Positioning Science and Technology Ethics Education in Higher Education in the New Era
title: "Positioning Science and Technology Ethics Education in Higher Education in the New Era" slug: "fanchunping-tech-ethics-education-orientation-2022.en" date: "2022-11-01" category: "education" author: "Fan Chunping" excerpt: "In the new technological revolution and crisis era, under the lens of science and technology ethics, morality has become a competency requirement, making S&T ethics education a complex, urgent, and formidable task. This paper argues that the educational objective of S&T ethics education should be 'the enlightenment of ethical consciousness and the cultivation of moral competence,' and that it should reach all students regardless of their major."
Positioning Science and Technology Ethics Education in Higher Education in the New Era
Author: Fan Chunping (1963–), female, from Siping, Jilin Province. M.A. in Philosophy. Senior Editor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Institute of Technology, M.A. supervisor. Research interests: philosophy of engineering, ethics education in science, technology and engineering, higher engineering education, sustainable development, and ecological civilization.
Abstract: Against the backdrop of the new technological revolution and an era of cascading crises, S&T ethics education has become a complex, urgent, and formidable task—one that existing forms of S&T ethics education are ill-equipped to shoulder. Approaching S&T ethics education from three dimensions—educational objectives and target audience, value orientation and content curation, and disciplinary and curricular positioning—this paper argues that the educational goal should be "the enlightenment of ethical consciousness and the cultivation of moral competence," and that S&T ethics education should be extended to all students regardless of their discipline. The value orientation should be aligned with the sustainable future of the "Earth Community" and its descendants, which in turn should guide the selection of educational content. The paper contends that S&T ethics education is a matter of great importance for higher education today, bearing directly on technology for good and the fate of humanity. Recommendations are offered spanning educational objectives, value orientation, curriculum development, and disciplinary institution-building.
Keywords: new era; higher education; science and technology ethics; moral competence; educational positioning
I. The Destiny of Our Times and the Mission of S&T Ethics
We are living through a new technological revolution and a civilizational transition. The risk society is morphing into a crisis era characterized by non-linearity, unpredictability, and turbulence. The crises are all-encompassing—global warming, ecological collapse, pandemics, wars, cultural conflicts, commercial and political strife, runaway technologies—entangled, mutually reinforcing, and resistant to resolution. Existential questions and developmental challenges intertwine; development undercuts the very foundations of survival, and survival imposes substantive constraints on development. The world is forced to confront the question: Where is humanity headed? We must face the facts squarely, reexamine our circumstances and condition, make value choices, and restructure our developmental trajectory. This is a scientific question, but even more so an ethical one. It requires consensus among all people and concerted action—only then is there hope of reaching the far shore.
Morality and ethics are ancient concepts in human culture and scholarship, yet they are also ever-evolving and perpetually renewed. Ethics is the discipline that describes and interprets the moral relations that emerge among members of a community through competitive coexistence and mutualistic symbiosis. Morality, in turn, refers to the ideas and norms that guide judgment and choice when confronted with different options. Compared to the challenges of risks and crises, "building consensus among all people" is an even greater challenge. This is the destiny of our times, and it is the mission of S&T ethics. To face this destiny and meet this challenge, we need research and deliberation to understand the underlying logic and mechanisms by which the world operates, to clarify what kind of future we truly desire, and to disseminate and educate in order to build consensus and translate it into action. In this undertaking, S&T ethics research and education play a pivotal role.
