A Pragmatic Approach for Teaching Ethics to Engineers and Computer Scientists

In this Innovative Practice Full Paper, we present a novel approach and a framework for teaching ethics to engineering and computer science students. The paper starts off by describing the background and context for the development process. The framework is sequential and consists of the following stages: Awareness, responsibility, critical thinking and action. It is described and related to earlier literature on engineering ethics, and we have tried to reflect our educational approach also in our description of the framework. The framework can contribute to research about engineering ethics education by re-stating the importance of responsibility, and by providing a sequential, interdependent heuristic that can make students and teachers aware of how different learning outcomes are related. The reconstructed, underlying reason for the pedagogical development is claimed to be an understanding of the human being from a post-phenomenological, virtue-based, and post-heroic standpoint.