Qin Zhu

This volume, the result of an ongoing bridge building effort among engineers and humanists, addresses a variety of philosophical, ethical, and policy issues emanating from engineering and technology.  Interwoven through its chapters are two themes, often held in tension with one another: “Exploring Boundaries” and “Expanding Connections.”  “Expanding Connections” highlights contributions that look to philosophy for insight into some of the challenges engineers face in working with policy makers, lay designers, and other members of the public. It also speaks to reflections included in this volume on the connections between fact and value, reason and emotion, engineering practice and the social good, and, of course, between engineering and philosophy. “Exploring Boundaries” highlights contributions that focus on some type of demarcation. Public policy sets a boundary between what is regulated from what is not, academic disciplines delimit themselves by their subjects and methods of inquiry, and professions approach problems with unique goals and by using concepts and language in particular ways that create potential obstacles to collaboration with other fields. These and other forms of boundary setting are also addressed in this volume.
Contributors explore these two themes in a variety of specific contexts, including engineering epistemology, engineers’ social responsibilities, engineering and public policy-making, engineering innovation, and the affective dimensions of engineering work. The book also includes analyses of social and ethical issues with emerging technologies such as 3-D printing and its use in medical applications, as well as social robots. Initial versions of the invited papers included in this book were first presented at the 2014 meeting of the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET), held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The volume furthers fPET’s intent of extending and developing the philosophy of engineering as an academic field, and encouraging conversation, promoting a sense of shared enterprise, and building community among philosophers and engineers across a diversity of cultural backgrounds and approaches to inquiry.

This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the practical plausibility of ethical decision-making. In addition to the quality of ethical justification, the value of a moral action also depends on its effectiveness in solving an ethical dilemma, cultivating healthy working relationships, negotiating existing organizational cultures, and achieving contextual plausibility in everyday professional practice. This paper uses a cross-cultural ethics scenario to further elaborate how a pragmatic approach can help us rethink ethical reasoning, as well as ethics instruction and assessment. This paper is expected to be of interest to educators eager to improve the ability of engineers and other prof...

ABSTRACT Although engineering education has played important roles in China's growing power and influence on the world stage, engineering education policy since the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s has not been well documented in current English-language scholarship. Informed by historical and sociological studies of education, engineering and engineering education, this paper attempts to address this scholarly gap by relating contemporary Chinese engineering education policy-making to its broader historical, cultural and ideological contexts. Based on analysis of policy documents and reports released by the Chinese government and engineering schools, and drawing on prior scholarship of Chinese (engineering) education policy, this paper employs the concept of 'past/forward' as an analytic lens to interpret and understand four major areas of engineering education policy change in contemporary China: institutional reform, disciplines and majors, training objectives, and curriculum reform.

Dominant approaches to designing morally capable robots have been mainly based on rulebased ethical frameworks such as deontology and consequentialism. These approaches have encountered both philosophical and computational limitations. They often struggle to accommodate remarkably diverse, unstable, and complex contexts of human-robot interaction. Roboticists and philosophers have recently been exploring underrepresented ethical traditions such as virtuous, role-based, and relational ethical frameworks for designing morally capable robots. This paper employs the lens of ethical pluralism to examine the notion of role-based morality in the global context and discuss how such cross-cultural analysis of role ethics can inform the design of morally competent robots. In doing so, it first provides a concise introduction to ethical pluralism and how it has been employed as a method to interpret issues in computer and information ethics. Second, it reviews specific schools of thought in We...

Approaching policy research from a cultural perspective, this paper proposes that understanding engineering education practice and policymaking in China requires considerable sensitivity to context. By adopting a historical–philosophical analysis methodology, this paper analyzes how three fundamental concepts (engineering, engineer, and education) are linked to a variety of beliefs, assumptions, and ideas that are partially unique to the Chinese cultural context. More specifically, these concepts are discussed in relation to three partially distinct philosophical frameworks: Confucianism, Marxism, and economic pragmatism. Our analysis in this paper draws on studies in comparative education and Chinese studies as well as policy reports released by the Central Government. Based on the analysis, the paper suggests taking a cultural approach to studying engineering education policy, with important implications for both Chinese and Western scholars and policymakers. This paper should be of interest to comparative education scholars, international engineering educators, and education policymakers with a global focus.

This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the practical plausibility of ethical decision-making. In addition to the quality of ethical justification, the value of a moral action also depends on its effectiveness in solving an ethical dilemma, cultivating healthy working relationships, negotiating existing organizational cultures, and achieving contextual plausibility in everyday professional practice. This paper uses a cross-cultural ethics scenario to further elaborate how a pragmatic approach can help us rethink ethical reasoning, as well as ethics instruction and assessment. This paper is expected to be of interest to educators eager to improve the ability of engineers and other professional students to effectively and appropriately deal with the kinds of everyday ethical issues they will likely face in their careers.

