ethics – Erhardt Graeff

Civic Virtue among Engineers

28 February 202528 February 2025Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Citation

Graeff, E. 2025. “Civic Virtue among Engineers.” Virtues & Vocations, Spring 2025. https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-spring-2025/civic-virtue-among-engineers/.

Link

https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-spring-2025/civic-virtue-among-engineers/.

Introduction

My undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering want to make a positive impact. They see engineering as a career path to building a better world. Their initial theories of change are often naive. But I want them to hold onto the hope of positive impact through four years of equations, prototypes, and internships, and feel like they can live their values wherever their careers take them.

A Culture of Disengagement

The fields of engineering and computing have been experiencing a rightful reckoning with the negative impacts of emerging technologies. Their traditional models of personal, professional, and corporate ethics have long been lacking. Now citizens and their governments are realizing their inadequacy.

New research, curriculum, and ethics codes have emerged in response to the global focus on technology ethics. I’ve participated in countless conferences and meetings with scholars, educators, and practitioners trying to figure out how higher education can cultivate the necessary critical mindsets and ethical skills of technologists. I’ve introduced many of the novel ideas, frameworks, and approaches into the design, computer science, and social science courses I teach.

I’m reaching some students, but not all, and not always in the ways I hope to. Student reactions seem to fall into a few, rough categories: (1) Woah! Engineers have done some really bad things. I don’t want to be an engineer anymore. (2) Ethics and responsibility seem important, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the kind of engineering I want to do. (3) You can’t anticipate how people will misuse technology. This is just the cost of innovation and progress. (4) Building technology in an ethical way sounds like exactly what I want to do. But I’m not seeing job postings for “Ethical Engineer.” Can I get a job doing this?

Sadly, most reactions are not in the minor success that is Category 4. Most are in the spectrum of failure represented by Categories 1–3. In these failure modes, critical examination of how technology is created and its impacts on the world erodes responsibility and the hope of positive impact and elicits defensiveness.

Four years isn’t much time, and the mentorship my colleagues and I offer is only a sliver of the learning experiences students will have during their undergraduate education. I want to make the most of it. I want to increase the likelihood that I cultivate their fragile hope and equip them with sophisticated theories of change.

Technology and the Virtues book review

20 December 2024Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues is the best book on technology ethics. It is not a practical guide to ethical decision-making in technology. It won’t tell you what to do given a specific dilemma. Instead, it’s much deeper—a careful philosophical argument for a global framework for virtue ethics that meaningfully engages with the entwinement of contemporary technology and civilization. If you want a learn how to work toward human flourishing in the age of AI, gene editing, etc., this will tell you what capacities to work on and how they can help you ask better questions and work with others to build good sociotechnical futures.

The first part of the book makes the argument for a shared set of ethical ideas across virtue traditions in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Western (Aristotelian) philosophy. This allows Vallor to argue that we can conceive a global ethical framework to address technologies that are global in scope. These are densest academic chapters of the book. But they establish some important concepts like “moral attention,” which help us understand how the “technomoral” virtues, eventually defined in Chapter 6, work.

Building on the classical virtue traditions, Vallor identifies 12 virtues for the 21st century: Honesty, Self-Control, Humility, Justice, Courage, Empathy, Care, Civility, Flexibility, Perspective, Magnanimity, and Technomoral Wisdom. Some of these are familiar virtues with definitions updated for the times. Others are new, like Care, which embraces feminist care ethics. And some do not mean what their common word definitions would indicate. For instance, the technomoral virtue of Civility is a “more robust form of cosmopolitan civic-mindedness, a reliably and intelligently expressed disposition to value communal ethical life in a global technosocial context and to act accordingly.”

The last section of the book examines four technological domains—social media, surveillance, robots, and human enhancement technology—and how we should use the technomoral virtues to navigate their ethical complexities and find paths toward designing, using, and regulating the technologies to achieve global human flourishing. Although the book came out in 2016, Vallor’s examinations of social media and artificial intelligence are still relevant and compelling. She concludes the book by discussing human enhancement technologies like gene editing because it forces us to literally ask: What is human flourishing? What is precious about humanity? What defines human dignity? She calls this “Knowing what to wish for” and argues that these fundamental questions require our collective technomoral Wisdom—the supreme virtue of applying our various cultivated virtues to good ends.

In my own research and pedagogy on ethical responsibilities of engineers and technologists, I have concluded that some version of cultivated virtue is necessary to ensure we have folks building our technologies with eyes wide open, appropriate humility, and a civic-mindedness that transcends narrow perspectives and economic assumptions. If you care about this, you should read this book. If you are interested in what it takes to be virtuous in the 21st century, you should read this book. Highly recommended!

