Compendium of Best Practices and Challenges in Ethics Education

• The autonomous status of ethics as a philosophical discipline (Greece, Türkiye)

One of the main problems that was raised by almost all participants, albeit in different ways, in the context of the Greek study, was the autonomous status of ethics as a philosophical discipline. The interview results on the matter can be subsumed under the following dilemma. Namely, students—at least those who problematise this issue—are either relativists or sceptics about the status of ethics. In the former case, ethics is understood as a matter of personal preference, a matter of psychological disposition, while in the latter, ethics is irrelevant and empty with no practical use or applicability. More specifically, regarding this latter horn of the dilemma, ethics appears too abstract, and dissociated from concrete social problems. In some cases, this scepticism takes an almost sociological turn: even if ethics is something of value, other sources of normativity prevail, such as the law, practices of the community (family and friends), or influential cultural elements (peer pressure, media, companies).

Furthermore, the problem of the autonomy of ethics appears in the form of another, parallel dilemma, regarding its status of normativity. In the first horn of the dilemma, ethics is indeed normative, but it does not constitute a philosophical area. In contrast, it is identified with the law, religion or theology, political ideology, customs, social norms, or entrenched social practices. In the second horn of the dilemma, ethics ceases being normative altogether. It is understood as identified with social sciences (political science, anthropology, sociology, or psychology).

The problem of the autonomy of ethics reveals itself yet in another manner when ethics courses are offered in a non-philosophy context. Participants from the philosophy departments in Türkiye indicated that many issues, such as those of agency and value, that are in fact vital to an ethical discussion are left aside when ethics is being taught in academic fields outside of philosophy. This marks a reductionist and isolative approach vis-à-vis ethics which meets the broad expectation of equipping students with a toolbox comprising of practical instruments for solving daily problems at the expense of over-simplifying the complex ethical issues. In this approach the assumption is that the ethical problem and data pertaining to it are out there to be dealt with via the instruments in a toolbox. A proper philosophical approach, on the other hand, should be able to address the ethical problem in its complexity and indeterminacy without the urge to simplification.

• Check-box approach vs. internalization of ethics (Türkiye, Germany)

In addition to the problematic perception of ethics outlined above (see 3.1.1), students in engineering and applied science programs may have prejudices about ethics being a “non-technical” but merely a “social” topic. One participant in studies in Türkiye who has been teaching ethics components in the context of the compulsory “Science, Technology and Society” course to the whole engineering faculty expressed that a factor contributing to this prejudice may be that the course is taught not by a technical expert but by a social scientist. According to her, students take the course not because they think ethics is important but out of the need for ticking a check-box in their curricula.

The checkbox approach is also problematic, as observed by German educators. In their discussion, they all mentioned that a problem they try to make clear with the students is that ethics is not simply a list of checkboxes. Their approach emphasizes applied ethics rather than keeping it solely in theory. In addition to the Turkish observation, they rooted this attitude in the standardized and rule-based approaches in STEM. They tried to modify it by emphasizing that ethics does not go with a one-size-fits-all concept, and each case requires and deserves its own specific considerations.

• Top-down and bottom-up approaches in designing ethics curricula (Türkiye, Germany)

The growing popularity of ethics education in European higher education is partly due to the new and demanding challenges arising from the extensive application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and biomedical technologies. However, even before human-technology relations became this complex and perhaps challenging, higher education institutions (HEIs) encountered external motivational influences regarding the inclusion of ethics education in their curricula. One influence here is the increasing popularity of accreditation processes all over the world in late 1990s. Some examples here include the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA, 2004), the ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) and national systems such as the Turkish Higher Education Quality Council (THEQC, 2015), Evaluation and Accreditation of Engineering Programs, Türkiye (MÜDEK, 2002), and the German Accreditation Council (2005).

Some higher education programs had to incorporate ethics elements into their curricula to meet the standards set by national or international accreditation systems in order to obtain accreditation. An illustrative example is the engineering faculty of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Türkiye which was required to incorporate ethics components into its curriculum as part of the accreditation process conducted by ABET in the 1990s. Later during the late 2010s, the Turkish Council of Higher Education (TCHE) mandated that ethics components be incorporated into all graduate curricula at higher education institutions.

