Developing and Implementing an Aerospace Macroethics Lesson in a Required Sophomore Course.

This innovative practice full paper details the creation and implementation of a macroethics lesson into a required sophomore-level aerospace engineering course at a large research university. The primary, novel learning objective for this macroethics lesson is for students to analyze how their own ethical philosophy and personal values influence their perspective on an ethical issue in aerospace engineering. This paper begins with a review of the literature used to guide the development of this macroethics lesson. Next, the outline and content of the lesson is presented which consisted of two distinct activities. The first was an introductory presentation on ethics and identifying personal values. This was followed by students choosing an "issue brief" (written by the authors of this paper) on a current macroethical issue in aerospace engineering. The brief topics were the military-industrial complex, space sustainability and orbital debris, and space settlement and resource utilization. After reading their selected brief, students engaged in a structured discussion on the issue in which they identified and ranked stakeholders, and reflected on how their own values were reflected in their ranking of stakeholders. This paper concludes with a discussion of the impact and effectiveness of the lesson with reflections from the authors, and presents quantitative and qualitative survey data from the sophomore students who completed the macroethics lesson.