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Timely ethical issues inspire
a new teaching model
By Blake Edgar
A walk in the woods can inspire introspection, a chance perhaps
to ponder solutions to personal or global problems. While hiking
in Tilden Regional Park a couple of years ago, Berkeley professor
William Kastenberg and his wife, Gloria Hauser-Kastenberg, an
attorney, ruminated about how they could integrate their professional
and personal lives and learn more about each other's ways
of thinking.
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| In their new ethics
and technology course, William Kastenberg and Gloria Hauser-Kastenberg
are creating a unique educational experience for their undergraduate
students. Peg Skorpinski photos |
About the same time, Kastenberg read a newspaper editorial by
then-Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman about the controversies
surrounding the use of genetically modified crops and foods, which
reminded the nuclear engineer of intense debates decades earlier
surrounding nuclear technology. As the College of Engineering
had instituted a new requirement for students to take a course
in ethics, the Kastenbergs decided to create and co-teach a course
on the role of ethics in the development and use of technology.
Rather than restrict the course to engineering students, the Kastenbergs
took the rare step of approaching the College of Letters and Science,
which each semester funds four undergraduate courses not sponsored
by a particular department. The College administration welcomed
the collaboration be-tween an engineer and an attorney, and Ethics
and the Impact of Technology on Society made its debut this spring.
The Kastenbergs' course examines complex ethical issues, with
broad legal and social ramifications that have emerged with current
technology, exploring how various philosophies, religions, and
societies have dealt with ethical problems throughout history.
"We shape our society through the technology developed here
(at the University of California)," says Kastenberg, an expert
on nuclear reactor safety and environmental risk analysis. "And
it seems to me that it's our obligation to talk to our students
about the implications."
 One
need only look at the latest news headlines to know that students
will face no shortage of pertinent, pressing ethical issues to
explore: cloning, stem cell research, nuclear waste disposal,
biological warfare, genetically modified organisms, and Internet
security and privacy. The timeliness of the subject matter attracted
a diverse and large group of students; advance interest prompted
the Kastenbergs to increase enrollment to 120 students, and by
the second week of the term there was still a waiting list.
"I had never taken an ethics course before, and because this
one dealt with technology, I thought that it would be a good way
to check the field out," says computer sciences major John
Gibson. Oscar Lang, a senior in cognitive science interested in
Internet privacy issues, is surprised by the democratic nature
of the class, where everyone participates and determines the course
of discussions. "I've never had a class organized this
way," he says.
With her expertise as a mediator in alternative dispute resolution
and an outsider's perspective, Hauser-Kastenberg encourages
a dialogue throughout the course and extracts common themes that
could help students form their own set of ethics. Students will
also work in teams of five each on a project attempting to resolve
an ethical issue tied to a modern technology, by applying various
theories as well as individual ethics. Gibson's team, for
example, will try to tackle global warming.
In developing the course, the Kastenbergs strove to include a
broad range of cultural viewpoints. Kastenberg took a sabbatical
from 2000 to 2001 that provided the couple with time to read,
travel, and become immersed in the subject. "We decided to
use ourselves and our relationship as an experiment," says
Hauser-Kastenberg.
They rented out their Berkeley hills home and spent months with
new surroundings, new people, and new ideas. The journey took
them to the rainforests of Ecuador, where they lived with members
of the indigenous Ashuar Nation. They traveled to India to study
with Ramash Balseker, an octogenarian former banker turned "nondualistic"
philosopher, and to learn about that country's experience
with the Green Revolution in agriculture. Closer to home, they
spent three days in a seminar with the Dalai Lama, which led them
to a concept of "compassionate technology" as a guiding
principle for their course.
Most modern technology stems from the linear, Cartesian paradigm
that has dominated Western scientific thought for three centuries,
says Kastenberg. Descartes' legacy includes a separation
of science from spirit, of human from nature, and faith in reductionism
and empirical observation as the best ways to understand a system's
behavior.
But many cultures have adopted a sophisticated yet nonlinear code
of ethics, and Hauser-Kastenberg believes that increasing globalization
obligates us to consider other ways of knowing. How might our
society change if we applied nontraditional approaches to the
creation of technology? If sustainability rather than efficiency
served as a primary goal, would we behave differently?
The Cartesian paradigm may fall short of supporting a sufficient
technological ethic. Take the example of MTBE, a gasoline additive
intended to control air pollution but now implicated as a source
of groundwater pollution. Says Kastenberg, "There's
a failure to understand how complex our environment is. By trying
to solve one problem, we created a problem that's more difficult
to solve."
Increasingly, the sorts of ethical dilemmas that engineers and
scientists face have potentially global ramifications. They can
also be imperceptible in time -- as rapid as an Internet stock
trade or as gradual as large-scale climate shifts. Methods of
quantifying risks, the Kastenbergs agree, need to catch up with
the greater degrees of uncertainty that accompany the latest technology.
"We're not proposing that we have an answer," Hauser-Kastenberg
hastens to add. "If students get a sense of the breadth and
depth of the issues, I'd be happy."
The Kastenbergs' interest in the subject won't wane
with the last lecture. They foresee similar courses in biology
or computer science. Plans are underway for a campus symposium
on ethics and technology. And Kastenberg expects his research
to continue shifting toward new ways of assessing and managing
the risks of complex technological systems. "When you understand
the risks and are finding ways to manage those risks, you are
dealing with ethical issues," he says. You never know where
a trail through the woods may take you.
Written by Blake Edgar, science acquisitions editor at University
of California Press, and former senior editor of California Wild.
He has co-authored three books on paleoanthropology, including
The Dawn of Human Culture, just published by John Wiley,
and From Lucy to Language. His work appears in Bay Area
and national magazines.
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