So when I was in college, ages ago, if you had asked me or other people, you know, how important is it for engineers to study ethics? And, you know, I think most people would have said, well, sure, engineers should study ethics. That's important. We want everybody to or professionals, or people with influence in society to, to behave ethically. But I think people in my day wouldn't have felt it was especially important for engineers. Maybe they would have said, it's especially important for those people in finance going to Wall Street. You got to give them some ethics Hello, everybody. Welcome to MIT Learn.

Today in the studio we have Peter Hansen, a lecturer in chemical engineering here at MIT and a course, administrator of the ethics for engineering. And together we're going to find out why this matters. But before we get to this, thanks for being here, Peter. Thank you for having me. Now, I like to start with a grander question at the beginning. And, for me, and I think a lot of, a lot of our listeners, we'd like to know, do you think there are ethical principles which are, say, true or ground truths, regardless of people believing them to be true or not? That's a very good question. As it happens, that's a question I would have mentioned if you hadn't brought it up.

I, I would say that's a central question for our course. Is, is there a truth about ethics the way we all think, or at least most of us think there's truth about the solar system, about mathematics, what have you. Or when it comes to ethics, is it different? Are there just different values, different feelings? Different beliefs, but no, no reality about the matter. And, that's something we generally confront right at the beginning of the course. For a couple of reasons. The belief that ethics is ultimately relative, that there isn't really a, universal truth about ethics is very widespread. I wouldn't say all students have that view, but I actually always ask my, classes.

We do a little survey, early in the course, and I try to lay out to you, do you think, ethics is ultimately morality is ultimately relative? Is there, a moral truth that's universal or. Don't know? And, and the first answer always, always wins the, the vote. We don't necessarily follow the Democratic principle that that the majority is correct. So, so we really begin with that question. And I would say, I, I one thing I try to bring out is I think relativism, as usually understood, isn't really a coherent view, because if, people if one believes that sort of person X is true, that's moral truth. That person believes that to be ultimate moral truth, and one believes for another person antics is is moral truth.

That's true if one believes both. But both those people think is right for themselves, as I think is a widespread kind of initial view. Well, one's really saying that about X or antics. There isn't a truth or there isn't a relevant truth. The true truth, as it were, is that, there is no truth about. How about that question? Okay, so I think relativism thought through and, you know, people who think it through, it tends to collapse into what I would call nihilism, the belief that there is no moral truth, that somehow ethical beliefs, moral beliefs, they're not like beliefs about, say, the solar system where there can be there have been many, many false beliefs, incorrect beliefs.

But, you know, there does seem to be a truth about it. We don't necessarily fully know that truth. Or maybe that truth is not fully knowable, but I think it might. We all think that the Copernican approach is superior to the Ptolemaic approach, to say nothing of, you know, the many myths that have prevailed and in other times and places and, so nihilism about, you know, ethical matters is the belief that there isn't that for some reason there isn't that kind of thing about, ethics. Maybe it's just like something we care a lot about, but there's no there, there. You know, the way atheists view belief in God, for instance, something people get really worked up about, but there isn't anything that's about, so, so that's one thing I try to, you know, we try to bring out in the class.

So you're mentioning that this class that you teach and I know you teach it and ethics for engineers, it's can you can you tell listeners a little bit about what that class is and maybe how you got into teaching that here at MIT? Sure. So about the class. I mean, obviously, as people can imagine, there are classes about ethics, different ones. Often it might as well as other schools. Ours is geared towards obviously engineers, as the title implies. What we try to do, what I think makes sure I mean, there are other courses that you might have elsewhere, that, that are of course, geared towards engineers. I think what makes our course a little bit distinctive is that we try to combine reading, you know, modest amounts of fundamental seminal texts about ethics and philosophy.

You know, Aristotle and Collins and Hobbs and Locke and, we combine that with, case studies from contemporary engineering and, you know, kind of trying to apply what we're thinking about learning in the one realm to the other realm. And, and I think, you know, students seem to like that, that combination. So, you also asked about me, my own background is in political philosophy. You know, on the ethics side or the engineering side is always a little bit funny for me to hear myself described as a lecturer in chemical engineering, though, that that is my title. But, I'm not a, not a chemical engineer. So, so political philosophy.

