Engineering Ethics
Engineering ethics gets examined through both theory and practice in this MIT course from the Engineering Systems Division. Students study ethics and philosophy of engineering using historical cases drawn from scholarly literature, alongside hypothetical cases students write themselves. A distinctive assignment asks each student to compose a story substituting an ancestor or a mythic hero into the role of a character in a real historical case, then compare the reworked case to the original and recommend a course of action. The approach is deliberately cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary, treating engineering decisions as moral decisions shaped by culture and history rather than abstract rule-following. Materials are provided as MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access, with syllabus and case materials available for self-study, though no formal certificate is offered.