The main challenge posed by top-down approaches in the Turkish context was that because the drive came from outside rather than from within academic institutions, endeavours to meet requirements often failed to customize ethics education for different academic settings. What is more, Turkish higher education institutions did not have the autonomy to set their own schedules and train human resources before the top-down requirement came into force. In the case of METU, for instance, in order to meet the TCHE’s directives, graduate programs extended the scope of the existing “Research Methods” courses to comply with the directives by adding ethics modules typically taught by non-experts. In certain instances, the course name was changed to “Research Methods and Ethics” as evidence of compliance.

On the other hand, a bottom-up trend was observed in acquired data from Germany regarding the course content and instruction. Educators are offering more participatory courses to students in technology ethics modules, in which they should bring their study case, choose the appropriate ethical and analytical framework for it, and present the final product or analysis. In this process, there are opportunities for external interventions, such as a session with an industry expert. Therefore, not only the educator or the chairholder has more power in designing a course—rather than the institution—but students are also actively shaping the course’s flow. However, the bottom-up trend itself has some infrastructural challenges.

This training format is new to study programs in Germany and was mainly developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the specificity of the pandemic allowed online or remote participation, external adversarial living situations and financial pressure on students are post-pandemic reasons to maintain the current approach. An interviewee claimed the harsh rental crisis for Master’s students forced them to work hard to afford a decent life. This situation resulted in fewer students’ on-site participation, constant preference for online participation, and visiting their classmates for the project on weekends. A widespread concern in the bottom-up format is how to keep the students interested and engaged during the course, while many do not receive the same interactions as they participate online.

• Lack of institutional infrastructure, human resources and teaching material
  • Lack of researchers and/or/as academic personnel (Türkiye, Greece)This issue may arise regardless of the academic discipline in which ethics courses or components are provided. To start with an example from Türkiye, when Turkish HEIs were required to add the ethics component to graduate curricula by the Council of Higher Education in 2010s or due to requirements of accreditation processes (e.g., in engineering programs, see 3.1.3), most faculties faced the difficulty that none of their academic staff were ready and equipped enough to offer ethics education, being non-ethicists. In other words, when the necessity to customize ethics education for different academic fields emerged, there were no trained human resources (instructors and researchers specializing in ethics) available for this task. It was not only that there were not sufficient human resources but also HEIs had no resources for offering institutional support to instructors. Whereas academic programs such as Philosophy, Biology, Education and Medicine which historically included ethics components in their curricula or research practices, adjusted to this shift relatively smoothly, other disciplines such as applied and natural sciences, computing and engineering had to address this gap by ad hoc solutions.Among these were practices such as inviting guest speakers to give seminars on different topics such as engineering ethics, theoretical ethics, technology ethics, research ethics, etc., analysing the professional codes of conduct and case study discussions. Nevertheless, even when instructors covered topics like research ethics or professional ethics, or identified relevant cases for classroom discussion, they often lacked the theoretical background to fully support their teaching. This experience felt akin to practicing ethics based on mere intuition. One of the focus group participants in Türkiye who is offering modules on research ethics in graduate curricula stated that “I am not … doing research about ethics, but teaching on ethical issues in research. But, of course, as the philosophical aspects are very hard for me, the concepts of ‘universal’, ‘relative’ [and the like in ethics] are the topics that I find most difficult during the introductory sessions of the class.” Moreover, instructors in disciplines lacking established professional codes felt constrained by the scarcity of teaching materials available to them. One participant expressed that he could not find a CODEX in Türkiye that reached consensus on engineering ethics, and therefore had to refer to the American CODEX in his classes.The lack of researchers and academic personnel doing ethics is raised in the Greek context as well. More specifically, two interpretations have been discussed. The first attributes this lack to different research focus. Namely, the number of researchers that focus on philosophy, in general, wanes, at least compared to the past, and those researchers that they do, they focus on other areas of philosophy. The second interpretation attributes this lack to organizational issues, whose scale varies according to the participants’ viewpoints. Namely, these organizational issues range from lack of state funding to issues within each educational institution. Finally, as a result, given the above, a specialisation in different subdisciplines of ethics (bioethics, environmental ethics, etc.) is lacking.
  • Lack or absence of co-operation among ethics institutions (Greece)In the Greek context, apart from the autonomous status of ethics as a discipline, the relative lack of specialised institutions altogether or the absence of co-operation amongst them is the second issue that was raised among almost all participants. In short, ethics institutions—ranging from ethics boards to specialised MA programmes—are relatively absent; and when they do exist, there is no co-operation amongst them. In this context, the issue of their public image qua their general visibility was raised.
  • Societal factors (Greece)
    In the Greek context, reference to societal factors has been made in the interviews, regarding their contribution to the main structural challenge of the autonomous status of philosophy. Namely, first, the narrower social background, such family and friends, has been discussed as influential in casting doubt to the status of ethics. Second, though, it’s the wider social background—namely, the role of ethics, in particular, and philosophy, in general, in society—that is considered constitutive to the above predicament. In short, the more philosophy does not play a role in the public sphere, the more doubtful students will be regarding its usefulness.
  • School level education (Greece)
    In the Greek context, the school level education was discussed as an infrastructural challenge to ethics education. The relevant issues of the school level education are twofold. On the one hand, there is a relative lack of familiarization with ethics at school, and, thus, an accompanying tacit identification of ethics with other disciplines (theology, law) and practices (religion). On the other, along with this specific lack, an equal absence of inculcation of related skills from the school curriculum is raised as an issue. Namely, critical thinking skills, argumentation skills, and debating skills fall short of what is to be needed at a university level, while knowledge of literature and film—areas from which the material of philosophical thought experiments can be mined out—is flagging.
  • Infrastructure issues (University level) (Greece)
    A series of university level infrastructural issues—ranging from the most practical, concrete and fundamental ones to the ones related almost exclusively to research—was raised in the Greek context. Namely, on the one hand, housing problems, materiality issues (desks, blackboards, markers, heating), and lack of electronic infrastructure (slide projectors, projector screens) were discussed. On the other, resource issues, especially regarding technology ethics, were raised, especially by younger academics. For example, problems of accessibility to online sources, lack of primary and secondary bibliography in Greek, and lack of library resources were some of the issues raised. (Indicatively, the number of secondary bibliography books in translation at the time when the focus groups and interviews were conducted was simply disheartening.) Finally, at least one participant raised the double issue of the ChatGPT. Namely, its current use by students is problematic since it is not used as an aiding tool but rather as a system to which essay writing is delegated, while the institutional response seems to follow the developments rather than to lead them.
  • Journal publishing industry and the flow of money (Germany)
    This challenge emerges from the traditional academic infrastructures like the ones in Germany, which seek journal publications and third-party funding for projects and positions. For instance, if an ethics educator successfully submits proposals and brings money, they can temporarily secure their position and plans. It is also the same story for journal publications. The current infrastructure is investing in publications. A survival attitude from an ethics educator in Science and Technology, Medicine, and Environmental Sciences is to publish as frequently as their STEM partners. However, publishing in humanities and social sciences has a different magnitude of complexity than STEM.