Between 1890 and 1912, Émile Durkheim first offered a "public course in social science" at the University of Bordeaux. This course later appeared under titles such as "Physiology of Law and Custom" (Physiologie du droit et des mœurs) and "General Physics of Custom and Law" (Physique générale des mœurs et du droit) at the Sorbonne, eventually settling on the name "Sociology" while retaining broadly similar content. After Durkheim's death, visiting scholar Hüseyin Nail Kubali and Durkheim's nephew Marcel Mauss edited his lecture notes. In 1937, three chapters on professional ethics were published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, followed in 1947 by six chapters on civic morality in the Revue de la Faculté de Droit d'Istanbul. Kubali subsequently compiled the remaining nine chapters on civic morality, bringing the total to 18 lectures. The complete volume was published in French in 1950 under the title Leçons de sociologie: Physique des mœurs et du droit. In 1957, it was translated into English and published as Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. In 2015, the Commercial Press included this work in its "Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics" series, translating it from the French original while adopting the English title.[1]
The evolution of Durkheim's course title and book title reveals a fundamental truth: ethics belongs to the category of underlying logics and mechanisms by which human society operates. Durkheim's vacillation between "physiology" and "physics," seen through the lens of contemporary understanding, likely reflects a distinction between viewing human society as a natural organism versus viewing it as a part of the cosmos.
Barely more than a century has passed since Durkheim's era, yet those hundred-odd years witnessed the most explosive advance of science and technology in human history. This formidable technological power has reshaped the global landscape, reconfigured the relationships between humanity and nature, among people, and between humans and technology, and it will determine humanity's future. S&T ethics—defined as "the values and behavioral norms that scientific and technological activities ought to follow" and "a crucial safeguard for the healthy development of S&T undertakings"[2]—has become an increasingly vital part of the underlying logic and mechanisms enabling the harmonious functioning and sustainable development of contemporary human society. It has entered the realm of first principles governing social operations. The orientation of S&T ethics and how well it is implemented will determine which path human civilization takes and what outcome it meets. The task of equipping the public—whether as S&T practitioners or as S&T recipients—with an understanding of these mechanisms and the ability to apply them has now fallen to higher education as a mandate of the times.
On March 20, 2022, Xinhua News Agency issued on behalf of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council the Opinions on Strengthening the Governance of Science and Technology Ethics (hereafter the "Two Offices Opinions")[2], requiring all regions and departments to "attach importance to S&T ethics education" and "promote the institutionalization of S&T ethics training mechanisms." On March 23, the Ministry of Education convened a "Launch Meeting for the Special Initiative on S&T Ethics Education in Universities," calling for "orderly and vigorous implementation of S&T ethics education"[3]. On June 24, the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education issued a follow-up notice (hereafter the "Notice") requiring "thorough implementation of the spirit of the Two Offices Opinions and effective execution of the Ministry's special initiative on S&T ethics education in universities." This strong starting point laid a solid foundation for subsequent implementation.
II. Why Is a Study of Educational Positioning Necessary?
Given such a complex theoretical and practical backdrop, and such an important, urgent, and formidable educational task, how should we define its educational objectives so as to fulfill its mission? And how should we go about achieving those objectives?
Although scattered and unsystematic, some forms of S&T ethics education do currently exist in higher education. They can be broadly categorized into three forms. The first is dedicated education—specialized S&T ethics general-education courses with an explicit orientation toward the overarching theme of "S&T ethics" or toward specific subfields such as engineering ethics, medical ethics, or AI ethics. Aside from "Engineering Ethics" for engineering graduate students and "Medical Ethics" for medical students, most of these are elective courses, reaching a very small proportion of the overall student body. The second is embedded education—where instructors of non-S&T-ethics-oriented required courses, such as "Marxist Philosophy," "Ideology and Morality," or even "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" at the undergraduate level, or "Dialectics of Nature" at the graduate level, integrate blocks of S&T ethics content out of their own commitment to the subject. Such courses are generally required and thus reach a large audience, but the class hours allocated to S&T ethics are limited. The third is infused education—where, in a very small number of STEM courses and other types of courses, instructors sensitive to S&T ethics issues weave in relevant ethical content as opportunities arise in the course of teaching.
