PRACTISING ETHICS IN ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Technological advancements are expanding continuously to affect more private, societal, and environmental aspects of our lives. This raises a serious need to equip those who lead and build such technologies with the skills that apply ethical principles to guide such development. If teaching ethics can provide such guidance, for technical disciplines it is often hard to translate principles into actions. In this paper, we describe a doctoral course whose learning experience provided a group of science and engineering researchers with a toolkit for practicing ethics. This toolkit consists of a participatory approach, stimulating peer-to-peer debates; and a system thinking perspective, to understand the interconnectedness and causality of ethical events. With these, researchers identified one's spectrum of ethical actions that could mitigate or prevent challenges. By discussing the effectiveness of these methods, we conclude by drawing a list of recommendations for future work. This to cover the growing need to equip scientists and engineers with skills that guide the understanding of what decisions can lead to ethical actions.