Proposal for Certificate Program in Practical and Professional Ethics Dr. Anayra Santori (a Co-PI) and Dr. Rosana Martínez-Cruzado (a retreat participant) have prepared a draft proposal for a certificate program in Practical and professional ethics. In November 2000, it was presented to the dean of Arts and Sciences who included it in her annual report to the UPRM Administrative Board. The draft proposal sets forth a certification program that requires students to take three courses related to Practical and Professional Ethics. Two of these courses will be chosen from the following:

Courses Currently Offered New Courses currently undergoing approval process (Courses created as a result of this grant) FILO 3155: Introduction to Ethics FILO 3___: Computer Ethics FILO 3156: Modern and FILO 3___: Environmental Ethics Contemporary Ethics FILO 3178: Business Ethics FILO 4___: Global Issues I FILO 4025: Medical Ethics FILO 4___: Global Issues II FILO 4027: Bioethics FILO 4045: Engineering Ethics FILO 4160: Philosophy of Technology FILO 6178: Advanced Business Ethics FILO 3181: Professional Ethics in Nursing

The third course will be a capstone course required of all students. Interdisciplinary in nature, it will involve a strong practical component. We have discussed several options for this last point. For example, the class could require that the student carry out a good works (service learning) exercise. (During the May retreat two student groups presented such projects, one a design for a skate board for a handicapped child, the other a computer system using satellite imaging to provide students access to a data on available housing in the Mayagüez area.) Dr. Anderson Brown presented another possibility in the May retreat: students would identify an environmental problem in Puerto Rico and prepare a position paper detailing a solution; the paper, then, would be sent to the appropriate government agency or private industry client, placing the student in an advisory position. Drs. Cruz and Frey learned of a third possibility at the DOLCE workshop in Golden Colorado, the Social Impact Statement exercise presented by Dr. Chuck Huff from St. Olaf College. In this exercise, students select a complex computer system and design different empirical and normative techniques for uncovering "ethical surprises" in the system. For example, students could examine a project to develop a "smart" student ID card by interviewing the developers of the project, the users, and then doing day-in- the-life scenarios to determine typical use. Using a matrix of ethical issues, the students would predict ethical problems that could arise in the use of the system: could the system be used to violate the privacy of the users, could it harm individuals by containing inaccurate information, could errors in programming lead to frequent and costly shut- downs? After having identified embedded problems, they would then design solutions that could be integrated into the planning stage rather than at the end of the process when change is much more difficult to bring about. The students would summarize these results in a comprehensive report prepared for the client of the project. Dr. Frey and Dr. Huff have plans to work on a proposal (to be submitted to the NSF) to bring Dr. Huff to Puerto Rico to help us implement this activity. They plan on preparing this proposal in the next academic year during Dr. Frey's sabbatical. The Certificate Program in Practical and Professional Ethics is still in the planning stages. What is important is how the Center's ethics initiatives, especially this project, have laid the groundwork for this program. The Center's NSF ethics initiative, SBR- 9810253, has generated important pedagogical tools for this program: (1) 50 real world case for use in ethics, occupational, and professional courses, (2) 12 integration exercises designed to integrate ethics into professional and occupational courses, (3) a comprehensive issues list identifying ethical problems in the professional and occupational areas in Puerto Rico, (4) classroom exercises designed for integrating professional and occupational issues into Practical and Professional Ethics courses. This curriculum renovation project has (1) enabled us to implement the NSF materials into the curriculum, (2) developed new courses that respond to accreditation requirements like ABET-2000, (3) designed a methodology (that we employed in stages one and two of this project) to generate further curriculum changes, (4) produced interdisciplinary teaching strategies and formed interdisciplinary faculty teams to carry them out, (5) facilitated the identification of further complimentary projects such as the PFEI grant devoted to integrating ethics across the curriculum in the UPR system and a Teacher Certification Program in ethics to empower UPR faculty in ethics integration. During the next year, we will be finalizing and implementing the Certificate Program in Practical and Professional Ethics. In a paper entitled, "Ethical Empowerment" written by Dr. Cruz and Dr. Frey in connection with this project, we have identified four important skill areas that form necessary conditions for ethical empowerment. (Ethical empowerment, in this context, means helping students develop the skills needed to integrate ethics into the professional and occupational sectors.) These four skill areas are: evaluation, prevention, integration, and good works. 1. Evaluation empowers the student to use ethical approaches in evaluating a past occurrence, present action, or future project 2. Prevention empowers the student to recognize hidden ethical issues and problems and to design measures to prevent them from developing into full-blown ethical dilemmas, disasters, or problems 3. Integration involves the ability to insert ethical considerations into areas such as decision-making, strategic planning, product design, and product marketing in such a thorough way that these ethical considerations play an internal constitutive role rather than an added-on, external passive role in shaping the decision, plan, product, or marketing strategy. 4. Finally, there is good works which empowers the student by helping him or her identify a need or potential ethical problem and respond to it above and beyond the call of duty. (Good works involve what ethicists call supererogatory acts.) In other words it empowers the student to use his or her professional or occupational skills to carry out the ethical principle of beneficence (doing good, preventing and compensating harm, promoting well-being). Dr. Cruz and Dr. Frey have summarized ethical empowerment in the following matrix. Moving from left to right, they identify the activity required by ethical empowerment, the skills necessary for carrying out that activity, the name of a classroom exercise designed to develop these skills, and a short description of that exercise. This matrix is a direct result of the findings of this project: during its stages we have (1) identified these skills, (2) developed a comprehensive framework to coordinate them, and (3) integrated pedagogical materials developed in previous ethics initiatives to realize them. This framework provides part of the underlying structure of the Certificate Program in Practical and Professional Ethics

