Empathy’s Role in Engineering Ethics: Empathizing with One’s Self to Others Across the Globe

Abstract

Engineers make decisions with global impacts and empathy can motivate ethical reasoning and behavior that is sensitive to the needs and perspectives of stakeholders across the globe. Microethics and macroethics offer two frames of reference for engineering ethics education, but different dimensions of empathy play distinct roles in micro- and macroethics. Microethics emphasizes individual responsibility and interpersonal relationships whereas macroethics emphasizes societal obligations and impacts. While empathy can support ethical reasoning and behavior for each, in this paper I argue that affective empathy plays a primary (but not exclusive) role in microethics whereas cognitive empathy plays a primary role in macroethics. Gilligan’s and Kohlberg’s theories of moral development are used to further depict how affective empathy aligns with care (depicted as an interpersonal phenomenon) and how cognitive empathy aligns with justice (depicted as a systems-focused phenomenon), thus positioning these ethical principles as playing primary (but again, not exclusive) roles in micro- and macro-ethics, respectively. Building on these ideas, this study generates a framework that describes and visualizes how empathy manifests across six frames of reference, each of which are increasingly macro-ethical in nature: self, team, operators, participants, bystanders, and future generations. The paper describes how proxy stakeholders can be identified, developed, and leveraged to empathize with stakeholder groups. Taken together, the manuscript seeks to clarify the role of empathy in engineering ethics and can enable engineering students to better empathize with the range of stakeholders impacted by engineering decisions, ranging from one’s self to stakeholders across the globe. The intrapersonal understandings and motivations that students generate by empathizing across six frames of reference can facilitate ethical reasoning processes and behaviors that are more inclusive and comprehensive.