"Engineering and the Good Life" at Santa Clara University

A Q&A with Matthew Gaudet

• By Mary Grush
• 11/10/25

Every day we hear many questions about the impact of not only AI, for example, but a full range of other technology and engineering advancements as well. These questions are often provocative and concerning. So, are we doing good things?

It seems that now is a great time to remind students in engineering and technology to draw on their ethical training and think carefully about how they approach these questions — so they can confidently do good in the world at the same time as they are building successful careers.

It's certainly not a matter of instructing students to internalize a list of pre-defined ethical constructs, and it's more than analyzing case studies frequently found in classical ethics courses. "Engineering and the Good Life" (EGL), a unique program in the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University calls on students to draw from the best part of their own character and experience as they consider their ethical choices.

 

While some scholars labor over the distinction between ethics and morals, EGL's emphasis on the formation of the individual allows for nearly equal footing of both terms. This reflects a principle of Jesuit education called cura personalis, the care and formation of the whole person (SCU is a Jesuit university). From there, the "whole student" can apply ethics training with purpose.

Here, we ask Matthew Gaudet, director of ethics programs and an associate teaching professor in the School of Engineering, about EGL at SCU.

Mary Grush: What is the overarching instructional purpose of the EGL program?

Matthew Gaudet: Engineering and the Good Life is an ethics across the curriculum program that aims to maintain ethical reflection as a part of the engineering design process — as opposed to something that's done outside of, or in addition to, or oftentimes, unfortunately, after the fact. EGL tries to make sure that ethical reflection stays a part of the way we do design.

Another way I like to frame EGL simply, is that it connects us to the why of engineering and keeps it tethered to the how of engineering.

"Engineering and the Good Life" connects us to the why of engineering and keeps it tethered to the how of engineering.

Grush: In that context, what's "the good life"? Is it the opportunity engineers — and engineering students — have, to be able to build on their own ethical choices throughout their careers?

Gaudet: That would be a fair statement — along with the ability to do good.

Grush: Is the "good life" approach to ethics that you have in the School of Engineering at SCU different from most traditional engineering programs? Could you tell me a bit about how EGL emerged at SCU?

Gaudet: When I arrived here in Santa Clara in 2018, the entire ethics curriculum at the School of Engineering consisted of a single course.

It was called 'Ethics and Technology' and it was only taken by about 40 percent of engineering students. And at the time, the rest of the engineering students took their required ethics course in the philosophy department or the theology department and sometimes in the business school, untethered from their work and identity as engineers. There were lots of different ethics classes on campus. But to think that back in those days only about 40 percent of engineering students took ours! And the larger problem for students was learning engineering without any ethical reflection specifically on the practice of engineering.

Moreover, the course I inherited was largely built around case studies of engineering tragedies — things like the Johnstown Flood, the Ford Pinto, the Space Shuttle Challenger, the A380 MAX airliner, or the Citycorp Tower in Manhattan. These case studies comprise a pretty standard approach to engineering ethics.

In fact, it's the very same approach and many of the exact same cases that were required of me when I was a mechanical engineering student at Villanova University in the 1990s. Like anything, courses like this vary in quality. But the worst of them are taught by engineers who often have no particular ethical training.

This is not to say anything against engineers, but engineers who don't have particular ethical training tend to read and discuss these tragedies without offering much ethical structure to them. This approach essentially maintained that ethics is inherent to the case… that there was no apparent need for ethical training.

A better version of the litany-of-engineering-tragedies course utilizes ethical methods to analyze cases more deeply, and then through the cases develops a deeper understanding of the ways in which we as humans actually do ethics. A philosopher teaching this kind of course might feature John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of utilitarianism, and then try to unpack utilitarianism using something like the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. This is actually how I taught the course, in the engineering school, for my first several quarters at Santa Clara.

A better version of the litany-of-engineering-tragedies course utilizes ethical methods to analyze cases more deeply, and then through the cases develops a deeper understanding of the ways in which we as humans actually do ethics.

But even when this type of course is done well, there's often a subliminal message that ethics and everything-else-humanities is separate from the practice of engineering. With the focus on the technical problem to solve, ethics may set some boundaries or constraints but doesn’t really inform the practice of engineering. I think there's a tremendous failure in that.

Grush: How were you able to turn that around? What was the role of cura personalis that you mentioned to me earlier?

Gaudet: Yes, two things combined to help us become successful:

First, when I moved to teaching in the engineering school, I realized very quickly that there was an opportunity in teaching only to engineers.

Engineering students are a tight-knit community. These students stay up till 3:00am working together on problem sets. And, importantly, they share a focus on building things that draws them toward a common purpose.

I saw that if I could tap into that common purpose, there was a lot more I could do with ethics in professional engineering education than I had been able to do in a more general setting.

Second, the commitment we have in Jesuit education to allow the formation of a moral individual is key. I tell my students at the very start of my very first lecture, in their very first year, that my job is not to teach them how to be ethical. That was their mom's job, their dad's job, their grandma's, their kindergarten teacher's, their soccer coach's job… By the time they reach me, students have been doing ethics for 18 years of their lives or more.

By the time they reach me, students have been doing ethics for 18 years of their lives or more.

My job is to give them the ethical frameworks to understand their own moral commitments so they can live them out — not simply by following moral rules or dictates, but by being a moral person. This is key. The shift from following moral standards to being a moral person is important and enduring.