Activity Skills exercised in Teaching Description of exercise required by carrying out activity Exercise ethical that helps empowerment develop skill Evaluative The ability to evaluate Evaluative Taking a big news/bad news something that has case study case such as the Ford Pinto and happened in the past by analysis applying ethical approaches. applying to it different Does it violate rights? Harm ethical approaches. individuals? Who is to blame? Preventive The ability to uncover Social Students prepare a report for the ethical surprises and Impact client on hidden ethical surprises design preventive Statements they find in a major design measures before they project. They use an ethical issue into full-blown matrix and empirical methods to dilemmas. uncover embedded ethical issues. Decision- The ability to integrate The Ethics Using a case or scenario that Making (not just apply) ethical Laboratory presents a real world decision (Designing) considerations into a making situation, students use a decision or design such seven-step model to resolve the that the considerations case by constructing a solution play a constitutive role in around ethical and feasibility the final product. requirements. Doing good Awareness of Good Works Students, through interviews and above and surroundings, perception Projects other forms of research, uncover beyond the call of opportunities for community needs. They then of duty service through apply their knowledge- and professional skills, agent-empowerment to respond

personal involvement to the need. (Students develop and accountability, design to allow aquaculture sensitivity to social and company to clean effluent while environmental effects of maintaining profit margin.) work.

A concern raised by the dean of Arts and Sciences and others who have reviewed the Certificate Program Proposal is what kind of criteria should be used to select the projects that students will be working on in this capstone course. Our response to this concern is to develop a matrix that underlies the Certificate Program to guarantee the seriousness and rigor of the ethical content of the program. (Such a matrix is summarized below.) A related concern is whether to focus exclusively on good works/service learning in the capstone course. The temptation to do this is strong given the recent popularity of service learning in both Puerto Rico and the United States. But there are other projects that respond to our goal of ethical empowerment that could compliment a strong service learning component, some of which we have already mentioned above: 1. Social Impact Statements. 2. Policy statements on environmental problems and social problems. 3. Ethics integration projects such as presentations integrating ethics into the professional and occupational decision-making scenarios. 4. Special integration projects such as developing codes of ethics for engineering co-op students. 5. Preparing a team from UPRM to compete in the Ethics Bowl held at the beginning of the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. 6. Allowing students to prepare an ethical audit or Social Impact Statement on a project they are developing in another class in their area of specialty (For example, students in the Technological Entrepreneurships course could perform a detailed Social Impact Statement on their class projects.) Whatever we choose in this context (an approach that emphasizes exclusively service learning or the broader, "umbrella" approach described just above), we need to develop an overall framework that sets forth the different ethical approaches, ethical issues, and levels of analysis that underlie this program. This guarantees the academic rigor and thoroughness of the Certificate Program and prevents it from being co-opted by the latest social or academic fad. Such a matrix could be modeled on that developed in the NSF-funded Impact CS project. It should include the following: 1. A distinction between different levels of analysis, distinguishing, at the very least, between individual, social, and international. A strong ethics program should acquaint the student with examples from each level: individual ethical analysis to examine relations between human beings and political policy analyses to examine interactions at the social and international levels. 2. An ethical framework that seeks to harmonize basic ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, and justice. Furthermore, it should include some exposure to basic ethical practices such as responsibility in the legal and moral realms. 3. It should respond to the issues we identified in the December 1998 retreat of our NSF- funded ethics initiative. 4. It should incorporate recent developments in the study of moral development. For example, simply recapitulating Lawrence Kohlberg's six stages to autonomy would lead to a distorted view of moral development in our students. Autonomy needs to be balanced with other ethical principles such as beneficence and justice, and recent developments in cognitive psychology need to be acknowledged. We should also recognize alternative ethical approaches, such as care-based ethics, communitarianism, and responsibility. 5. The Certificate Program needs to be anchored in a comprehensive set of goals. Ethical empowerment, as developed by Dr. Cruz and Dr. Frey in their paper, presents one possible way of integrating goals. There are many others also acceptable. 6. The establishing of a clear and comprehensive set of goals makes possible the process of assessment. Not only is this important in responding to accreditation requirements (such as ABET-2000 and ACM/IEEE requirements in engineering and computer science respectively), but it is essential to designing a program that is self-improving. To respond to these concerns, we have developed a draft matrix that includes the ethical framework (principles), levels of analysis (individual, social, and international), and basic issues (professional, occupational, social, global) to be addressed in a Certification Program in Practical and Professional Ethics.