Examining the Relations between Moral Intuitions and Values among First-Year Engineering Students: Implications for Culturally Responsive Ethics Education

Abstract Ethics as long been recognized as vital to responsible engineering practice, with research focusing mostly on the effects of ethics pedagogies and programs on ethical reasoning and knowledge. Historically, engineering ethics has tended to be "normative" – telling people how they should think about or behave in engineering. Recent work in moral and cultural psychology has called into question the extent to which ethical judgements are based primarily ethical reasoning. Ethical judgments are also the result of intuitions, emotions, and held values. The authors argue that more empirical research using this perspective is needed to explore first-year engineering students' ethical intuition. As such, this quantitative and qualitative research study examines the relationship between moral intuitions, measured using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), and student-held values about what is important in the engineering profession. Around 285 first-year engineering students were surveyed at a public university in the northeast United States as part of a larger research initiative that seeks to understand the effects of diverse cultural and educational experiences on ethical judgements in engineering. This paper reports the findings from a portion of this survey, namely the MFQ and the open-ended question "List three values you think are the most important for defining a good engineer". Descriptive and correlational analyses are employed to examine meaningful connections between moral intuitions and values. Since moral foundations theory is based on a broader, more inclusive understanding of ethics, results from this research can be more easily generalized, compared, and built on in increasingly cross-cultural settings.