Examining the relationships between how students construct stakeholders and the ways students conceptualize harm from engineering design

Abstract

Engineering ethics curriculum and the research around it often emphasizes micro-ethical issues such as whistle-blowing and responsible conduct of research with lesser but growing attention to macro-ethical issues such as how engineering practice is entangled with broader social, political, economic, and environmental concerns. Engaging in macro-ethical reasoning often requires conceptualizing a wide range of stakeholders and their concerns, challenging one's beliefs about engineering as naturally leading to social good, and conceptualizing negative impacts of engineering work. There is still a paucity of research on the moment-to-moment dynamics and evolution of students' macro-ethical reasoning in sociotechnical contexts. In this paper, we present analysis of audio-video data from a series of focus group sessions in which engineering students discuss the ethics and ethical implications of a 2012 incident in which statisticians and engineers at Target developed predictive analytical software capable of identifying shoppers who were pregnant. We show how students' conceptualization of different stakeholders was relational, in that the ways in which pregnant women were conceptualized was entangled with how Target was conceptualized. We also argue that the way students construct various stakeholders over three focus group sessions constrained how they were able to understand any of the stakeholders as causing harm or being harmed.