Although engineering education has played important roles in China’s growing power and influence on the world stage, engineering education policy since the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s has not been well documented in current English-language scholarship. Informed by historical and sociological studies of education, engineering and engineering education, this paper attempts to address this scholarly gap by relating contemporary Chinese engineering education policy-making to its broader historical, cultural and ideological contexts. Based on analysis of policy documents and reports released by the Chinese government and engineering schools, and drawing on prior scholarship of Chinese (engineering) education policy, this paper employs the concept of ‘past/forward’ as an analytic lens to interpret and understand four major areas of engineering education policy change in contemporary China: institutional reform, disciplines and majors, training objectives, and curriculum reform.

This paper maps approaches to engineering ethics in the People's Republic of China. It is addressed primarily to English-language scholars interested in learning more about one aspect of the complex historical and cultural context of technological education in a nation that now graduates more engineers than any other in the world. Although the basic terms of this mapping – i.e., traditionalism vs. modernism – will strike some non-Chinese readers as too simple, it nevertheless represents a common conceptualization within the community of discourse being presented. Engineering ethics studies in China today are constituted by a dialogue between traditional Chinese value systems concerning engineering and modernist perspectives influenced by both Marxism and more technoscientifically advanced nations as a result of global technology transfers and economic exchanges. As a preliminary exploration of this dialogue, the paper offers a historical-philosophical narrative of engineering and engineering ethics in China as reflective of traditional attitudes shaped by engineering in the premodern sense of gong cheng and its modern reinterpretation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The paper then outlines some of the main research areas in contemporary Chinese engineering ethics studies. Finally, in the face of globalization, the traditionalism-modernism tension is used to characterize contemporary challenges in engineering ethics in China. The paper concludes with an argument addressed more to Chinese than to non-Chinese scholars, suggesting a need to rethink engineering ethics in order to redefine the meaning of ‘made in China’.

Despite the emergence of China as a global power in our age of great
technological and scientific advances, technology has drawn little attention from philosophers who study its thought and culture.Meanwhile, Chinese philosophers of technology have focused on social issues, only using Western philosophy of technology as the intellectual foundation. Perhaps an opportunity has been missed. Could Chinese philosophy provide an intellectual resource for reflecting on the emerging technologies and sociotechnical problems? Qian Wang takes this largely unexplored path by parsing the idea of the dao, which is unique to Chinese philosophy and has been a keystone of Chinese thinking since antiquity. Angus C. Graham asserts its importance by
describing ancient Chinese philosophers as “disputers of dao.”Popular understandings of the dao focus on its role in the origination of things
and its evolutionary characteristics, butWang’s book is a deeper exploration,
inspired by Joseph Needham,who said:“[t]he ancient pictography
forTao being made up of a head together with a sign for going and
‘Way’ is but a shadow of its full meaning.”

As a specialist in John Dewey studies, Larry A. Hickman has made and continues to make contributions to the development of Dewey’s philosophy. This new collection of papers from more than three decades of work is his latest approach defending and extending Dewey's classical pragmatism.

Philosophy of technology is a relatively recent addition to philosophy. It was not until the late 1970s that a few philosophers started to consider technology as a potential topic in philosophical reflections. In 1979, Mario Bunge even complained that “[philosophy of technology] is an underdeveloped branch of scholarship… So far no major philosopher has made his central concern or written an important monograph on it” (Bunge, 1979, p.68). However, in the past three decades, rapid developments have embedded technology into
human society and even human bodies (e.g. biomedical engineering). Philosophers have thus felt obligated to think about the ways technology fundamentally alters living conditions and what it means to be human. Such a challenge has given rise to the philosophy of technology. Nevertheless, gaps still remain in the philosophy of technology. On one hand, technological advancement requires intellectual resources to guide its trajectory wisely. On the other, philosophy of technology has not completely been established as an institutionalized field. Contemporary philosophy of technology is attempting to bridge this gap. Since “no major reference work on the philosophy of technology is in existence,” this Companion to the Philosophy of Technology (hereafter simply Companion) edited by Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks, is the most up-to-date attempt to synthesize all sorts of historical and contemporary efforts and to point toward further research (p.1).

Ethics and technology as a branch of practical ethics has drawn global attention in both Anglo-Saxon and Continent traditions. By historically-philosophically acknowledging that the great contributions that the traditional approaches have made, this paper argues that the fundamental challenge they are encountering in the new phrase of the global technological innovation is the practical ineffectiveness both in the hermeneutical and the functional aspects. In face to the challenge, this paper introduces the empirical ethics into ethics and technology studies to make it more contextualist. Finally, it will use embedded ethicist as a promising case to demonstrate that how the empirical ethics and technology can be engaged.

In pre-modern China the traditional thinking pattern had a strong influence on the practice of engineering and on social development. This thinking pattern is still influential and valuable today. In this chapter we characterize the rational thinking pattern from four perspectives: (1) at an ontological level it presents itself as an organic entity; (2) at the theory of knowledge level it relies on intuitional experience; (3) at a methodological level it highlights the notions of correlation and flexibility; and finally (4) at an ethical level it advocates the morality of yi dao yu shu (mastering technique with dao) and pursues the harmony between a number of related contextual factors. Moreover, in the chapter we indicate the influence of the traditional thinking pattern upon the modern practice of engineering in terms of planning, design, implementation, testing and maintenance. Finally, we argue the case that the traditional thinking pattern is recommended as a method to improve the professionalization of engineering practice, the qualities of engineering education and the development of qualified engineers.