What is that? That's, questions about, well, what is justice? What's a good society? What is, virtue? What's a good human being? What's a good life? What's happiness? Is there moral truth? All these kinds of questions that are obviously very relevant for, for an ethics class. So, so that's, that's my kind of academic background. I, I ended up at MIT, partly through serendipity, after getting my master's in my 20s. At that point, I didn't want to be a professor. I kind of wanted to be on my own and, you know, examine big questions and, whatever. So I, so I actually worked in finance for a while, company for a while, with the idea of, you know, being able to supply myself with, with, with leisure to, to think my thoughts.

Sure. And, and study things and, and, you know, and that kind of worked took longer than I expected. But after, after some years, I felt like, well, you know, maybe it really would be nice to have students and have colleagues and be less, you know, more involved and, stimulated by that. So, so I started heading back towards academia and, and it took me a while to get here. I feel very fortunate to be at I might have been, teaching in this program, or teaching this course for, a little over ten years and, full, full time for 5 or 6 years. And, so my, I think I'm a good fit for it because my scholarly work, my, my, my kind of chief interests research have been, to two questions.

One is justice. And, what it means for us, it's place in human life. I mean, obviously, we all of these almost all, know that we care about justice. I would argue, even though the few who think they're above that really do care about it. But, so the importance of. But you know, what's going on. Why is that? Why is that so essential for us? So that's something I examine that's obviously relevant. But my other chief focus has been on, science, the ground, the foundation and possibility of science, of understanding the universe. And, so those are my two kinds of areas of, of work and research. So they seem to, to fit well in this course of teaching.

Yeah, it sounds like it for, for our listeners, I'm curious what you would define as ethics. What is ethics. Right. So, the way we use the word was coined by, by Aristotle, and he took a word that meant something like habit. And so our term ethos kind of echoes that, that the kind of way of a given people. And he applied that to individual behavior, to virtues and vices. I would say ethics is about, living well, broadly speaking, especially living well in society with other people. And what obviously what is right and wrong. What is, what is a good life? One question that we examine in our course and I think probably most ethics courses don't focus on this at least nearly as much.

They make it more implicit is, so should one be ethical? We read a little bit of Machiavelli I once saw online some chat groups somewhere. I forget the details. They were talking about our course. It wasn't. It didn't seem to about it, but they they'd seen the syllabus online, whatever. And they were making fun of the fact that we signed Machiavelli in the course as well. These, these people don't know what Machiavelli is really about or something. We assign Machiavelli to kind of make the anti ethics case. Okay. Because, all right. Here's this very clever man who says to simplify greatly, ethics, as we usually think of it.

Well, that's kind of for chumps that's going to mislead you. You care about yourself, not about all these other people or principles or whatever it might be, religious beliefs that you really certainly didn't share. So, so let's look at that. And, and one thing I, I'd say we try to bring out in the course of that discussion is, okay, maybe, you know, there's a tough minded person perhaps can live this way, but is that does it really promise happiness? What we mean by happiness, or does happiness not involve require bound up with some feeling that there's a meaning larger than just oneself and one's own desires?

So I'd say that's kind of, broadly speaking, what I think ethics is about. Yeah. Well, very interesting. You mentioned, you I don't know if you're using this interchangeably, but you were mentioning morality and ethics, and I'm curious, is there is there a difference? Yeah. Also a good question, that we talk about in class. No, I would say the way the terms are used, there can be a difference. Ethics is also often used to mean kind of specifically, professional ethics is a way when we commonly hear about it. Whereas morality is meant to be more like personal, and then maybe justice is meant to be more societal.

Nonetheless, I would say in our course we tend to say, you know, those are fine shades of difference. But the heart of those three things seems to me to be they're basically the same. Ethics is about morality. It's about justice. And fundamentally, and, regarding Aristotle, for instance, he originates, of course, the use of the word ethics, the way we we currently still use it, as I said, and he is very concerned, he also introduces kind of moral virtue as a category into political thought, philosophic thought in a way that, it hadn't been before. So for him, those two things are all bound up together. I like the, the, the grouping.

It is different, just, I guess, expressions of ethics and a larger scale for justice, and then the personal scale for morality that that connects. That makes sense to me. I like that. And this, this will likely be implying a lot, but why? Why do you think engineers need ethics? Is there a reason why there's so much focus on that now for engineering? Yeah. So when I was in college, ages ago, if you had asked me or other people, you know, how important is it for engineers to study ethics? And, you know, I think most people would have said, well, sure, engineers should study ethics. That's important. We want everybody to or professionals, or people with influence in society to, to behave ethically.