Despite these three possible avenues, the coverage of S&T ethics education—whether in terms of total course offerings or across the entire academic trajectory—remains quite limited and exhibits strong randomness and fragmentation. It is essentially a matter of a small number of instructors offering or touching on the subject based on their own capabilities and willingness, without planning, institutional structures, mechanisms, or evaluation. The effects are difficult to consolidate. Often, classroom discussions generate considerable resonance only to be forgotten once the course ends. How, under conditions of generally weak S&T ethics awareness among students, can S&T ethics education avoid becoming a hollow formality? How can its educational impact be protected from being drowned out by demanding specialized courses, broad general-education offerings, and lively extracurricular activities, and instead leave a deep imprint on students' consciousness that guides their future professional conduct? To answer this, a logically clear positioning of the various dimensions of S&T ethics education is needed.
The assertion that students' S&T ethics awareness is weak and that the retention of relevant education is poor is supported not only by empirical studies[4][5] but also by one indirect piece of evidence. The author teaches a course on "Scientific Integrity and Academic Honesty" for first-year master's and doctoral students at her institution. Once a large class with over two hundred students (now capped at 80), the course uses short written responses as an attendance method. At the first session, students are asked to write in a few concise sentences: "What is science?" Judging from the responses, barely one in ten could articulate the basic meaning of science. The graduate students in this institution come from universities across the country, and "Scientific Integrity and Academic Honesty" is typically their very first course after enrollment, so this survey result can serve as a valid sample for gauging the effectiveness of relevant education at the undergraduate level in Chinese universities nationwide.
In the current crisis era, the most fundamental value demand of S&T ethics is to bring benefit and avert disaster. If one truly grasps the sheer material power of contemporary technology and the strength of the social forces driving it forward, and understands the depth of the crises ahead, one will appreciate how extraordinarily difficult it is to "bring benefit and avert disaster." To ensure that the ethically diverse cultural deposits accumulated over history do not become a burden on S&T ethics education but rather a resource for guiding technology toward the good, we need to make rational selections among theoretical and practical ethical resources under clear objectives, while developing and refining them through research, to identify suitable educational content and methods for realizing the educational purpose.
III. What Are the Fundamental Dimensions of Positioning?
1. Educational Objectives and Target Audience
Immanuel Kant, the founder of German classical philosophy and deontological ethics, traced the absolute "good will"—that which "could be considered good without limitation"—from the level of moral metaphysics down to the concept of duty, which is more closely connected to action. His "first proposition of morality" states that "an action must be done from duty in order to have moral worth"[6],17. Max Weber, in turn, clarified the moral value of duty from the perspective of intellectual history and sociology: "The highest form that an individual's moral activity can take is to evaluate the fulfillment of their secular duties"[7]. Yet Aldo Leopold, the father of land ethics, observed: "Obligations have no meaning without conscience"[8],199. Thus, our ethics education confronts two major tasks: the enlightenment of moral consciousness and the cultivation of the capacity to bear obligations and duties.
Regarding the evolution of ethics, He Huaihong notes: "From the traditional focus on the person to the modern focus on conduct; from a primary concern with virtue, character, values, and ideals to a primary concern with actions, norms, rules, and obligations"; "from prioritizing how to achieve happiness and felicity, to prioritizing the most urgent and severe misfortunes"[9],21-34. The author believes that focusing on actions, norms, rules, and obligations, and prioritizing the most urgent and severe misfortunes, is fundamentally about the capacity to choose right actions and avert misfortune. In the current crisis era, morality has transcended the categories of virtue, character, and disposition; it has become a competency requirement. The aims and objectives of S&T ethics research and education should undergo yet another evolution of their core ideas, shifting toward a focus on "the capacity to realize technology for good as a whole" and "the individual's capacity to fulfill moral duties."
The graduates our higher education system produces should be outstanding individuals capable of confronting the fundamental questions and needs of human civilization, understanding the underlying logic and mechanisms of civilizational operations, and possessing the ability and commitment to identify, analyze, and solve problems—able to make the right choices when faced with complex situations. S&T morality has become an indispensable and irreplaceable form of knowledge and competency—not optional, not a lofty ideal, but a realistic, necessary, and unavoidable requirement. What is meant by moral competence is the capacity to make judgments and choices, and to bear duties, based on information and reason. The Two Offices Opinions state at the very outset that the document is issued "to further improve the S&T ethics system, enhance S&T ethics governance capacity, effectively prevent and control S&T ethics risks, continuously promote technology for good and benefit humanity, and achieve high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and strength"[2]. Thus, the cultivation of competence is key.