View all my reviews

The Digital Good demands Civic-minded Technologists

17 July 202424 July 2024Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Citation

Graeff, E. 2024. “The Digital Good demands Civic-minded Technologists.” Presented at EASST-4S 2024: Making & Doing Transformations, Amsterdam, Netherlands, NY, Jul 17.

Presentation

Abstract

Engineering’s “culture of disengagement” (Cech 2014) casts a long shadow on society. The anemic civic philosophy, preached by lauded tech heroes, pretends politics and power don’t apply to technology, that we can reduce most problems to technical challenges, and that meritocracy is justice. There are bright spots—individual, civic-minded technologists; the Tech Workers Coalition; and the Integrity Institute, a community of practice for “trust and integrity” professionals from technology companies. But it’s insufficient. To solve the challenges of contemporary society and democracy, entwined with sociotechnical systems, we need to understand technology’s civic landscape and reframe the technical expert’s role in democracy.

Engineering has a rich history of political activism and rumination about its social and civic responsibility (Layton 1986; Wisniowski 2016). And STS has long tried to understand and define ethical technology. However, computing has grown more deprofessionalized over time, loosening its ethical tethers. Simultaneously, there are growing concerns about the role technologists play in society. So how should civic-mindedness intersect with the education and daily practice of technologists?

I’ve conducted 17 interviews with leading engineering educators, looked at the history of civic engagement and civic-mindedness in engineering and computing, and worked on defining civic professionalism in technology. My research supports an argument that technologists need a political education. Unfortunately, civic learning is scarce in most undergraduate programs and even secondary schools, and it’s particularly uncommon in computing. So we must define and invest in civic learning and a civic culture in computing, because the digital good really demands civic-minded technologists.

Educating Engineers for Civic-mindedness

23 September 202330 January 2024Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Citation

Graeff, E. 2023. “Educating Engineers for Civic-mindedness.” Presented at the 14th Symposium on Engineering and Liberal Education, Union College, Schenectady, NY, Sep 23.

Slides

Abstract

In her book Educating for Civic-mindedness, Carolin Kreber (2016) offers a compelling framework for civic-mindedness as an attribute and capability of professionals, which can be nurtured through “transformative higher education” experiences. This paper will apply Kreber’s framework to understanding the task of nurturing civic-minded engineering professionals, summarizing the existing landscape of transformative experiences in engineering education and diagnosing the challenges and possibilities for enhancing these efforts, as expressed in interviews with leading educators and practitioners of civically-engaged engineering.

Kreber starts with Bringle and Steinberg’s (2010) definition of civic-mindedness as “a person’s inclination or disposition to be knowledgeable of and involved in the community, and to have a commitment to act upon a sense of responsibility as a member of that community”; a civic-minded graduate is “a person who has completed a course of study […], and has the capacity and desire to work with others to achieve the common good.” Kreber emphasizes the “with others” portion of this definition, arguing that civic-minded professionals “support the flourishing, or authenticity, of other members of society, by helping others achieve important human capabilities.”

Cultivating authentic, civic-minded professionals should be a core purpose of higher education, according to Kreber. She believes this requires carefully designed, community-engaged learning experiences that have a “transformational” effect on students. Engineering education rarely achieves this high bar. Rather, engineering’s culture and its most common approaches to nurturing ethical and social responsibility appear in tension with certain civic virtues. A call to action for “civic professionalism” in engineering is due.

Klara and the Sun book review

8 August 2023Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is such a brilliant and timely little novel. It touches on so many important ethical questions about AI/robots: care robots, AI replacing jobs, robots/AI as human-like species deserving rights versus being like appliances, philosophy of mind, and more. I’m excited to talk to my students at Olin about this book. It’s our summer reading for incoming first years.

Ishiguro’s “Klara” is an artificial friend (AF). She is a care robot (like the many, notably from Japan, that are developed to be companions to humans and help them with social-emotional health). Her objective is to ensure the child she is acquired for is not lonely. She believes the worst thing a human can be is lonely. Her child Josie is a little sick and lives far away from others. The novel covers Klara’s efforts to serve Josie well.

The novel starts in the store where Klara is for sale. She is our narrator. When we meet her, she is starting to form assumptions about the world. Her observational skills are unusually good for an AF, but her narrative is of course flawed both because of the limits of her technology (cleverly illustrated by Ishiguro) and the limits of her experience.

Ishiguro is not the first to offer a first person perspective to an AI. Many fine examples, especially the Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy beginning with Ancillary Justice, come to mind. What I love about Klara and the Sun is that it’s a bildungsroman—one of my favorite genres—for a young robot. This allows us to explore some of the key ethical questions from a unique perspective and provides for the eponymous plot line written stylistically as a fusion of science fiction and realism.

The book is a fast read, filled with clever imagery and symbolism, which open and close the narrative elegantly. I would read this even if I didn’t have to, and I recommend that you do too.

View all my reviews