But I think people in my day wouldn't have felt it was especially important for engineers. Maybe they would have said, it's especially important for those people in finance going to Wall Street. You got to give them some ethics and, whatever it might be. But, now my sense is it's different. Engineering, you know, was always powerful and kind of was transforming the world back then to. But it's become more obvious somehow in the last couple of decades. And, so, you know, developments in bioengineering and I, as well as other areas, maybe especially especially those to make it very salient to everybody that we engineers are transforming our world and we want them to, you know, not screw it up to, to to accomplish good things, not bad things.

So that's kind of the most obvious reason maybe, I mean, I would say, I think for, every person, you're living a fuller life. I think you're a fuller human being. If you give some thought to what am I living for? What's really good? What's my relation to other people? Is my happiness bound up with theirs? Aristotle, in talking about happiness, says we people define it differently. And by that he doesn't mean simply different strokes for different folks. But there are ways that people don't see clearly what they're aiming at. He compares us to archers who are shooting our arrows but don't have the target clearly view.

So let's try to get that target clearly in view. And, so we talk a lot about happiness as well as ethics. And of course and, and the relation between those two. Happiness sounds like you have such a broad term. Everybody wants to be happy. Yeah. But it's kind of interesting to to try to think about what is what I mean by that. Yeah. It's a pleasure. Is it being, you know, Aristotle called honor being well thought of by others good reputation. Is it good health. He said virtue. None of those answers simply seems complete, I think even to the people who who think that's what it is, they all kind of appeal to other things as well.

So that's something that's, valuable to get, get clarity on with, the impact that people in, engineering and related fields have now. Now, you were mentioning it, it seems to be more on a magnifying glass. It's in the news more and does that in part a larger ethical burden on these people is it is and I guess to the counterargument is ethics getting in the way now for these types of people. Yeah, that's a good question. And of course I'm not there myself, an engineer in one of these fields. So I can't speak necessarily to what their experience is, but it seems like people working in I these days have to be more aware of the ethical implications.

I mean, I'm sure, you and your listeners have probably heard of the, the alignment, problem challenge. Is I going to do what we want it to do or. Is it somehow going to come up with objectives, you know, without without its being like the Terminator. But still somehow we, we programed it wrong or right or it, it concludes somehow from, from the machine learning process that what it should be doing is kind of maximizing efficiency kinds of objectives, whatever other problems that might entail. So I think people in, in that field, also people in bioengineering, other fields as well, have to think about ethics.

And yeah, it's probably I mean, I hope it's, getting in the way. Sometimes, they're simply pursuing their, you know, quote unquote strict engineering aims. Yeah. As if not, they could do a lot of damage to all of us. I think, a school, if forgive me, if it's not school of thought, but a, altruism. The concept has been very, very popular lately in, well, a lot of the monetarily successful individuals, but also the, the people that are tend to be in big tech seem to really be interested in that concept. And, how do you see the that diverging from, maybe just some grounded ethics principles? So, so I mentioned that in, let me.

Yeah. Please. Yeah. That's right. I mentioned, my course, we, we combine this reading of, you know, foundational, seminal ethical philosophic thinkers with the contemporary case studies. And we, we really begin. I mean, we kind of look at a couple of big questions initially like, is it relative or is there ethical truth just to open that up? Not to answer that at the beginning, but, but then we get into for what a generally I think considered in, in ethics teaching, the field of ethics, the four, predominant kind of frameworks, I should say, at least in Western ethics, and the kind of reason based, not faith based, ethical frameworks or theories, utilitarianism as one and then duty ethics. Right.

So ethics and virtue ethics of the others. So effective altruism seems to basically be the same thing as utilitarianism, the founder of which was man named Jeremy Bentham coined the term back in the 18th century, so that we do read a little bit of Bentham in our course. And, and yeah, I think he would have said, you know, effective altruism. That seems to be basically what, what I was talking about, kind of think rationally, mathematically. He began thinking mathematically about about the way to get the most pleasure, in the least pain to the maximum number of people. There are, I would say, a number of, of the reservations.

I myself have, about, utilitarianism and effective altruism in particular, I should say, in my course. You know, I encourage students to, you know, it's a discussion oriented course. We talk a lot about things. I'll say a little bit more about why it's a discussion oriented course in a bit, but, so, so I'm not looking for, you know, to convince them, you know, you should prefer groups. You should prefer, this or that ethical framework. But, that said, in my own view, utilitarianism. One problem is often discussed about utilitarianism that, you know, very obviously, if you're trying to maximize the, as Bentham puts it, basically the pleasure minus pain of, of a large group of people.