Our S&T ethics education should explicitly position its educational objective as "the enlightenment of ethical consciousness and the cultivation of moral competence." It is not merely an education in virtue, general knowledge, disposition, and attitude, but an education in responsibility and competence—a capacity for discernment, reasoning, materialization, and execution. Under the framework of S&T ethics, morality is a competency requirement as important as professional competence; indeed, ethical competence is itself an integral component of professional competence.[10] This capacity includes lucid awareness, clear concepts, rich relevant knowledge, appropriate value sensitivity and ethical imagination, and, on this foundation, the ability to judge, to choose, and to act. Without such competence, there is no guarantee that powerful technologies will "bring benefit and avert disaster."
Should only STEM students receive S&T ethics education? The answer is no. All students—all future citizens of the Earth—should receive the enlightenment of S&T ethics and possess S&T ethics competence. As members of the human community in the "deep-tech era"[11], the future belongs to everyone; no one can stand apart.
Every person either acts as a professional—a producer and wielder of technological power—or as a non-professional—a user of technological products and services and a bearer of their negative externalities. And every professional, beyond the scope of their specialty, is also a user and a bearer. Professionals need ethical value sensitivity, an understanding of their professional responsibilities, the capacity to make ethical choices about the technical plans and pathways they implement, and the ability to exercise S&T moral agency. Non-professionals also need ethical value sensitivity; confronted with technological information and applications, they need the capacity to understand, discern, and choose (to adopt, use, or reject, resist, veto), and the capacity to participate in public hearings and oversight. S&T ethics education, therefore, is education for S&T professionals and also education for future citizens of the Earth. The massive and demanding task of S&T ethics education must be shouldered by the entire higher education sector through substantive educational institutional arrangements and a faculty capable of this educational mission.
2. Value Orientation and Content Curation
In our current educational system, it is generally assumed by default that specialized courses cultivate competence while general-education courses serve to broaden horizons, build disposition, or cultivate character. Students tend to invest their energy primarily in specialized courses. For general-education courses, aside from hastily and instrumentally consulting a few references to complete end-of-term assignments, they typically devote little additional learning effort. Without mutual reinforcement among clusters of courses and without resonance from specialized courses, it is exceedingly difficult for general-education courses to achieve the effect of cultivating competence. Hans Jonas, the master of responsibility ethics, offered this insight: "Responsibility originates from a person's response to a divine calling, or, for atheists, from obedience to the voice of conscience." And conscience is the tribunal of morality, capable of internally judging the individual at the moment of action.[12] If, through appropriate content selection and course design, we can enable students to grasp not only that something is so but also why it is so within a limited number of class hours, this may help awaken cultural self-awareness and inner conscience, allowing the S&T ethics content taught to integrate into students' deeper consciousness, settle into the bedrock of their values, and become an unthinking reflex that guides their future practice.
Modern S&T ethics is an evolving frontier field. It cannot wait until it is fully mature to be taught; it can only be educated through research and researched through education, developing iteratively. The reason ethics is a discipline—as opposed to a mere pile of norms—is precisely that it constitutes a logical system. The approach of communicating ethical ideas solely through case studies plus normative prescriptions was long ago rejected by Kant[6],41, presumably because it fails to reveal the underlying rationale.