As the H-Index and the number of publications are also crucial to many institutions worldwide, an interview partner from Germany mentioned the undeniable role of journals (old and reputable or young and name-seeking) in changing the course of ethics education. In this view, the more these journals are willing to publish interdisciplinary publications, the more the faculty would be willing to financially support ethics education and interdisciplinary research by allocating infrastructure to them. For instance, famous science and technology journals like Science and Nature now accept “a few” social science papers or commentary addressing (ethical) issues in science and technology. Moreover, as two major Computer Science associations, ACM and IEEE are initiating conferences and publication opportunities – like ACM FAccT – including ethical, legal, and social frameworks. As these are well-known associations offering peer-reviewed publications, other faculty members would take their published research seriously.

• Traditional ethics education (Greece, Türkiye, Germany) 

The university level educational challenges that were raised in the Greek context are of two sorts. The first set of issues regards the curriculum formation. Namely, in general, ethics appears to have a peripheral position in the curricula and to be underrepresented in relation to other areas of philosophy. Moreover, even in the cases where philosophy subjects are evenly distributed, curricula appear fragmented. Specifically, the formation of the curriculum can impede students from acquiring a comprehensive ethics education. For example, ethics can be an optional subject, or philosophy courses appear to be unconnected amongst them. Additionally, significant time gap between ethics related courses has been observed, while ethics courses can be offered at a later stage when students might have already formulated their philosophical interests.