Well, what if like almost all those people will be a lot better off if some of them are, you know, enslaved or somehow sacrificed, like for medical research or, you know, one could imagine various kinds of things and, well, you know, a modest increase or in the, the happiness, the lifespan, well-being of a very large number of people seems to like if you do the math that looks like it outweighs a, a very great loss or of of, a freedom of life, for a very small number of people. And that gives most of us pause, as I think it should. And I would say it, it points to what seems to be a more fundamental problem with, utilitarianism, ethics, effective altruism.

And I'm hoping, by the way, probably some of your listeners identify with effective altruism, as you kind of suggested with your question. So, so here's, here's a question I have for for such folks. Bentham begins with the thought that pleasure and pain, those are those are real. If you're talking about, you know, other sorts of common goods or or, you know, religious beliefs or whatever or rights or all that stuff he calls rights nonsense on stilts. Okay. So that stuff's not real. What's real is how we feel. Oh, we feel pleasure and pain. Let's try to, you know, maximize the good part and minimize the bad part.

But then his next step from there. This, by the way, pleasure in pain. What's real in our lives? This is a very old, old school of thought. Goes way back to ancient times. The, the word hedonism, people are aware of, of course, means an approach to life that aims to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Very connected to Epicurus and Lucretius, ancient, ancient philosophers. But they their view was, well, one's own pleasure and pain, not societies. And that seems like, if you think about it, if what's real is pleasure in pain, what you care about is pleasure and pain. What doesn't that mean? Your own pleasure in pain?

Bentham. Starting point is, and I think kind of intuitively some power to this obviously that pleasure and pain rule us. We cannot do otherwise than choose to do, try to do what we think will give us the most pleasure and in the least pain, as in a kind of empirical observation. And yet somehow then he goes from that to therefore, if to you should try to maximize the pleasure of society, minimize the pain of society. Well, why society? Why not just your own. Utilitarianism, it seems to me, doesn't really give you a reason for that jump from my own pleasure minus pain to society's minus pleasure, minus pain.

In my view, the other ethical frameworks that I mentioned that we look at, duty ethics. Right. This rights ethics, virtue ethics, they've all got more of an answer to that question. Why should you think about others, not just about yourself? Bentham says, in effect, and I think utilitarianism, effective altruism in effect, is saying, well, if you want to be moral, if you want to care about others, this is the rational way to do it. Right? But certainly Bentham himself and maybe a lot of other people who, would think similarly. There are, by the way, utilitarians and in especially British universities, seems to be especially fertile ground for them in our time, and elsewhere too.

So, it's they're kind of assuming that one should be moral. I think that, high minded utilitarians would, in fact, despise themselves if they felt like what they were doing was placing their own pleasure ahead of society's pleasure minus pain. But does is that really consistent with their principles, their fundamental principle, or does it suggest, you know, and I'm going to try to make it a little more concrete, not just a philosophic contradiction. Whatever. Does that contradiction suggest that what really matters to Bentham and people who think similarly to him is being moral, being a good person, that the pleasure and pain?

Obviously it's pleasant to feel like one's a good person, but, I would suggest that we talk about this in class. But, you know, my own view is that you don't really understand why people do some things that they do in life. You know, most, maybe, maybe most things. Pleasure and pain. Sure. But why? A soldier might go into battle in a deadly situation. Why am, frontline worker during a pandemic, you know, takes terrible chances? It may be that the decision to do that is more gratifying at the moment, but it's more gratifying, I think, because the person thinks, well, this is my duty. This is what it is to be a good person.

It's not that the person is, and therefore the pleasure is more like a kind of a, you know, a way of communicating between the person's fundamental beliefs and the person's kind of attraction and repulsion. It's not really driving the person the way the fundamental beliefs are. So I would say that, I think people who are drawn to utilitarianism, at least high minded people, really care about being good people. That's what comes first. The pleasure pain is not what comes first. Well, if you really care about what it is to be a good person, can't. I think Immanuel Kant is a much better guide for thinking that through than utilitarianism, effective altruism, something like that, Kant says.

What does it mean? We think the goodwill is the highest thing, the most important thing in human life. What does it mean to say that that comes first and then? And then he thinks that through it ends up with, among other things, the consequence that, well, every rational, autonomous moral agent, as he calls them, is tends to come up with lengthy phrases. Must be treated as an end, in other words, you can't sacrifice that one person, even if it's going to make everybody else feel better. Because no, the whole basis of our, are being concerned for each other, are being moral agents. That's what's the most important thing about us.

