Authorial Particularism and the National Grand Challenges in Engineering

In this episode of the Viterbi Conversations in Ethics podcast, hosts Sandra Al Hames and Aryan Shah interview Natalie Maciel, a USC mechanical engineering student talking about the National Academy of Engineering's 14 Grand Challenges. Natalie argues that while engineers should define engineering problems due to their technical expertise, there is value in incorporating diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives. She questions whether the current process excludes valuable insights by being too narrowly defined by engineers alone. Natalie also emphasizes the structural challenges within engineering education and industry that limit engineers' ability to consider broader social, political, and cultural contexts. She advocates for reforming the process of defining grand challenges to include collaboration with non-engineering disciplines without compromising technical rigor, and she supports integrating non-Western moral philosophies into engineering ethics to strengthen the profession’s social responsibility.