call.

Based on Harry Boyte’s concept of “citizen professionalism” and Albert Dzur’s concept of “democratic professionalism,” civic professionalism is both a professional identity, anchored by civic attitudes and related values, and a set of normative professional practices that rely on civic knowledge, skills, and habits, which augment specialized technical competencies. In contrast to typical outside experts, Boyte argues citizen professionals see their role as co-creators and facilitators of problem-solving. They acknowledge that they too are citizens alongside many other stakeholders and should share power over decisions. They acknowledge the limits of their knowledge and expertise in different contexts and embrace local knowledge. Their work serves the common good by solving technical problems while also building and strengthening relationships.

Similar to Boyte’s description, Dzur’s democratic professionals resist the technocratic urge to flatten complex problems into challenges well-suited to professional methods beyond the lay public’s reach, and instead create space for deliberation and collective action regarding social and political issues beyond the borders of their own professional domains. Dzur specifically offers democratic professionalism as a middle ground between a “social trustee” model of professional and its radical critique, which would seek to deprofessionalize expertise and recover all such power for the public. Dzur argues that professionals and laypeople both have a stake in professional decisions and should share oversight of professional ethics democratically.

This is where engineering and computer science should head—framing social and ethical responsibility in terms of a broader civic and democratic responsibility. Although civic professionalism does not have a monopoly on these tenets, which we can locate in other popular ethical engineering frameworks, it does provide a compelling emphasis on epistemic humility, politics, and the common good with clear pedagogical opportunities as this paper will show.

Undergraduate Engineering as Civic Professionalism

Graeff, Erhardt, and Alison Wood. 2021. “Undergraduate Engineering as Civic Professionalism.” The Good Society 30, no. 1: 76-95. muse.jhu.edu/article/862840.

Link

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/862840

Abstract

Undergraduate engineering education is not doing enough to address engineering’s culture of disengagement—a culture that inhibits modern society’s ability to serve the public interest and mitigate the threat of technologies amplifying harm. We argue for visions of undergraduate engineering that purposefully embrace the humanities and make civic education integral in order to educate engineers as civic professionals. Two case studies from our college, one curricular and one extracurricular, illustrate how we are building toward a new vision by offering learning experiences in which students can evolve their personal and professional commitments to the common good and practice technical skills in ways responsible to democracy and society.



Collective Organizing and Social Responsibility at CSCW

Devansh Saxena, Erhardt Graeff, Shion Guha, EunJeong Cheon, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Dawn Walker, Christoph Becker, and Kenneth R. Fleischmann. 2020. Collective Organizing and Social Responsibility at CSCW. In Conference Companion Publication of the 2020 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 503–509. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406865.3418593

Link

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3406865.3418593

Abstract

The CSCW community has long discussed the ethics and politics of sociotechnical systems and how they become embedded in society and public policy. In light of the Black Lives Matter protests and Hong Kong protests, technologies such as facial recognition and contact tracing have re-invigorated conversations about the ethical and social responsibility of tech corporations, tech workers, and academics in science and technology. The goal of this workshop is to move beyond a call for the usual suspects of participatory design and human-centered design by committing to concrete steps to transform society through advocacy and activism.