As one of the oldest fields of inquiry, the treasury of human ethical thought contains a sprawling and diverse collection of ideas and theoretical resources. How to select among them is an extraordinarily thorny problem. The world of science and technology advances at breakneck speed, yet culture possesses resilience, adhesiveness, and continuity. In Jonas's words: "If we ask which of yesterday's values will be useful and important for tomorrow's world, we are simultaneously asking which values may be obsolete or unimportant. Conversely, according to the plan, which new values will be called forth by a new kind of tomorrow. What is presupposed in this case is not a kind of knowledge, but a vision of what kind of world tomorrow will be."[13] In the 1980s, Jonas used thought to foresee the future in this way, synthesizing deontological ethics (with its focus on motivation) and utilitarian ethics (with its focus on consequences), while transcending the anthropocentric limitation shared by both—their exclusive concern with the ethical subject. Going beyond Kant's dictum that "man legislates for nature" and utilitarianism's pursuit of the greatest human happiness, Jonas proposed an ontological ethics that is "human-centered" yet "nature-grounded," viewing all beings on Earth as an integral whole[12]. He endowed "care" and "fear" with ontological significance, proposing the "heuristics of fear"—knowing what is at risk is what tells us what to preserve, what to avoid, and why.[14],26; [15] Jonas oriented human ethical responsibility toward the future, insisting that "the existence of humanity must never be put at risk"[14],37, that "the existence of humanity is the first commandment," and that "living well is the second commandment"—the first being an unshakable categorical imperative.[14],99
Reflecting on the evolution of human ethics, what we see is a process moving from spontaneous emergence, to the pursuit of freedom, and then to rational self-discipline. Because technology has amplified humanity's material capabilities, self-discipline—traditionally a matter of human nature alone—has extended to encompass the regulation of technology. Compared to traditional ethics, modern S&T ethics has undergone two core evolutionary shifts.
First, the expansion of the scope of the ethical subject. Originally, morality was "a system of social norms that promotes rational self-direction or self-determination among the members of a society"[9],38. Leopold extended the concept of "member" to the "land community"—including the soil, water, plants, and animals within the human living environment[8],192. Jonas called this the "totality of nature." Under the purview of S&T ethics, this scope may in the future extend even to inorganic life forms[17].
Second, the expansion of the space of ethical choice. All morality arises within a community. Non-human organisms in nature live according to natural laws and by instinct; individuals and groups are governed by necessity and have no freedom of choice. Without freedom and choice, where everything is necessity, morality cannot be said to exist. Human technological and economic development has expanded the space of choice, propelling humanity from the realm of necessity toward the realm of freedom. Yet an increase in possible choices also increases uncertainty. The greater the space of choice and the more options available, the greater the freedom the subject acquires—and correspondingly, the greater the moral responsibility that must be borne. This is the arena of morality. It requires ample knowledge, value sensitivity, ethical imagination, and moral competence.
How to awaken cultural self-awareness, and how to convey the underlying rationale—these questions involve the selection of ethical values and the curation of course content.
Regarding value orientation: Leopold pointed out that "an ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence"[8],192-193, and that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise"[8],213. Jonas stated that "in this technological civilization which has become 'omnipotent,' if not in its constructive potential then at least in its destructive potential, caring for the future of humanity is the overriding responsibility of collective human action. This care must evidently include care for the future of the totality of nature on Earth as an essential condition of humanity's own existence"[14],136. Jonas's "totality of nature" refers to the whole of living and non-living entities in the natural world, roughly equivalent to Leopold's "land community." Such values demand that today's science and technology take responsibility for the sustainable future of the "Earth Community" and its descendants.
Leopold's idea of the "ethical community," Jonas's concepts of the "totality of nature," the "tribunal of conscience," "care," and his extension of Kant's and Weber's "duty" into a future-oriented, intergenerational "responsibility"—these should undoubtedly serve as the value orientation for contemporary S&T ethics education. Jonas further distinguished between "natural responsibility," "contractual responsibility," and "self-assumed responsibility," a distinction that is conducive to sharpening the actor's clarity of responsibility.[18] Unlike the time when Jonas first proposed responsibility ethics, today "the future has already arrived." It needs no imagination—the future stands vividly before us in the present, making it all the more cause for "fear."