I want my students to be asking right from the start, what does it mean to be an engineer rather than just doing engineering? That framing shifts the way we think about ethics and provides an understanding of what we're trying to do here in the engineering school and how it will last many years into the profession.

Grush: What are some of the ways you apply EGL concepts to engineering and technology issues now? Are there a few examples you could provide from some of your courses?

Gaudet: In thinking through this question, I'll first make the point that what we call the "good life" in EGL is a purposeful choice of words. It's most traditionally a term associated with the Greek philosopher Aristotle. And for Aristotle, ethics is the act of seeking one's ultimate purpose.

The ancient Greeks had a term for this purpose in life. They called it eudaimonia, an ancient Greek word. There isn't really a great translation of the word into English. It's sometimes equated to happiness, but even that doesn't quite capture the connotation of the word. Probably the better word if we're going to get to English is flourishing (though that's still sort of inadequate as an English synonym). But the question Aristotle had for us all was what does it mean to flourish as a human? So we take this ancient question and turn it back on our engineering students to ask, how is this technology that we're putting out into the world actually helping us to flourish as humans?

This becomes an important framing for what we're thinking about when we're building technology. We are putting technology into the world that lots of people are going to use and operate around and through.

Engineers have an outsized impact on the world that we all live in. This is an important responsibility that our engineers need to recognize from the start. We're trying to think about what actual life we want to live and what counts as the good life and what we're striving to achieve. What we're trying to do with this program, is simply to have this conversation so that it becomes a part of how we think when we design a piece of technology.

That's where we get back to this concept of the good life, which you'll find embedded in each of our courses.

The first full course in our lineup is called 'Values and Technology'. Again, our job is not to pick particular values and say that you must embody these particular values; instead we give students the space right from the outset of their engineering journey, to reflect on the values that should inform their future as engineers. Naming these values at the outset of the program helps students keep them at the center as they delve deeper into the technical coursework.

We give students the space right from the outset of their engineering journey, to reflect on the values that should inform their future as engineers.

Next, we have a two-course sequence that Santa Clara calls a "Cultures and Ideas" sequence. For us, the "idea" is technology itself. In this sequence, we explore the influence that culture has on technology and how technology in turn shapes culture and society we live in.

This somewhat symbiotic relationship between technology and the culture is useful: We can begin to center the "good life language" here and ask students what it means to live a good life, and how we can create the technology that we would dedicate our lives to — building it to help us bring about that world, that culture, that society.

It's only after we've laid this foundation, these three courses, that we come back to the original course that I began teaching here, the 'Ethics and Technology' class. This is where we begin a formal treatment of ethics and technology. The course — the fourth course — is still the original course I taught, and it still uses ethical methods — rules, rights, duties, utility, and virtues — to examine historical ethical tragedies better.

Yes, we still look at some of those classic cases that I studied in my engineering curriculum, but the questioning now begins to take up some of the cutting edge technology, to ask about the future of engineering, and to think deeply about how emerging technologies should or shouldn't be built. By building on the formation of the first courses in the series, these ethical explorations are all the richer; they're all deeper. They get to that perennial question: What does it mean to me, to be an engineer?

The questioning now begins to take up some of the cutting edge technology, to ask about the future of engineering, and to think deeply about how emerging technologies should or shouldn't be built.

Finally, in their senior capstone design project, we turn directly to the task of engineering design and how to take everything we've learned and put it into practice. Many of these capstone projects are being implemented in the real world — with real consequences. As a part of the final write-up for every capstone project, students are required to include an entire chapter on the social and ethical impacts of their project.

We encourage design groups to discuss their shared values on the project as well as the lines they don't want to cross, and to hold each other accountable to these commitments as they go through a year-plus process of design.

We encourage design groups to discuss their shared values on the project as well as the lines they don't want to cross, and to hold each other accountable to these commitments as they go through a year-plus process of design.

Grush: What can you learn about students who enter the workforce armed with their background in "the good life"? Has there been a cadre yet that you can study, who have now entered into the "real world?"

Gaudet: We've been building this out for four years, so we're right at that tipping point of the first cohort that might have gone through all of these courses. But even then, the most recent courses have only been out for a year and a half. And those are first- and second-year courses.

I can say that there is data from other universities that has helped us to isolate the problem we are trying to solve. A sociologist at the University of Michigan, Erin Cech, has found that in a curriculum without a program like ours, the inclination of engineering students to understand their work as serving the public good diminishes with each year of focused technical coursework. We have plans to test our program to see how it helps combat that trend, but this research is still in progress.

So, the students who have actually gone through the entire program have not yet graduated. Most of our work so far has been aimed at getting the program off the ground, designing the courses, returning and training – or recruiting and training new faculty, and scaling those courses that seem to be working. Anecdotally, though, I can tell you that former students have taken the time to reach out, to tell me how meaningful our courses have been to them and their careers.

And I'm happy to note that the days of 40 percent enrollments are over — Now, every time, every term, I have waitlists for every one of our EGL program courses.

I'm happy to note that the days of 40 percent enrollments are over — Now, every time, every term, I have waitlists for every one of our EGL program courses.

No matter how many additional sections we add, they are still waitlisted every single time, and they pack full. Originally thought I needed to make these courses required of our engineers, and now I know that I don't. I simply tell students these courses exist, and they flock to them. Once they take one course, they seek out the others. They keep thinking about the why question for themselves. They keep coming back.