Therefore, no moral agent should can be treated as a means, including oneself. So that's, where you ended up as, to me, a little and inspiring and thinking about how people on the front line sang during the Covid 19 pandemic, or on the cutting edge of these technology fronts, safer AI or different, enhancements, let's say, to our to our lives, do you from a person who is not say on those lines, not an engineer or not a nurse, is is there a role for them to play in this, these like these ethics that are larger that might be affecting them directly, or should they trust these people? That's a very good question.

But, let me let me hide from it. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. A, another thought I would say about effective altruism. Utilitarianism. Yeah. It's I mean, I was speaking about the high minded people, and maybe, maybe they would understand themselves better, perhaps if they're looking at it rather than it, that a Bentham, you know, at duty ethics rather than utilitarianism. Or perhaps Aristotle virtue ethics. But there are some people who aren't as high minded, perhaps, and I'm sure you know, of cases, perhaps you're alluding to cases where people who are prominent advocates of effective altruism proved to behave really badly.

But freed being perhaps the most am I regret most, the Tories recent example. So my sense is that that's not entirely a coincidence that, I don't mean to say, you know, people are effective altruists, utilitarians, whatever, are all right. You know, are tend to be bad people, anything like that. But I would say it doesn't give you clear guardrails to the extent that, at least to that, do the ethics and rights ethics certainly give clear? No, you can't you can't do that. Utilitarianism. You in principle, you can kind of do anything if it looks like in the long run it'll benefit humanity. Well, somehow people are really good at telling themselves stories in which big things that they want to do.

I'll be so important. You know, Elizabeth Holmes. Whatever. I don't know what her motives were, but we're really good at coming up with stories. Narratives in which I'm going to do a lot of good. And, it's going to be it's going to justify whatever I had to do along. Yeah. So I think just on utilitarian grounds, utilitarianism, you know, on the grounds of is it really going to benefit society? Utilitarianism has problems one can observe empirically. Not quite enough guardrails. It flatters too much that, I'm going to I'm going to come up with something really clever of impulse that we all have. So, so that that was my, my, my other, other point there.

In terms of, your question, can ordinary people affect what's going on in AI or and we didn't talk as much about bioengineering. So lots of, lots of things going on as well, of course. Crispr and Gene drives, you know, tremendous changes are on the rise. And it's exciting and it's scary. But there are things that, can be done with scientific engineering knowledge that, could be terrific and could be terrifying, as that's as we all, I think, know. What can ordinary people do about that? Obviously, you know, I wish I could say ordinary people's, you know, decent, moral. More beliefs or instincts will keep us out of trouble.

I'm not I'm not sure that that's true. I think, though, in our country, at least, ordinary people can. Of course, as citizens say, you know, join groups, talk to, congressmen, whatever it might be, about things they're concerned about. And I think, I think that can have an effect. I think that, the fact that I seems to be really not so popular a technology with American public generally, and perhaps in other countries as well, that does have some political effect that makes regulation more possible. Now, will the regulation be done? Well, you know, I don't know that obviously. Would involve more people who are more knowledgeable about it, getting involved.

And, I hope people who are not simply people who want to become billionaires, but also people who who are ordinary, decent people who are knowledgeable at MIT or wherever it might be, saying, this is something we should be concerned about, as some people are already saying, I'm not in a position to judge. You know what, what, how grave the danger really is. But, the fact that some people are very knowledgeable about it think there's, there's real danger here is reason for concern. Clearly. And there are regulations and laws, like we, we have a system in the US that allows a lot of engagement with that. Is that the one of the main drivers in society for like applying ethics or setting up societal guardrails.

I would say in terms of my course, my aim, you know, above all, is to encourage my students to think more about the ethical implications of what they do and more broadly about the lives they're living. And, I, I tell them, you know, we talk about, these kinds of large issues. We also talk about more mundane cases where, you know, some well, Sam Bankman-Fried, whatever. Companies that were doing things that were illegal or at least, you know, kind of crummy. What does one do if one finds oneself in a situation like that? So I, I encourage my students to live a life where you can, you know, look in the mirror and be proud of the person you are and what you're doing.

