Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

2. ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Publication Details

IEEE International Symposium on Technology & Society, Dublin, 11-12 November, 2015

Abstract

This paper is focused on the teaching of engineering ethics (EE). Through a focus on safety and the lens of what sociologists call the agency/ structure relationship it examimes various approaches to this teaching. Drawing on Critical Realism it argues there are deficiencies in both the dominant approach and a number of proposed alternatives as they suffer from various forms of conflationism . By drawing on Critical Realism (CR) a more robust agenda for teaching engineering ethics can be developed. It is argued that CR offers a basis for understanding the range of factors which lead to accidents and disasters. It allows for a fuller consideration of agency/structure relations and the importance of changing the contexts in which engineers work in order to allow them to hold paramount the health, safety and welfare of the public.

DOI

DOI: 10.1109/ISTAS.2015.7439443

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