A Pragmatic Approach for Teaching Ethics to Engineers and Computer Scientists Thomas Taro Lennerfors Dept. of Civil and Industrial Engineering Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden thomas.lennerfors@angstrom.uu.se Mikael Laaksoharju Dept. of Information Technology Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden mikael.laaksoharju@it.uu.se Matthew Davis Dept. of Civil and Industrial Engineering Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden matthew.davis@angstrom.uu.se Peter Birch Dept. of Civil and Industrial Engineering Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden peter.birch@angstrom.uu.se Per Fors Dept. of Civil and Industrial Engineering Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden per.fors@angstrom.uu.se Abstract—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. Index Terms—Curriculum development, STEM, Engineering education, Computer science education, Ethical aspects, Ethics I. I NTRODUCTION At some point we realized that we had a problem. For years, we had suspected that something was not right about our ethics teaching for engineers. Until five years ago, the courses that we had taught were electives, which had meant a certain degree of freedom when it came to the creation of content and structure of the courses (in addition to the fact that students who were not interested in the course could refrain from applying for it or, if they realized this too late, easily just drop out of it). The format was simple and, dare we claim, classical: we combined established ethical theories, such as consequentialism – maximizing good outcomes – and deontology – performing the right actions – with more modern theories; we discussed professional ethics, and paradigmatic cases, such as the Challenger accident; we assigned students to interview practitioners to learn something about how ethics could relate to the real world, and although each part seemed good in itself, we lacked a clear idea about how it all was supposed to form a coherent whole. Interestingly, this did not lead to any particular problems when it came to student evaluations, and neither students nor other faculty put any pressure on us to change anything. Rather, some of the engineering students – those with prior interests in humanities, social sciences, and who had perhaps even studied philosophy – thought that the courses were amongst the best they had ever taken. Still, even though also most of the more stereotypical engineering students signalled that they were satisfied, we felt that they were not really given what they needed. Needless to say, we did not know at the time what they needed, and as we have come to learn, there is some debate about what a course, or an across-the-curriculum module, in ethics should aim at and contain. We will return to this particular lesson in the discussion section, but perhaps the best way to put it in hindsight, is that we taught courses about engineering ethics, rather than courses for engineering ethics. In 2015, it was decided that the course would be obligatory within a certain technical Master’s program at the Faculty of Science and Technology. Following a larger evaluation project (2010–2013) there were also indications that most of the engineering programs in Sweden failed to fulfil the degree criteria in the Sweden Higher Education Ordinance related to ethics. The courses that we had taught until then were developed based on academic discussions about ethics, rather than in rela- tion to any degree criteria or external institutional obligations. However, since the course was going to be obligatory and an instrument for an educational program to fulfil its degree criteria, we had to start from these. The criterion that inspired us the most was the one that states that students should have the ability to make judgments, taking ethics into account: [For a Degree of Master (120 credits) the student shall] demonstrate the ability to make assessments in the main field of study informed by relevant disciplinary, social and ethical issues and also to