'Star Trek' sets stage for engineering ethics course

University Park, Pa. -- When people think about the "Star Trek" television series, they might recall the cheesy special effects, William Shatner's hammy performances, or the 1960s-style take on futuristic fashions. So it might come as a surprise that a course in Penn State's College of Engineering is using the series as a basis to teach ethics to students.

Andrew Lau, associate professor of engineering, says he was seeking to design an ethics course that was different from the traditional way ethics is taught.

"Sometimes the best education is when the students don't know they're learning," he explains. "'Star Trek' was more subtle -- when one looks at it through ethics, there are a lot of lessons in morality and in what's right and what's wrong."

Though the show was about a spaceship exploring the galaxy, series creator Gene Roddenberry and his writers often used the Enterprise's adventures as a guise to explore many of the issues confronting society in the 1960s.

Lau, who grew up watching the show, says the idea for the course came from a serendipitous find at a second-hand bookstore -- a book about the ethics of "Star Trek."

"It was written by a philosopher who was probably a Trekkie too," Lau says.

Not long after, the engineering professor developed the first-year seminar course, "The Ethics of 'Star Trek.'"

Students in the course watch an episode every other week, which coincides with the course's required reading of "The Ethics of Star Trek," by Judith Barad and Ed Robertson.

Lau says the subsequent discussions on the episodes are tied into the teachings of philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, among others. For example, students watched an episode titled "The Enemy Within," where a transporter accident splits Captain Kirk into two identical Kirks -- a "good" Kirk, who has all of the intellect, and a "bad" Kirk, who has all of the emotions.

"The good Kirk starts to lose his decision-making ability when he gets split from his impulsive self," he explains. "Aristotle's idea was that the will and intellect controlled a person's animal instincts."

The course covers concepts such as cultural relativism, religion and power. "We talk about ideas such as, 'Do the ends justify the means?' and the notion of the show's 'Prime Directive,' where the crew is forbidden to interfere in the natural evolution of an alien species. Is this hands-off policy good or bad?" Lau says.

First-year student Natalya Lakhtakia says she enjoyed the class, though she readily admits she's not much of a "Trek" fan. "The show definitely presents ethical dilemmas well, and it was good to see them, rather than just discuss them," she says.

Lau says the class also focuses on engineering-related ethical dilemmas. In one such case study, a fictional student working for a consulting environmental engineering firm is asked to sample some drums for a client. The student believes the drums contain hazardous waste. By law, if the contents are toxic, the drums must be transported and disposed of according to strict guidelines and federal and state authorities must be notified. When the student informs his supervisor, he's told to report that samples have been taken and not to conduct the analysis. The supervisor then proposes to tell the client where the drums are located, that they contain questionable material, and suggest they be removed.

"It's situations like this that our graduates must be prepared for," Lau says. "The idea of tying engineering education in with science fiction is a very neat segue."

Last Updated March 19, 2009

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