Eac toolkit - uprm ethics bowl - iit summer institute follow-up  (Page 3/4)

Skill objectives

• Ethical Awareness : You will demonstrate ethical awareness by how well you identify and frame the ethical issues and problem that arise in the case you debate. If you spend time in your presentation framing the problem raised in your case and making sure the peer review team understands how you see the problem, you will do well in this category. A helpful hint: many of the cases you will be debating can be sharply specified as value conflict problems. Show the values that are in conflict and how you will go about integrating them.
• Ethical Evaluation : You have already spent time practicing ethical evaluation by using the ethics tests to assess and rank solution alternatives in the Hughes case. The tests help you to hone in on the ethical strengths and weakness of solution alternatives. When the tests converge on a solution, this is a strong sign of its ethical strength. When they diverge, this signals to you the need to reformulate the solution to cover the "ethics gaps" raised by the tests.
• Ethical Integration : You have examined the analogy between design and ethics problems. In ethics problems, we create solutions that realize, balance, and integrate the ethical specifications. We also implement these solutions over situational constraints like resource, interest, and technical constraints. Ethical Integration requires that you make clear the solution formulation process that your solution demonstrates. Make it crystal clear to the peer review teams that you have designed your solution to realize ethical considerations while respecting situational constraints.
• Ethical Prevention : This is not the prevention of the ethical but the anticipation of potential problems and the development of counter-measures to prevent these problems from arising or to minimize their impact. The earlier we address ethical problems the easier they are to solve. Taking a preventive stance toward ethical problems is the best way to promote ethics int he real world.
• Value Realization : Finally, make the move from asking how to fix things when they go wrong to how to make things continually better. As professionals, you are in the position to use your knowledge and skills to realize values of all types. Now you can put this to work to identify ethical value "gaps" and develop strategies for eliminating them.

A quick word on two additional objectives. Moral imagination requires examining a situation from multiple framings. As we have already seen in class, some of you approach problems from a social perspective. You see effective solutions lying in leading opposition, forming coalitions among co-workers, and leading organizational charges to resolve injustices. But others seek to formulate problems in technical terms. Changing the manufacturing process, pressing for technically innovative designs, and formulating situations as technical puzzles. The point here is that the one does not exclude the other, and moral imagination requires working through these and other possible framings.