I think it's very hard to be happy in life if one's not in that situation. Even if one's got, you know, a bank account that's 5 or 10 times bigger. But, in addition to that, so, so above all, you know, what they do in their own lives, but certainly also people who, you know, people who are MIT graduates. I have, a guy who's I'm not in my to graduate things. What, went to Harvard undergrad and, up the river. But I have a guy who sometimes who comes and does a special presentation on, Boeing, who's a, Harvey Lewis is a, lecturer in Aero Astro. He may have recently retired from that, but he, he was actually more on the Astro side than on the aero side and his own career.

Is an MIT grad and MIT PhD. Tragically, he lost his sister in one of those Boeing crashes, terrible years ago. So he, not surprisingly, given his background, he ended up becoming a kind of spokesperson for the families of the victims. And, so he does, often he comes in and does it as a terrific special presentation for us. But one thing he says is, you know, you might not realize it, but as MIT graduates, you're going to be listened to, you know, maybe even more than you. You really deserve at the outset. Once you get out there in the world so. Well, doesn't mean, you know, obviously not always. If you think you're working at a company and you think everything is they're doing is wrong, and, you know, you come in and tell your boss that a month later he's probably going to say, go take a hike.

You know, you've got to weigh what's appropriate. And, but still, you know, you'll have a voice, you'll have some, some possibility to get together with other similarly situated people and possibly affect policy and regulation. What do you say to your students that it, you know, will likely end up working in something that has a, differently aligned, maybe set of ethics and whatever company they're working at compared to their personal ones. Is there a way to separate that or work with that? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say differently aligned, of course, can meet a lot of things. If it's differently aligned in the sense of, well, it's not quite what I was thinking I'd be doing, but it seems like these are decent people and it's going to accomplish something good.

And I there's nothing to be ashamed of here. Nothing that can't face the light of day. Well, then maybe one goes into it. If one's in a situation where, one thing we've, we've used as a case study, so it's a little bit dated now, so not so much, but, the Volkswagen case study, with the, there were cheating on the emissions, right? You know, ten years ago, came out big time. And, of course, engineers had been involved with that. They had to program the cheating device. And presumably they, you know, they they must have known what they were doing. Yeah. So is that really a life you want to live, where you're helping a company make more money and get more market share by lying, cheating and doing things that are damaging people's health.

And, you know, it's one thing, if you're stuck in a situation, you've got no alternatives. But might be graduates will have alternatives. So, so I as I said, I encourage them to, you know, one thing I encourage them to do, you know, this this course is an elective. You didn't have to fix. Course. You you wanted to take this course to think about how to be an ethical engineer. Remember, in future years and decades, the person you were in this room. Remember what you want out of life and the kind of person you want it to be. And if you find where you are, it's very different. You know you can change it. You're not at least the way our economy is now.

It's not to say you can do anything you love, but that you love to do, but you'll you'll have some alternatives. You don't need to be living the life you're ashamed of. So well said. And of course, if it's a Volkswagen, if it's a really illegal situation or very shady, well, then one's got to think about what to do about that. And, you know, I think not being involved with it is, is certainly, a very good idea. But does one want a whistleblower? Does one want to, how can one try to, to, to change the behavior of the company? Is that possible? We talk about that kind of thing a lot. And sometimes I've actually had in a couple of cases, students who've already been working in industry for a while, who've encountered situations that were a little dubious and had very good suggestions about about what one might what one might do in that situation.

So I do want to give you time to talk about how you run this class, because I think trying to teach and encapsulate such a nebulous topic for a lot of people would probably be tough. And you do mention a lot of using case studies as reference and think talking about what has happened. Do you do you feel that using case studies a lot in ethics conversations, like limits people's view or does it what are the positives and negatives there. Yeah. I mean I think for most of our, our students, you know, future engineers or at least people studying engineering, you know, they like the case studies. It's interesting.

I get some students who really like the theoretical stuff and wish we got more in-depth in that. And I get probably a larger number of students who really like the case studies. And, and I might like to see a little more focus on that. So, so it's a balance. But I think they work together well. And I think, that's a kind of, as I said, an ingredient of key ingredient of the course, the case studies that we take, I've kind of mentioned a few, we sometimes ethics courses, what they'll do is they'll, they'll develop their own case studies, like, they'll think about what's the kind of situation conundrum we want students to think about, and they'll write up, well, you know, Janet is in this situation and she says this and the other thing, and we don't we don't we don't do that.