The second set of issues regards teaching itself. Namely, ethics is taught in a non-systematic way. In some of these cases, the historical approach can prevail: ethics is identified with the history of ethics, and, thus, ethics can become a kind doxography, a history of successive viewpoints on a series of matters. Even when this is not the case, the specific teaching methods are largely traditional. The most common ones remain the lecture form, the in-class discussion, and the study of primary and secondary bibliography at home. Sometimes, handouts and PowerPoint presentations supplement the main lectures. This finding was shared by the participants of the focus group studies conducted in Türkiye, where traditional teaching methods such as the lecture form was frequently described as outdated. Participants expressed a need for more engaging approaches in teaching and learning that encourage active learning (internalizing ethics) and critical thinking among students. They suggested including activities like case studies, role-play exercises, movie analysis, field visits and hands-on projects to enhance learning experiences and to better address the complexities of ethical issues. A participant from the faculty of medicine reported many examples of best practices as this academic discipline has traditionally incorporated ethics in curricula. Most prominent among them was perhaps the “shock education” approach where the instructor uses a real-life scenario to allow students face real-life ethical dilemmas. Having the actual individuals or role players present in the discussion hall intensifies the drama of the case, humanizes the issue and may cultivate empathy, a deeper grasp of the ethical complexities, and thus prompt a shift in perspective among students.

Regarding student assessment, written exams at the end of the course, that is, usually at the end of the term, remain the most popular form of undergraduate assessment, as reported in the studies in Greece. This assessment method is supplemented by in-class presentations and essay writing at home (or more rarely, a take-home exam) depending on the course (subject matter; compulsory or optional; number of participants) and the level (undergraduate or graduate) at which it is taught. Finally, albeit not very common, the method of focusing on and discussion of fictional case studies, with the help of artworks, such as, mainly, films and, secondarily, other literary forms (theatre plays, short stories and novels), is highly engaging. (Similarly, debating exercises are relatively rare (depending again on the course as specified by the aforementioned factors) but are equally highly engaging.) This final point clearly orientates towards a practice to be adopted: namely, discussing case studies (fictional or otherwise) with a relatively clear and concise narrative structure should be opted as a practice in order to both enhance the participation of those students that are already interested in the course, and engage those that seem lacking in the necessary interest (see 3.2.4.).

In Germany, educators were not concerned about the teaching materials or human resources. The size of the offered courses was a good fit for the number of participants. Moreover, the affiliated supervisors gave enough supervision to the students for the project-based course. Courses are designed to show ethics as an everyday-life practice, applied and flexible. They start with teaching theoretical ethics, from utilitarianism and consequentialism to ethics and law, and Situated Knowledges, constructivist, feminist perspectives, and value-sensitive design. Alongside these theoretical frameworks, the courses depend highly on the cases students bring or the external participants who join the discussion. The structures of the courses were mostly participatory, allowing students to discover the theoretical framework that would better fit their needs for their project or the final essay. This discovery needs integrative supervision from the educator that distances itself from the typical seminars and lectures in German universities, where the student is only a learner/listener and the educator is a teacher/lecturer. 

However, more hurdles are embedded in the traditional education structures, especially for engineers. The conventional force directs the program structure to offer more pure technical courses in technical universities or faculties. Not only does this push ethics courses into the corner, but it also requires a lot of effort from the ethics course educator to approach other faculty members for a more inclusive and interdisciplinary course. It requires the colleague’s agreement and interest in a more interdisciplinary course with an ethics touch and the faculty’s board approval of such a course. 

A successful story was when the ethicist proactively participated in a “technical” course as an educator and tried to connect ethics just in time with the technically taught concepts. While the students found the back-and-forth techno-ethical discussion interesting, even in this successful story, conducting examinations and evaluations is more complicated than expected. Usually, taking a test is unreasonable for the given courses, as they mainly focus on the application of ethics in real life. Therefore, projects and essays are reasonable approaches to evaluation. Projects involve teamwork, participation, and choosing the proper framework and analysis. The first two criteria are difficult to measure, and the rest depends on the team members’ skills and knowledge. The theoretical framework and analysis are also the core evaluation criteria for essays. Nonetheless, in both evaluation types, many STEM students showed lower-quality discussion and writing skills, making it a big challenge for educators.

•  Interdisciplinarity gap (Germany, Türkiye)

This gap has four settings, as discovered in the focus groups and interviews conducted in three countries. The first gap appears when students of different backgrounds and majors participate in the same ethics course, as each has various levels of ethics education—academically and as an extracurricular topic, or none at all. The educator has to make further efforts to make sure that the participants do not receive a set of unmeaningful jargon or are bored with content they have heard or studied before. Students’ knowledge about ethics and ethical concerns is described as a “white page.” Furthermore, approaching a techno/medico/environmental-ethical case while one discipline has already developed a strong theory, method, and argument and one is less clear or eloquent about it is noticeable in available materials and texts and students’ arguments in the class. Furthermore, the technologically deterministic mindset is reported to be prevalent among many STEM students. Refuting such a determinism while ensuring that the students would not take ethics as something that drives research results out is the art of the educator. 