Regarding content curation, the author has experimented with different approaches in various classes. Beginning with a vivid depiction of the mechanisms and fundamental processes by which the universe, nature, and human society operate, the approach fully reveals the current conditions of ecological imbalance and runaway technology, the uncertain predicament and crisis situation humanity faces, and deduces the possible futures of the "ethical community" in which humans are embedded. Then, following the logic of ethics, concepts such as "morality," "ethics," "good," "right," "risk," "crisis," "care/fear," "duty/responsibility," "principle," "norm," "judgment," "choice," "responsible innovation," and "moral materialization" are progressively introduced. The underlying mechanisms are explained, norms are derived, and exemplifications are provided. Some results have been achieved in helping learners grasp both the "what" and the "why." Some students have expressed that the course content was eye-opening and that they gained certain methods of thinking, stating that they would take these factors into account in their future professional practice. This approach converges with Jonas's "heuristics of fear" though arriving there by a different path.
The ethical logic can be considered on three levels. The first is value choice and theoretical foundation: the definition of the "good" and the "right" for our era will determine which technologies are chosen, and what value choices and theoretical foundations will underpin the construction of S&T ethics theories and normative systems—this is about building consensus. The second is the construction of S&T ethical principles and normative systems, which requires researchers to have a solid grasp of the natural environment, the conditions of human existence, the frontiers and trends of S&T advancement, and the value orientation of sustainable human development. The third is how to translate abstract ethical principles and normative systems into management practice and technical details.[19] These three levels correspond respectively to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.
3. Discipline and Curriculum
As noted above, current higher education offers a small number of dedicated S&T ethics courses, along with limited embedded and infused S&T ethics education within non-dedicated courses, but the overall effectiveness is troubling. The root cause is that within the current educational institutional arrangements, S&T ethics has no proper place. It was only in the most recent revision of the disciplinary catalogue that a minor "Applied Ethics" sub-branch, limited to professional master's degrees, was placed under the first-level discipline of Philosophy[20]. This disciplinary arrangement is misplaced. It is entirely incapable of meeting the massive demand for S&T ethics educators in higher education.
The ethical analysis of technological development and the future destiny of humanity, and the directional corrections thereby realized, are the guarantees of technology for good and the sustainable development of civilization. Corresponding S&T ethics competencies have become an essential competency requirement for future citizens of the Earth. Like science and technology itself, S&T ethics must be educated through research and researched through education, groping forward as it goes. This requires recognizing pathways as clearly as possible, setting constraints, and deliberating thoroughly on what kind of life is good and what kind of future we should bequeath to our descendants, so as to avoid stumbling into perilous paths. Such a task is far beyond what can be accomplished by a small number of instructors offering courses at random, or by the approach of assigning a few instructors to open a course on short notice once the importance has been generally emphasized. It requires a high-quality dedicated faculty engaged in high-quality research, offering a diverse array of courses, along with broad-based training of the entire faculty so that they can shoulder the responsibilities of embedded and infused S&T ethics education across a wide range of relevant courses.
From the perspective of "enlightening ethical consciousness and cultivating moral competence," the task of S&T ethics education can be divided into two aspects. The first is clearly targeted professional S&T ethics education for STEM students, such as engineering ethics, medical ethics, AI ethics, robot ethics, data ethics, energy ethics, space ethics, nano-ethics, and so forth. The second is broad-based S&T ethics general education aimed at cultivating basic disposition and competence, including clusters of elective courses as well as embedded and infused education.
Such an educational mission requires robust research support, and robust research requires a rational disciplinary institutional arrangement. The disciplinary nature of S&T ethics research and education lies at the cutting-edge intersection of the two great domains of the humanities and social sciences on one hand, and science and technology on the other. It is a frontier crossing involving philosophy, ethics, cultural anthropology, sociology, education, and even aesthetics, intersecting with the history of science and technology, the sociology of science and technology, the philosophy of science and technology, STS, and all STEM disciplines. How could such a demand for research and educational talent possibly be met by a minor "Applied Ethics" professional master's degree tucked under the discipline of Philosophy?
The rational approach would be to formally establish a dedicated "S&T Ethics Education" first-level discipline—or one broad enough to encompass S&T ethics education while also accommodating other related needs—under the "Interdisciplinary Studies" category.
