2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Ethics and social responsibility education within aerospace engineering remains limited, with education on the subject often disconnected from technical course content and led by guest lecturers. While still valuable, this approach inadvertently signals to students that such topics are an addendum to their work as engineers, and reinforces the misconception of engineering as an apolitical field. Furthermore, existing ethical discussions place focus on the microethical realm, examining the ethical implications of individual decisions within the profession. This microethical focus, while important, overlooks the wider impact of engineering technologies on society. Contrastingly, macroethics addresses the collective social responsibility of the engineering field, emphasizing the ethical concerns of engineering technology. However, the abstract and qualitative nature of these macroethical concepts often conflicts with the more quantitative content of technical engineering classes, complicating efforts to integrate them into engineering coursework.

This work-in-progress paper presents an example of how macroethical concepts can be embedded into traditional technical classes to foster student awareness of their ethical responsibilities as future engineers. An in-class macroethics activity and follow-up assignment were implemented in an aerospace engineering capstone design course at the University of Michigan. In the in-class activity, the technical concept of spaceports, or facilities designed for spacecraft launch, and the macroethical concepts of rightsholder analysis were specifically selected to complement the course topic of spacecraft systems design. As such, the course structure was designed to present macroethical considerations as equivalent to other systems design requirements. The in-class activity encompassed a full course period and was both developed and presented by the course instructor, with the follow-up assignment appearing in the final student group reports.

The aim of the in-class activity was to increase student awareness of macroethical effects, asking the broader question of who/what is impacted when an engineering decision is made. To this end, activities of rightsholder identification and power-impact mapping were implemented, along with small-group and full-class dialogue. Students were asked to select a location for a spaceport within their university’s host state, consider the impact of their choice by identifying the rightsholders affected, and compare and contrast the differences in power and impact of these affected parties. Following the lesson, students repeated this process as part of their final course project, considering the social impacts as part of their space system design process.

The instructor's experience of developing and implementing the in-class macroethics lesson and activities is examined within this paper, with focus placed on the decisions made within course structuring and lesson planning to present macroethical content as equivalent in importance to technical content. Discussion of learning goals and pedagogy will be shared with aims to identify key aspects of the macroethics lesson that may be implemented in other courses. Future work by the authors will seek to further develop this core set of facilitation goals, and integrate student data into evaluating effectiveness of the lesson in developing students’ macroethical awareness.