Unlike many of you, I'm not an engineer. I'm an ethicist. I do, however, teach a fair number of engineering students in my environmental ethics and professional ethics courses. So, in this card, I suggest one way you can insert a bit of ethics into your curriculum.

WHO
Below, I describe an activity/assignment that I designed for second and third-year engineering students in my professional ethics course. But regardless of whether you teach a dedicated ethics course, this is the kind of activity/assignment that you could adapt for a wide range of engineering courses to spark curiosity, help students make connections, and challenge students to think more critically about what it means to create value. 

WHAT
For this activity/assignment, I put students in teams of 3-4, and I give them the following prompt:

• To this point, international agreements have failed to slow climate change. Ocean levels are rising. Low-lying islands are flooding. And those who live on the coasts are being forced to move inland. Droughts are making it difficult, if not impossible to grow crops in many countries, and the resulting famines are causing many people to emigrate.
• As the world looks to the U.S. for leadership, Congress is considering a number of potential solutions to the climate crisis. It has reached out for advice about geoengineering. In particular, it is interested in whether it should devote increased funding to one or more geoengineering techniques, and if so, which ones. 
• Note that many environmentalists are critical of geoengineering. Rather than looking for technological solutions (or techno-fixes) to the climate crisis, they think we should focus on changing people’s attitudes and/or behaviors. On their view, the best way to address the climate crisis would be to limit procreation and/or reduce consumption. Others, however, are more supportive of geoengineering. They argue that limiting procreation and/or reducing consumption is not enough to prevent significant environmental degradation. On their view, we’ll inevitably need to engage in geoengineering to prevent widespread hunger, political instability, and mass extinction. 
• As a team, I would like you to advise Congress on (A) which geoengineering techniques are the most promising and (B) whether it should increase funding for those techniques or focus its efforts on passing laws to limit procreation and/or reduce consumption. 

Students are expected to develop a short, 5-minute PowerPoint presentation where they will present and defend their answers to (A) and (B) to "Congress" (i.e., the rest of the class). They are also expected to answer any questions that "Congress" has after their presentation. Once each group has presented, we discuss (A) and (B) as a large group and I have students vote on which team's presentation was the most persuasive.

Since my students are relatively unfamiliar with geoengineering, I provide them with a number of readings to help them complete the assignment. Some readings are ones that I encourage every student to read. Others can be divided up between the team members. I've attached a reading list below. I have also included some examples of student work that I received permission to share.

WHEN
Because the prompt is relatively open-ended, because the students are relatively unfamiliar with geoengineering, and because I'm asking them to develop a short PowerPoint presentation, I give my students a fair bit of time to complete the assignment. Even though I expect them to do most of the reading outside of class, I give them a week of class time to work, in their teams, on figuring out how to answer (A) and (B) and to develop their presentation. Then, we spend a half of a week on presentations.

If you like the activity but can't dedicate as much time to it, you could have your students focus their attention solely on (A) or solely on (B). You could also make the prompt less open-ended by having your students look at a more limited number of geoengineering techniques. Alternatively, you could drop the presentation requirement altogether. In that case, you could just divide up some of the readings up between your students and spend one class period trying to figure out how to answer (A) and/or (B).

WHERE
When I've used this activity/assignment, I've used it as a sort of mini-capstone project at the end of the semester. Students have already learned a bit about ethical theory. They've also learned how to construct arguments and how to raise and respond to objections to their arguments. All of these skills help them develop their presentations.

Having said that, none of these things is essential for completing the activity/assignment. The questions raised by the prompt are the sorts of questions that any college student should be able to address after a little bit of reading. Obviously, the expectations for whatever work they do should be tailored to their ability level.

WHY
The central objective of ethics courses in general and mine in particular is to improve students' moral reasoning skills. To do that, I regularly require students to engage in a bit of moral reasoning and then give them feedback on their performance. This activity/assignment is just one example of that.

There are, however, a few things that I think this assignment does especially well. First, it sparks curiosity. Because students are relatively unfamiliar with geoengineering, and because the prompt is so open-ended, they have a lot of flexibility to follow their interests wherever they lead. This increases student motivation, which helps students produce their best work.

Second, it helps students make connections between the standard positions on geoengineering and the ethical theories we've studied. For example, one of the ethical theories we study in the class is consequentialism (or utilitarianism). According to this view, agents should always act so as to produce the best consequences or, more specifically, to produce the best balance of pleasure to pain. Questions about geoengineering create problems for consequentialism because it's difficult, if not impossible, to know what the consequences of any particular geoengineering technique will be. This challenges students to think about what they should do in cases where the consequences of their behavior are unknown or even unknowable. How risky should they be willing to be? A further complication is that the risks of geoengineering to future generations are greater than they are to our generation. So, students must consider how to weigh their interests against the interests of future generations of people. Is our interest in continuing to consume at the current rate sufficient to justify imposing risks on future generations? If so, why? 

Third, this activity/assignment challenges students to think more critically about what it means to create value. An engineer's goal is typically to design a product that will do the best job of bringing about some desirable outcome, so when I ask students to figure out which geoengineering techniques are the most promising, students are in their element. But the second part of the prompt forces them to question whether those geoengineering techniques are truly the best way to address the climate crisis. In particular, it forces them to consider the possibility that geoengineering may make things worse. If that's right, then just because a particular product is better than others at bringing about some desirable outcome doesn't mean that it creates value. It could be positively bad to create that thing. Getting students to appreciate this is crucial to their becoming socially responsible.