The curriculum is the basic cell of education; educational objectives are realized through the curriculum. The architecture of university curricula generally includes "foundational courses," "general-education courses," and "specialized courses." General-education courses include "required general-education courses" and "elective general-education courses," with the latter typically understood as "liberal education courses." Specialized courses are further divided into "theoretical specialized courses" and "practical specialized courses." Theoretical specialized courses can be subdivided into "specialized foundational courses," "specialized core courses," and "specialized elective courses." Foundational and core courses are invariably required; "specialized elective courses" typically address specific sub-fields or certain frontier trends related to the discipline.
At present, S&T ethics-related courses are rarely positioned as specialized courses. Even those like "Engineering Ethics" and "Medical Ethics," which may be required courses within small program clusters or individual majors, are essentially general-education courses. Such courses typically carry 32 class hours. The sole exception is Zhejiang University's AI program, which includes "Ethics and Safety" as a specialized core course. Different positioning within the curricular system signals different weight and character for a course, and elicits different levels of attention and investment, with foundational and core courses receiving the greatest emphasis. In principle, a specialized core course should be supported by related courses that reinforce its educational outcomes, and its content should serve subsequent courses and be reflected in them. Elective courses, by contrast, are optional, taken as needed, not required—they may even be dismissed as "filler courses" used merely to accumulate credits. It is very difficult for an isolated 32-hour elective course to ensure educational effectiveness.
IV. Conclusions and Recommendations
S&T ethics education is a matter of great importance for higher education today, bearing directly on technology for good and the future of humanity. Humanity has never experienced the kind of technological explosion we are witnessing now, and ethics has never faced such a severe test. Human civilization now requires a second enlightenment and a revaluation of values.[22] Although the cultural sediment of tradition has left us with many theoretical ethical resources, there is no ready-made prescription for the bewildering array of severe S&T ethics maladies of the present day. While some S&T ethics education is taking place in various forms in current higher education, it is scattered and random, incapable of shouldering the burden of "bringing benefit and averting disaster." The higher education sector needs to take S&T ethics education truly seriously. The following recommendations are offered.
First, clearly define the educational objective of S&T ethics education as "enlightening ethical consciousness and cultivating moral competence," and treat S&T moral competence as an essential competency for future citizens of the Earth and a professional competency requirement for future S&T practitioners.
Second, in terms of value orientation, strive to establish core ideas, ethical consciousness, and systems of knowledge and methods grounded in the sustainable future of the Earth Community and its descendants.
Third, with regard to curricular positioning, begin by widely offering liberal education electives, first forming clusters of courses and gradually developing structured curricular modules, then working toward making S&T ethics a specialized core course for STEM disciplines—together with general-education courses, forming coherent course clusters.
Fourth, faculty development and curricular capacity building. For dedicated courses and embedded and infused education to support one another requires both a dedicated research and teaching faculty and embedded and infused education capabilities among instructors of all types of specialized courses. This also requires the accumulation of teaching materials, reference readings, case analyses, project-based practical education resources, and teaching experience. In particular, integration with specialized instructors, research projects, and specialized courses calls for rational top-level design and enhanced overall management capabilities.
Fifth, it is recommended that the relevant departments of the Ministry of Education establish "S&T Ethics Education"—or a first-level discipline with the relevant inclusiveness—under the "Interdisciplinary Studies" category, providing institutional safeguards for the healthy development of S&T ethics research and education and for S&T ethics to fulfill its mandate of the times.
The theories and practices of human ethics constitute an extraordinarily complex and diverse field, fraught with contradictions and dilemmas. Higher education simultaneously confronts intricate and multifaceted tasks of the era. The convergence of the two presents exceptional difficulty. This paper has only offered, at the level of principle, some dimensions of positioning and directional suggestions; there are inevitably many shortcomings and inadequacies. It is offered merely as a brick cast to attract jade, in the hope of drawing the theoretical and practical wisdom of more colleagues and fellow travelers into the conversation.
This paper was published in Studies in Dialectics of Nature, Issue 11, 2022
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