My view is that things like that, that the real life situations tend to be more, you know, real and more exciting to people and, and young people, you know, studying, engineering, want to want to know about what actual engineers are facing. So, so that's more what we do. And, nonetheless, of course, we, we, you know, we look for ones that are particularly, ethically relevant and try to, to think, well, here's a case study that's really good. Like, you know, for rights, ethics, one that we use for that, for instance, is, a different track, the AZT trials back in the 1990s, big controversy. And AZT means AZT is a, it's a drug for Aids, for HIV.

Life saving drug. And, but back in the, in the 90s now it's, it's more widely available though they're still kind of second, line drugs that are, that, that are out of reach in some poor countries. But but back in the 90s AZT was still under patent, very expensive. So, it was basically not available for an Aids was extremely widespread in Africa, especially at the time, also in, in poor parts of Asia. So a trial was was conducted to look at pregnant mothers, transmitting, HIV to their, to their babies. And since there was, there was now a protocol that if for the, for the wealthy countries, that was out of reach, both in terms of expense and also in terms of kind of logistics of, of providing it to women in these poor countries, you know, they didn't leave their hospitals in whatever it might be.

So, so there was this lesser AZT, regiment was developed. And the idea was, here's something that might be able to prevent Aids from being transmitted from these mothers to their children. And, and they in this one group had this regimen. The other group had had placebo. You always need a control group, of course, an experiment. And there was a huge outcry, about a number of things, but especially about there being a placebo group when there was a known treatment, in the West that would, you know, was very, very effective. I think it, it cut in by two thirds the, the transmission rate from for mothers due to their children.

But the thing is, you know, it wasn't it wasn't available. So that was, it wasn't like that was an option for the mothers. So, so there's, I think a very interesting real world example for, for people going into, you know, biological research, bioengineering kind of research. So examples like that, I would say to my mind, you can make up something like that. It's just more interesting that, than something someone's going to, I'm going to think of. So I'm not I'm not sure that answered your, your question, but, Oh, I, I think you did. Yeah. Let me say, another general thing I could say about, of course, is I mentioned it's discussion oriented.

So, yeah, generally speaking, we meet at sort of sections of on average maybe 12, 14 students, sometimes a smaller, sometimes a little bigger, and and big premium on discussion and, and why is that important? I think, if when students at MIT are taking a course on fluid dynamics or the genome or, or quantum mechanics, they don't come into the course thinking, well, I already know about fluid dynamics. I already know about the genome, maybe a little bit in some cases. But basically, you know, it's a technical subject. They're there to, to learn it if they're taking a course on ethics. Well, of course they've already got opinions about ethics, about what a good person is and what a good society is, what justice is and, and happiness.

And, you know, as a human being, you have you have opinions at least once you, you know, more than whatever, 5 or 6 years old or something. So, so people start out with opinions, but those opinions are usually not super well thought through. They're, you know, they're a little like the opinions you would have about fluid dynamics if you took some guesses, but you hadn't yet studied fluid dynamics. And moreover, there are certain ways that kind of ethical thinking we, involves sort of things we'd like to believe, things that flatter us that it that aren't really so relevant for, you know, technical subjects.

So my view is it's crucial to, to talk about it, to get those opinions out there, to have them confront each other, confront me, especially confront the authors we're reading and kind of see. Well, well, you know, you like the fact of altruism, but, you know, what about Sam Bankman-Fried or what, at the end of the day, if you're an effective altruist, is that really going to tell you, no, I shouldn't do this in some difficult situation or, or is that an is that a problem. Or conversely, you know, what about your happiness is that is if you get here's another thing I suggest you use about I mentioned the Machiavellian should wouldn't be ethical.

I think that's a very important question because someday, you know people talk about the trolley problem and we, we, we talk a little bit about the question that a lot of people that we used to shoot in the bull about that, with each other and college dorms and that's great. But if, if, if your whole approach to ethics has been kind of in the direction of, here are some difficult ethical questions, what's really ethical in this situation, it's hard to decide. But you've never thought about, well, should I be ethical when it's difficult for me? And then you find yourself in a situation where, you know, you had a company that's doing something, but they're smart people, and even they seem like decent people. And they say, you know, what are your hang ups here?

We're accomplishing good in the long run. Well, I think then, you want to thought not merely about which of these ethical choices. If you throw the switch in the trolley problem, which one's more right you want to thought about? Should I be ethical? Should I be obeying, or should I be doing things that, that can bear the light of day? Or is that maybe not so important that some of these people. So that's a situation, you know, as I tell them, some of you are really going to face that in life. So, you know. So for, for our enders for the show, I like to, to ask, a couple of things that we'll start with. Any common misconceptions about what we've talked about today that you'd like to clear up?

