We often throw around the joke that if Oppenheimer had taken an ethics class, maybe we wouldn’t have nuclear bombs. But would those lectures have changed anything? Actually, we’d have been better off if he had spent his Sundays in a pew absorbing a sermon centered around community, humility and accountability. This isn’t just a quip; it speaks to a profound question about the effectiveness of ethics education versus the deeper influence of religious or community-based moral frameworks. If our goal is to cultivate a society with stronger moral convictions, religion or at the very least structured community engagement would offer a more effective solution than any ethics lecture.

This isn’t to say that ethics education is pointless — I’d never dismiss the value of learning to reason through moral dilemmas. I believe, and have often argued, that education is the most powerful driver of societal change. But when it comes to ethics classes, I find myself questioning whether they’re truly impactful, especially for engineers. Do they truly affect the decisions students make in the workforce, or do they just make us more aware of the compromises we’re already planning to make?

Ethics classes in universities, especially for fields like engineering, are meant to shape our moral compass, to help us evaluate the impact of our decisions. Yet, studies have shown these courses often fall short of their intended goals. One study published in Science and Engineering Ethics highlighted that while students who took Responsible........

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