The second setting includes non-academic views and concerns regarding the course topic. The interviewed educators in Germany engaged experts from the industry in their courses or were invited by the industry to give a course. Closing the gap between how the industry includes and perceives ethics and how it is being addressed in academia is also an interdisciplinarity gap. The challenge here is usually discussed as ethics being perceived as a set of checkboxes rather than an applied discipline. 

The third setting refers to the gap that is experienced in the case of an ethics course offered in an interdisciplinary topic or manner. This may occur regardless of the academic field in which the ethics course or component is being offered as the core instructor often lacks the academic background to fully support their teaching. Many focus group participants in Türkiye indicated that in order to tackle with the structural problem of insufficient number of researchers / academic personnel for offering ethics components in technical and applied disciplines, they invited guest speakers who would give seminars on different topics such as engineering ethics, theoretical ethics, technology ethics, research ethics, etc. On the other hand, within the social sciences and humanities, when existing ethics instructors cover specific topics or cases in technical fields such as techno-ethics, biomedical ethics or AI ethics—pressing societal challenges to be addressed in academia—the same problem arises. No matter how well-trained they are in ethics, these instructors often lack the essential background on specific topics to thoroughly address ethical issues. Even when they invest significant time in learning the fundamentals of a such a technical field, the rapid pace of technological advancement quickly renders their efforts obsolete. One of the focus group participants in İstanbul who comes from an educational background in Philosophy stated that he stopped covering some of the topics in his Bioethics course as he failed to keep pace with the latest advancements in the field. Another colleague from a philosophy department addressed the current inequalities between technical and applied sciences on the one hand and social sciences and humanities on the other in terms of the human/financial/academic resources these fields receive for compensating for the interdisciplinarity gap. Her point was that bridging the gap was understood as supporting technical and applied sciences rather than the social sciences and humanities which becomes all the more obvious when one looks at the amounts of funding made available for research and education in the two fields.

Finally, while the individual educator’s approach to teaching ethics is participatory and interdisciplinary, the relevant department/faculty may not always accept it. One of the interviewees in Germany explained that at the institutional level, they encounter a dichotomy in the reception of their courses. Some faculty members, particularly from engineering and computer science, embrace the integration of ethics and sustainability into curricula, recognizing the value of adapting to contemporary educational demands. Conversely, a faction of traditionalists resists this evolution, advocating for a focus on conventional technical instruction. This schism reflects the broader debate on the role of ethics in technical education and the need for a balanced approach that accommodates the evolving landscape and foundational knowledge.

•  Lack of local case studies (Türkiye)

Among the prominent discussions in the two focus groups in Türkiye were 1) the difficulty experienced by students in internalizing ethical dilemmas and 2) grasping the practical implications of ethical principles. Case studies were highlighted as a powerful tool for addressing these difficulties. Yet, even such a strong instrument encountered difficulties when it was not carefully tailored to specific teaching and learning contexts. Pre-formulated ethical dilemmas in textbooks or cases from the global context (albeit their significance) may not align with the interests of the students. As a means for tackling with this challenge, participants underlined the importance of local and real-life case studies noting that these could resonate more with students. According to the majority of participants, teaching practices that facilitate discussion of local cases, focus on students’ actual experiences and explore ethical dilemmas relevant to their lives motivate students to directly engage with and internalize the cases as they grapple with formulating relevant ethical dilemmas themselves. However, cases from local contexts are hardly available in the current literature in Turkish.

• The need for ethnographic fieldwork for ethics education in STS curricula (international workshop)

STS emphasizes the importance of understanding the social and cultural contexts in which science and technology are developed and used. This perspective helps students to appreciate the societal impacts of scientific and technological advancements, and to recognize the need for ethical considerations in research and development. Although case studies are a powerful tool for ethics education, they do not necessarily involve the perspectives of stakeholders in real-life. In order to address this gap, one of the participants of the international workshop in Athens pointed out to the importance of ethnographic fieldwork as an alternative for case studies in ethics education particularly in STS curricula. According to her view, ethnographic fieldwork allows a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of e.g., scientific trials with humans, beyond what can be obtained through textual research, thought experiments or expert interviews alone. By involving stakeholders through ethnographic research for understanding the ethical perspectives at play as well as for developing and implementing ethical frameworks, students can gain a better understanding of the real-world implications of new technologies and the ethical challenges associated with them. This engagement can also help to ensure that ethical frameworks are responsive to the concerns and needs of stakeholders, and are inclusive of diverse perspectives and values.