(266b) Using the Trolley Problem in Chemical Engineering Ethics Education

The so-called trolley problem has been used as a common tool of ethicists to introduce difficult topics of morality to the classroom and to the public. In this problem, and its many variants, participants are asked to participate in a choice that will either result in the hypothetical death of or injury to one person versus several people. In many instances, respondents have been found to gravitate to choosing harm to the individual over the group. However, depending on how the questions is posed and how the people involved are described, the majority of respondents may switch to favoring harm to the group. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, researchers have found the decision between harm to the individual verses the group engage distinct regions of the human brain, and may reveal important moral decision-making processes.

These same processes are often in play in the daily life of a working chemical engineer, when attempting to assess the hazards and risks associated with their decisions in the design process or during daily operations. As automation increases, engineers are finding themselves in the position to code these ethical choices into the scripts needed to make decisions when a human operator cannot make them in real-time. As such, implications from these automated choices need to be considered well in advance by all engineers, from those designing the next autonomous vehicles, to those designing the next generation of oil refineries.

For ten years, we have used the trolley problem (and its variants) within the engineering ethics portions of our senior Unit Operations Laboratory to introduce concepts of “personal” verses “impersonal” ethical dilemmas. In this talk, we will discuss the results from the use of this common tool of ethicists, and how it can be used in a chemical engineering classroom settings to help students realize the influences on their ethical reasoning that often go unnoticed, even when they can dramatically alter the ultimate consequences to coworkers or the public.