GLASS CEILING

Glass Ceiling

Glass Ceiling

Chartered Engineer overview

In the United Kingdom, a Chartered Engineer is a professional engineer registered with Engineering Council UK (the British regulatory body for engineers). Contemporary Chartered Engineers are master's degree-qualified and have gained professional competencies through training and experience. The formation process (academic + internship / apprenticeship / graduate training + peer reviewed professional practice) of a Chartered Engineer spans a minimum of 8-12 years.

Discussion

In this paper I outline an "agent-centered" approach to learning ethics. The approach is "agent-centered" in that its central aim is to prepare students to act wisely and responsibly when faced with moral problems. The methods characteristic of this approach are suitable for integrating material on professional and research ethics into technical way, as well as for free-standing ethics.

The analogy I draw between ethical problems1and design problems clarifies the character of ethical problems as they are experienced by those who must respond to them. It exposes the mistake, common in ethics teaching, of misrepresenting moral problems as multiple-choice problems, especially in the form of 'dilemmas', that is, a forced choice between two unacceptable alternatives. Furthermore, I clarify the importance for responsible practice of recognizing any ambiguity in the problem situation.

To foster in students the skills they need, teaching examples should preserve the open-ended, multiply-constrained, and ambiguous character of problem situations as experienced by the agent. I give guidelines for constructing open-ended scenarios that present moral problems much as an agent would experience them - guidelines which strongly influenced the construction of 'cases' in the second edition of "On Being a Scientist"- and I discuss how to present historical cases and cases from the instructor's own experience to best foster agent-centered learning.

Until quite recently the dominant approach to practical and professional ethics was the 'applied' ethics approach that began with abstractions (usually in the form of ethical principles) and sought to apply those abstractions to particular instances. Recent work in practical and professional ethics has instead started from particular instances or 'cases', which have been presented in any of a wide variety of forms - stories or accounts, detailed or abbreviated - and written for a variety of purposes from news reports, personal recollection and historical investigation to Presidential Commissions.

The method I outline here begins with cases. However, as I shall discuss, it supplements the usual consideration of cases from what the distinguished philosopher, Stuart Hampshire, identifies as "a judge perspective" with consideration from what he calls "an agent perspective". Presenting an ethical problem from an "agent perspective" means presenting a situation as it would appear to someone who must respond to it. For example, "Suppose that you suspect that cold temperature compromises the performance of the gaskets, and hence the safety of your vehicle, what should you do?" gives a thumb nail sketch of a situation with some uncertainties that calls for a response.

In contrast, the question "Should you report a safety problem to the media and be fired and perhaps blacklisted, or should you say nothing and keep ...