Caroline Whitbeck
Biographical Sketch for the Online Ethics Center
Caroline Whitbeck is a philosopher of science, technology, and medicine. She is the Elmer G. Beamer-Hubert H. Schneider Professor in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University where she holds appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
She holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Wellesley College, a master's degree from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professor Whitbeck combines research and teaching interests in the philosophy of science, technology, and medicine; practical ethics; and feminist philosophy, with interest in education of a diverse student body for careers in engineering and the science-based professions. Her work in the philosophy of science extends from the philosophy of physics through the philosophy of medicine and medical research to engineering. That work focuses on the place of practice in the development of scientific, medical, and engineering concepts. She also made significant contributions to feminist philosophy and to medical ethics in the 1970s and 1980s. She initiated the feminist philosophical critiques of science, delineated a feminist self-other distinction, and gave philosophical voice to some of the ethical concerns underlying the practices of the women's health movement.
Whitbeck's work emphasizes the synthetic as well as analytic elements in responses to moral problems. In the 1980s and 1990s, she developed the analogy between ethical problems and design problems, in particular, problems of engineering design and research design. She pioneered active learning methods in the teaching of engineering ethics and the responsible conduct of research, especially methods that place the learner in the position of the agent who must actually respond to the problem (rather than in the position of a judge who merely evaluates responses that have already been constructed). Her emphasis on agent-centered problem-solving has been widely influential. For example, it is reflected in the construction of discussion scenarios in the second (1995) edition of On Being a Scientist, for which she served as reviewer. Major themes in her recent work in professional ethics are trust and trustworthiness, responsibility and negligence, and ethics of collaboration.
In 1995 she edited a special issue of Science and Engineering Ethics on Trustworthy Research. She is the editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Engineering Education on engineering ethics, which will appear in August 2001, with duplicate publication in the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science, which she directs. Whitbeck serves on the advisory board of Professional Ethics and on the Editorial Board of Science and Engineering Ethics.
Whitbeck was elected Fellow of the AAAS for her work in engineering ethics, and was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1994-95. Her book, Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research, was published by Cambridge University Press in spring 1998 and the Japanese translation of the first half of that book, translated by Hiroshi Iino and Jun Fudano, was published by Misuzu Shobo in December 2000.