2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineers play a critical role in bettering humanity via technological and scientific innovations. This ethical responsibility to the practice of engineering is the reason that engineering ethics is required of all accredited engineering programs at all levels of education, and engineering ethics is required of all facets of professional licensure in engineering. Educators at all levels leverage textbooks to teach engineering ethics. In this paper, we conduct a systematic, comparative review of twenty-six of the most widely used engineering ethics textbooks. This comparative analysis has enabled us to identify over forty thematic topics that are collectively covered across these twenty engineering ethics textbooks. Twelve of these thematic topics are covered in at least half of the textbooks. Gaps do exist in the topics and approaches used in this comparative textbook analysis and these gaps offer us an opportunity to evolve the field of engineering ethics. Initial findings from the engineering ethics textbook comparative analysis uncovered several prominent topics that the majority of textbooks included: public welfare and wellbeing, whistleblowing, safety and risk, and professionalism. Additional topics that were prolific included ethics in design and technological development, conflict of interest, and environmental ethics. The analysis also revealed important topics that only a few of the textbooks included such as competence, moral theories, the involvement of religious values, intellectual property and legal liability, employer/employee and mentor/mentee relationships, and employee rights. Under half of the textbooks included sections on ethics in research and education/academia. The findings of this study can (1) provide engineering educators insights about the current list of thematic topics that fall under engineering ethics, (2) identify gaps in engineering ethics knowledge, and (3) offer a discussion of the opportunities to improve engineering ethics education. To the best of our knowledge, this systematic and comparative engineering ethics textbook review is the first of its kind.