‘It’s up to the managers’: Strategies engineering students use to avoid discussing ethics

Studies show that engineering students are open to discussion of ethics; however, their overall understanding of it tends to be narrow and their engagement decreases over the course of their education and professionalization. Students' initial willingness to engage seems to get deterred, leading to concerns about their ability to deploy ethical reasoning in engineering practice. Using a qualitative approach to observe and analyze students' group discussions of ethical issues, we observed a variety of strategies for disengaging from discussing ethics in engineering. We identified eight patterns of discussion that can be considered strategies for disengagement: (1) deflection to managers, (2) deflection to users, (3) reduction to legal issues, (4) reduction to absurdity, (5) reduction to triviality, (6) justification via observation or anecdote, (7) digression to technical details, and (8) digression to non-ethics issues. Engineering education needs to understand these disengagement strategies and counter them to enhance students' understanding and practice of engineering ethics.