Ethical Dilemmas
Updated: Jul 29
With the rise of LLMs and generative "AI" tools, I and many educators had to grow more creative and deliberate in how we achieve our learning goals inside the classroom. For myself, this meant reassessing my learning goals and getting to the core of what I hoped to achieve in the classroom. In an ethics class, what I would hope from my students is threefold: 1) they read and retain some of the lead ethical frameworks that exist, 2) they form opinions on the benefits and drawbacks about those frameworks, and 3) they are able to apply those frameworks to novel situations and evaluate those benefits and drawbacks therein.
This led to my implementation of oral "ethical dilemma"s every class. Students sign up at the beginning of the semester for 2 dates, upon which they know they will be picked to evaluate and deliberate an "Ethical Dilemma" scenario I present to them. The scenario will be based on the reading for the day. My goal is to craft scenarios which guide the students towards utilizing concepts from day's reading, as well as draw connections to previous readings. The students are encouraged to submit notes beforehand based on the reading and brainstorm what sort of ethical dilemmas I might come up with based on the readings
Benefits
Students are forced to think for themselves about the ethical concepts in the class, without the mediation of an LLM or chatbot
Students must come up with their own opinion about the ethical frameworks and articulate it in their own words
Creative solutions, rare as they are, are encouraged and rewarded
Rejection of frameworks is also rewarded if well-articulated
Each scenario is a practical "real-world" application of the ethical frameworks, so even students not participating in the ethical dilemma benefit from listening to the scenario and the ensuing discussion
Drawbacks
For students with severe issues with public speaking or different accommodations which preclude the ability to take in information, think rapidly about it, and then verbally articulate the end result of that thought, I must come up with an alternative assignment which fits with their accommodations while still trying to achieve the learning goals I'm after
Occupies 10 minutes of class time which could be otherwise used more efficiently for class discussion, reviewing concepts, going over the reading, &c.
Students don't tend to turn in the written portion ahead of time (almost ever); this could be solved by penalizing harsher failure to turn it in or emphasizing more (every class?) the expectation that they turn in the written portion of the assignment ahead of time
Students have expressed a desire for a more specific rubric going into the assignment, which I'm currently working on
I don't pretend that any of these scenarios are the most original ethical dilemmas in the world, but for introduction to ethics classes they've proven fun and adequate at encouraging students to engage with and think critically about the readings. Enjoy flipping through some examples of my ethical dilemmas. These are taken from a mix of my "Engineering Ethics" and "Introduction to Ethics" courses.
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