Recent work in moral psychology demonstrates that case discussion helps students to refine decision making techniques, leads them to question unexamined attitudes, and helps improve their moral reasoning. This module works with these developments by providing students with short, realistic scenarios whose narratives end at crucial points of decision. Students are provided with solutions that bring the narrative to a close and are asked to evaluate and rank them by using ethics and feasibility tests. The format bears a superficial resemblance to the Gray Matters exercise currently being used at Boeing Corporation in their ethics training program. But this particular version is more open-ended (students are invited to design their own solutions) and more oriented toward getting students to think about ethical issues and values. The first UPRM version of this module was introduced during an NSF funded retreat (SBR-9810253) held at Maricao, Puerto Rico in 1999. Different versions of this activity have been used in engineering, computer, and business ethics classes. This module is being developed as a part of an NSF-funded project, "Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing of Best Practices," NSF SES 0551779.
The cases used in this module have been developed through NSF SBR-9810253 and
UPRM ABET EAC Workshops. Also to thanks to Jaime Rodriguez, a former MBA student at UPRM, for providing cases 1 and 2.This module represents a modification of the Gray Matters format developed by George Sammet. For a more detailed description of the history of Gray Matters, see Whitbeck, Caroline. 1998. Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 176-181.)
Directions
Read the following scenarios and the accompanying solutions.
Evaluate the alternatives in terms of the tests described below.
Choose the one you think best or design your own solution if you believe you can do better.
Summarize your results by filling in the solution evaluation matrix that apprears on the page following the scenario. Notice that the first column repeats the solution alternatives.
Be prepared to present your matrix to the class. You will also provide the other groups in the class with a copy of your matrix for their ethics portfolios
Solution evaluation tests
REVERSIBILITY: Would I think this is a good choice if I were among those affected by it?
PUBILICITY: Would I want to be publicly associated with this action through, say, its publication in the newspaper?
HARM/BENEFICENCE: Does this action do less harm than any of the available alternatives?
FEASIBILITY: Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political constraints?
Decision making scenarios and exercises
This file contains four cases: When in Aguadilla...?, The Laminating Press Room, Prints and Primos, and The Persistent Engineer.
Harm test set-up
Identify the agent (=the person who will perform the action).
Describe the action (=what the agent is about to do).
Identify the stakeholders (individuals who have a vital interest at risk) and their stakes.
Identify, sort out, and weight the expected results or consequences.
Harm test pitfalls
Paralysis of Action--considering too many consequences.
Incomplete analysis--considering too few results.
Failure to weigh harms against benefits.
Failure to compare different alternatives.
Justice failures--ignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benefits.
Reversibility test set-up
Identify the agent
Describe the action
Identify the stakeholders and their stakes
Use the stakeholder analysis to select the relations to be reversed.
Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent) and yourself in their place (as the target of the action)
If you were in their place, would you still find the action acceptable?
Reversibility pitfalls
Leaving out a key stakeholder relation.
Failing to recognize and address conflicts between stakeholders and their conflicting stakes.
Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler).
Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall global reversal assessment that takes into account all the stakeholders the agent has reversed with.
Public identification set-up
Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action under consideration, and listing the key values or virtues at play in the situation.
Associate the action with the agent.
Identify what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone associated with a virtue/value or a vice?
Public identification pitfalls
Action is not associated with the agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and the action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with disrespect but these points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a person who deliberately performs such an action.
Failure to specify the moral quality, virtue, or value of the action that is imputed to the agent in the test. To say, for example, that willfully harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what moral quality this attributes to the agent. Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt, dishonest, or unreasonable?
