Teaching Ethics

In an engineering writing course whose theme is climate change and engineering, I foreground climate change as an ethical problem. At the end of the semester, I ask students to compare their attitudes toward climate change from when they began the course to their attitudes at the end. Some report that, as a result of knowing more about the difficulty and scale of the problem, they have become more pessimistic about our ability to solve it. Climate change despair has been studied from several disciplinary perspectives. Here, I approach the issue from an ethical perspective. My question is, how should I address students’ affective responses to climate change? After providing background on the course and the students’ attitudes, I review the literature on the ethics of climate change despair, hope, and false hope. I then argue for a pedagogy that guides students toward a critical hope and engineering praxis.

Many introductory courses in ethics stress competence in ethical theories popular in modern Western, Anglophone philosophy. This is limiting to ethics students in two ways: 1) it privileges theory over practice in the area of philosophy that has the most intuitive practical importance and application and 2) it privileges modern Western ethical theory at the expense of philosophical and practical engagement with all other world ethical systems. This essay seeks to provide a pedagogical corrective for both of these trends in the context of a virtue ethics course in offering 1) a blueprint for a course in practiced virtue ethics at the high school level based on my version of a required course, “Ethics and the Cultivation of Character” in the Leadership Education Department at Culver Academies (where I am one of the Ethics instructors) that 2) draws on a theoretical apparatus for virtue ethics derived from both Western and non-Western world philosophies.

This paper discusses the value in implementing photography as a means of assessment in philosophy courses. I specifically discuss how I utilize this interdisciplinary method in my honors environmental philosophy course with encouraging results, and how it can be easily employed in other philosophy courses as well. Photography is the basis for one of my larger course projects, the environmental philosophy in photo project (EPPP). The EPPP offers students novel methods of applying and understanding environmental ethical theories and new ways of making meaning. In the following, I offer a defense of photographic methods for philosophical assessments, project instructions, student learning objectives and feedback, overall effectiveness of the project, and potential uses of photographic methods in other philosophy courses.

Many students feel despair when addressing systemic issues of ethical significance, such as climate change, and student despair has been exacerbated by the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic. This creates an unwelcoming space for authentic student engagement. To address the problem, we present an imaginary of radical hope, a pedagogical tool informed by trauma, for developing a brave space for class discussion. It is psychologically beneficial to acknowledge negative emotions, clearing the emotional space for students to engage. Therefore, we frame ethics courses with an uncomfortable discussion, asking students to draw from their positionality and share their feelings of hope and despair, related to course material. In this paper, we explain the problem of despair motivating the project, describe the pedagogical and ethical support of our strategy, share the assignment, activity, and examples, and discuss takeaways.

As attention to the pervasiveness and severity of environmental challenges grows, technical universities are responding to the need to include environmental topics in engineering curricula and to equip engineering students, without training in ethics, to understand and respond to the complex social and normative demands of these issues. But as compared to other areas of engineering ethics education, environmental ethics has received very little attention. This article aims to address this lack and raises the question: How should we teach environmental ethics to engineering students? We argue that one key aspect such teaching should address is the tendency of engineers towards technical framing of (social) problems. Drawing then on engineering ethics pedagogy we propose that the competencies of moral sensitivity and critical thinking can be developed to help engineering students with problem (re)framing. We conclude with an example from our teaching that operationalizes these competencies.

Using picture books to prompt philosophical conversations with children is an effective means to raise awareness of environmental issues and invite children to think creatively about their responsibility for their community and environment. In our Philosophy for Children (P4C) program at Kern County Public libraries in Bakersfield, we address environmental ethics issues as part of our regular curriculum as well as for Earth Day conversations. Children discuss how they may reuse and recycle objects that they ordinarily discard, how small acts of care may have big consequences for their community, and how they share reciprocal relationships to other living creatures, even insects. Most importantly, during such conversations children reflect and deliberate on how they can act on their insights to expand their moral imagination and empower them as citizens of their community and the world.

In respect to the increased number of cases of research misconduct in Sweden, especially the Macchiarini case, a new national ethics legislation has been adopted. Following the previous and new legal acts and the Higher Ordinance for studies, Swedish universities have established qualitative measures to make sure that PhD students have knowledge about research ethics when graduating, for instance through offering third-cycle courses in research ethics. In this article, we describe how a Swedish university has been working with such a course to promote good research practice and ethical integrity to the researchers of tomorrow. We are doing this by describing the course structure and content, its outcome in relation to the legislation concerning misconduct in research and ethics within research, as a conscious reflection on research and its consequences. The results indicate that the course is in alignment with other scientists and/or rules and regulations.