International Conference on Ethics and Human Values in Engineering ICEHVE 2008 (Eds) © Barcelona, 2007 LEARNING ENGINEERING ETHICS BY DEBATE CLIMENT NADEU, JOSÉ B. MARIÑO AND MIREIA FARRÚS Departament de Teoria de Senyal i Comunicacions Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Campus Nord UPC, 08034 Barcelona, Spain e-mail: climent.nadeu@upc.edu Key words: ethics; engineering education; science, tecnology and society (STS). Summary. In this communication, the authors aim to describe their experience in a couple of optional STS courses taught at the school Telecom BCN (ETSETB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). The first one is about the macro-ethics area of technology and society, while the second one focuses on the micro-ethics area of professional responsibility. Both courses are based on the active participation of students in the classroom, mainly through the use of debates, where opposed viewpoints have to be argued. The paper is especially focused to the debates carried out by the students about cases of ethical conflict. 1 INTRODUCTION As the complexity of the technology and its ability to transform nature and society is continuously increasing, the responsibility of the engineers becomes more and more apparent. This fact is stimulating the existence of many debates, committees of ethics, codes of ethics, etc., which are especially focused to environment and genetic engineering but also to other areas like information technologies. That growing interest in ethics of science and technology and, at the personal level, in the professional responsibility of engineers, is also entering the university classrooms (see e.g. [1]-[2]). The authors, who are professors of technical disciplines, are currently teaching two optional Science, Technology and Society (STS) courses at the BCN Telecom School (ETSETB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Those 3-credits courses resulted from splitting a previous 6-credits course that had started in 1994. The first one, Technology and Society (T&S), is about the wide macro-ethics area of STS, while the second one, Technoethics (TE), focuses more on the micro-ethics area of professional responsibility of the engineer. Both are optional courses which belong to the curriculum of the Telecommunication Engineering degree (similar to the Electrical Engineering curricula from other countries), but up to 5 students from other engineering curricula can also enroll on it. They are one semester long (14 real weeks), offered in alternate semesters, and with 2 hours per week of class attendance. The classroom is a meeting room with a large table so that all the students and teachers can sit around it. There is also a screen for projection of movies and slides. An additional room is available to allow splitting the group in two subgroups when it is needed.