In early 2024, rain drenched Los Angeles, with megastorms snarling traffic, causing mudslides and flooding streets. Against this backdrop, Katherine Brichacek had a decision to make.

The lecturer in the Engineering in Society (EiS) program received an email from the USC administration letting her and other professors know that with another atmospheric river on the way, they could cancel class if they wanted.

Most of them did without giving it a second thought. But Brichacek, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago, struggled with the choice. For guidance she turned to Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century German philosopher whose deontological theory posits that actions are only moral if motivated by rational duty.

In the end, Brichacek told her students to stay home and posted a recorded lecture to Zoom, ensuring that they remained safe but continued to learn. “I felt like I did have a duty in that moment to keep them safe, and that that was part of my responsibility as their instructor,” she said. “The basis of my decision was ethics.”

To Brichacek, ethics provide a road map for making better decisions and leading better lives. In a chaotic and brutal world, they can serve as a lodestar for stability and decency.

That’s why she infuses them in the advanced writing class and other classes she teaches at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. It’s also why she volunteered in the fall 2024 semester to coach the first USC student team to participate in the Ethics Bowl, an intercollegiate competition sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, or APPE.

“Ethics, in and of themselves, is a way of existing, a way of deciding how to act, and I think it’s just foundational to everyday life,” said Brichacek, who in 2023 won a Northwestern University Race and Justice Grant to study ways to teach first-year engineering students to think about design in more equitable and inclusive ways. “I feel like the more that I’ve studied ethics and taught ethics, the more that I do pause before I do things.”

 

A love of ethics and philosophy

Brichacek developed an interest in philosophy, which she considers a subdiscipline of ethics, as a first-year undergraduate student at DePaul University in Chicago. She found her first philosophy class so engaging and challenging that she decided to take more and more of them.

“The first time I read Kant, I found it incomprehensible,” she said. “Thankfully, in the second philosophy class I took, we did a deep dive on Nietzsche, Hegel and Kant. It started to make more sense. The puzzle pieces started coming together.”

After graduating in 2010 with her B.A. in English literature and minors in philosophy and art history, Brichacek matriculated at the University of Chicago for a master’s program in humanities, which also included several philosophy classes.

After earning her master’s degree in 2011, she began teaching philosophy, writing and other subjects at local community colleges and universities. Brichacek soon decided to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, she said, because of her love of the subject and to become “more competitive” for a full-time teaching gig. In 2021, she earned her Ph.D. from Loyola Chicago, with an emphasis on social and political philosophy and ethics.

That background made her especially appealing to USC Viterbi’s Engineering in Society program, which has heavily integrated ethics into its curriculum in recent years, EiS Director Steve Bucher said.

“Having a faculty member with a Ph.D. in philosophy in a school of engineering is a reflection of a commitment to a broader set of learning outcomes where our students connect their technical work with larger questions of meaning and impact,” he said.

 

A coach with a conscience

In February 2024, Brichacek made a presentation at APPE’s annual conference in Ohio about how to use science fiction in the teaching of engineering ethics. While there, she served as a judge at APPE’s national Ethics Bowl competition, a contest in which university student teams discuss and dissect current ethical issues.

The experience motivated Brichacek to assemble and coach the first team of USC students to participate in the next Ethics Bowl. In fall 2024, she recruited seven students, including four from USC Viterbi. Over the course of the semester, they met two hours per week to immerse themselves in ethical thinking.

Brichacek felt fully invested. “The way that people exist globally tends to be unethical. This is just a human condition problem,” she said. “And so, one possible solution to that, one that can at least help, I think, is ethics education.”

Throughout the semester, Brichacek taught the budding ethicists different frameworks by which to make sense of the world.

She talked about Kant’s deontological or duty-bound approach; utilitarianism, a school of thought popularized by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham that encourages people to make choices that result in the best outcomes for the most people; Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which calls for cultivating courage, temperance, honesty and modesty, among other characteristics; and care ethics, which advocates that before making a decision, people consider the possible ramifications their actions could have on those closest to them.

More specifically, Brichacek and the students examined several case studies provided by APPE. Topics ranged from whether people have the right to their discarded DNA to the morality of nondisclosure agreements to the ethics of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI), which allows people with paralysis to control devices with only their thoughts. The goal: Identify and flesh out the most salient ethical arguments and counterarguments in advance of the upcoming regional Ethics Bowl.

At the Dec. 6, 2024, competition at Stanford University, Brichacek said her USC students performed well, making thoughtful presentations and answering judges’ and opponents’ questions with aplomb. Although they failed to make the semifinals, she believes they benefited greatly from their participation.

“I see value in allowing students to be able to discuss and try to better understand these cases, because that helps them develop their own ethical kind of awareness,” said Brichacek, who plans to coach again next year. “It allows them to apply ethics in their own lives, and I think it makes them more ethical.”

 

From the Midwest to Troy

Brichacek grew up in Carol Stream, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.

In differing ways, her parents influenced her decision to become an educator. From her mother, a voracious reader who served as a ghost writer and editor for a nonprofit, she developed her communication skills. Her father, a math teacher who later became an IBM software engineer, “inspired me to be a lifelong learner,” Brichacek said.

A love of ideas and thirst for knowledge led her to academia. A true polymath, Brichacek taught more than 10 different course subjects, including philosophy, engineering communication and humanities, at Loyola University Chicago, Harold Washington College and Northwestern, among other schools, between 2012 and 2023.

When she saw the job posting for a teaching position in Viterbi’s Engineering in Society program, Brichacek applied with alacrity. “They were looking for someone who had the ability to teach ethics but who also had a writing instruction background,” she said. “I really do feel like it was kind of a perfect fit for my experience.”

Brichacek has blossomed in the land of Troy since joining USC Viterbi in fall 2023. She loves USC’s diversity of thought and diversity of students. She also enjoys running in the middle of winter, something that wasn’t always possible in the Midwest, and hiking in the Southland. She recently summited Strawberry Peak in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Most important, Brichacek hopes she’s making a small contribution to making the world a better place.

“Even if we can’t change the whole of totality of society or the world, we can make a difference in our lives and perhaps the lives of others who intersect it,” she said.