Yeah. I mean, I guess I'd say it circles back to something. We talked about. One common misconception, you know, in my view, is that, ethics is kind of relative. And different people have different values, and that's not a problem. Now, if you're talking about different customs, sure, that's fine. But if you're talking about different views about, you know, murder, slavery, racism, I think we all sense that's well, if you start to think about it, that's more problematic and it isn't. And as I suggested, if one saying it's all relative, isn't that really saying there's no truth? There's no guidance nihilism.

I would say this connects to a larger question about science. And, Richard Feynman, the physicist, said, you know, basically, there are these questions for which the scientific method, the experimental method, doesn't work, including questions like, should I do this? Is it right to do this? That doesn't mean those aren't important questions. In some ways, those are perhaps the most important questions. But they don't. The experimental method isn't so obviously a good way to answer. So I'm trying to encourage students to think there's a kind of knowledge that is rigorous that's, not modern science experiment based.

Do this and what happens, but for instance, could be more logic based as mathematics is, different ways of thinking about ethics that can be rigorous, that aren't just, well, this is kind of how it seems to me. And whatever I would say the, maybe connecting to a larger theme. Obviously, science is our public authority in, in the West. It's people say about their moral beliefs, ethical beliefs, even about their religious beliefs. Well, that's what's true for me. You know, what's true for you is true for you. And obviously, they're partly just trying to be nice people and not ruffle feathers. But still, nobody says about quantum mechanics.

Well, that's what's true for me. You know, you can be a Newtonian. Somehow science is we see science as truth. And that's fine as far as it goes. But the problem is, as Feynman says, it doesn't answer those questions about what we should do or what's really good to do. At least modern science is currently understood. Aristotle thought science could answer those questions, but, it's different, different kind of approach. The thing is science. It's not only that it doesn't answer those questions, but it also undermines at least the most common other forms of attempting to answer those questions. Right? So the religious beliefs, the ethical beliefs of various kinds, they become, you know, it's my values.

This what's true for me. Science is what's true for everybody. Other stuff becomes more like, optional, so hazy. And so we have no public authority that tells us what's right and wrong, which in some ways obviously is a big advantage, but it also makes us a little bit lost in some ways. I think sometimes this is called the crisis of the West. And so, you know, we try to go into a little bit into that kind of large question. And, I try to encourage students to think about, as I said, how one can think about ethics, morality, justice, happiness, living a good life, how one can really think about those things and not just, well, I feel like you feel why?

Or I feel like there's nothing further to say about it. There's so much more I could say. I want to take more time, but, one thing I find very valuable about Aristotle in particular is he observes, you know, some people believe happiness is pleasure. Some people believe say happiness is honor. It's not simply that they've got these different feelings, different strokes for different folks. It's that the folks who believe, for instance, that, happiness is honor. Well, they want to be, honored for their virtues, for their good qualities, by people who are good judges of those things. So it really looks like what they care about is being good people is being virtuous.

So if you think through a lot of these beliefs, they actually point beyond themselves to something else. That's kind of what Aristotle's inviting us to do. Think them through. Wonderful. So we fit the TLDL section for too long. Didn't listen. So this is this is where I'd like to ask you to tell our listeners why this matters and what you might be looking forward to in this area of ethics or ethics for engineers, to be more specific. Yeah. I think why it matters, I'd give a, a couple of reasons. The first one, as we talked about, engineering is so powerful in today's world, and the changes are coming fast. And I very much hope, that they will be, produced, conducted by people who are, thinking through ethically what, what what's going to happen, not just trying to maximize their prestige and profit.

I think also, you know, my students are human beings, thoughtful human beings, intelligent human beings, certainly. And I think, I'm trying to help them to live a life that will be fuller for them and that will enrich the lives of those around them. I hope, through greater self-awareness, know their self and the ancient, ancient Greek saying that we can all relate to. So those two things above all. Thank you. Yeah. And from myself and all our listeners, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me to remind everybody. We have Peter Hansen here, a lecturer in the chemical engineering department and the course administrator of ethics for engineers here at MIT.

And to all our listeners, I've been Daniel Braconnier, your host. Thanks for listening. Chat with you next time. so I'm not looking for, you know, to convince them, you know, you should prefer groups. You should prefer, this or that