Dogs are actually an interesting example because I think they are engineered (by evolution) to be "good", or rather, to be obedient. The only reason you can train a dog, and the reason that dogs were ever successfully domesticated in the first place, is that they have an inbuilt desire to be cooperative and to submit to the authority of a more powerful "dog". The dog is happy when you're happy with it, and sad when you're angry at it. Making it obedient is thus a fairly simple matter. Try that with just about any other animal (especially any other large carnivore which could seriously hurt you if it wanted to) and you'll be out of luck.
Humans are actually similar -- we have some sort of an innate ethical sense, though human ethics is a lot more complicated than dog ethics. We're smart enough to realise that our own short-term best interests may be served by acting in a non-ethical manner, and we've evolved all sorts of defence mechanisms to cope with this fact, including the moral outrage and desire for revenge which we feel when we see someone behaving non-ethically.
So in conclusion, while you can't necessarily engineer ethics into a mind, you can hard-wire in the structures necessary to care about ethics. Humans and dogs both have some sort of ethical sense wired in.
Humans are actually similar -- we have some sort of an innate ethical sense, though human ethics is a lot more complicated than dog ethics. We're smart enough to realise that our own short-term best interests may be served by acting in a non-ethical manner, and we've evolved all sorts of defence mechanisms to cope with this fact, including the moral outrage and desire for revenge which we feel when we see someone behaving non-ethically.
So in conclusion, while you can't necessarily engineer ethics into a mind, you can hard-wire in the structures necessary to care about ethics. Humans and dogs both have some sort of ethical sense wired in.