Engineering Ethical Bridges

You might think that philosophers and engineers would make strange bedfellows, but UNM Philosophy Professor Mary Domski would probably disagree – she is building a bridge between the two disciplines  – and doing so for the benefit of UNM graduate students in these fields.  With assistance from faculty in the UNM School of Engineering, Domski received a one year, $100,000 concept grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the Ethics Fellows Pilot Program, an interdisciplinary program in the teaching of engineering ethics.

With the goal of better preparing students for their future professional lives both in and out of the classroom, the program pairs advanced Ph.D. students from the Philosophy Department and the School of Engineering to teach required engineering ethics courses to undergraduate engineering students.  Domski hopes that by creating these interdisciplinary teams to teach courses, graduate students will learn as much about each other’s disciplines and perspectives as they do about lecturing and leading discussing groups. 

Given the nature of Professor Domski’s own research, which focuses on the interplay of mathematics, science, and philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she understands the importance of fostering relationships between different disciplines.  “I earned my PhD from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University.  Along the same hallway there were historians and philosophers, and though they approached science from different perspectives, the historians and philosophers worked in tandem to deepen their insights and progress in their respective projects.   It was a wonderful learning experience, and I continue to bring different disciplines into conversation in my own research.  Given what we aim to achieve with our NSF grant, my hope is the graduate students in the Ethics Fellows Pilot Program will walk away with a similar appreciation for how their relationships with colleagues in other fields can strengthen their own projects and, of course, enhance their success as teachers.”

Ethics Fellows Pilot Program web site:  http://www.unm.edu/~ethicfel
Mary Domski’s web site: http://www.unm.edu/~mdomski