Because we automatically categorize individuals into members of in- or outgroups based on their perceived similarity to us, our social identity creates limitations and bias in our thinking. I examine the ways in which banal nationalism, cultural identifications, and group membership influence our thinking, the assumptions we hold, and the intuitions we form. If our goal is to engage in ethics without borders—a laudable goal—then we must uncover the ways in which our thinking is limited and consider strategies to escape or transcend such borders in our theoretical work and teaching. I offer two proposals using insights from cross-cultural psychology. First, I propose the acronym of WASPI as a description of the nonreflective assumptions held by many WEIRD university professors. Second, I offer a four-factor model of normative analysis as a concrete tool for our teaching and theoretical work. It is only through such processes of active and critical reflection that our goal of ethics without borders can succeed.

Ethical questions posed by emerging technologies call for greater understanding of their societal, economic, and environmental aspects by policymakers, citizens, and the engineers and applied scientists at the heart of their development and application. This article reports on the efforts of one research project that assessed the growth of critical thinking and awareness of these multiple aspects in undergraduate engineering and applied science students, with specific regard to nanotechnology. Students in two required courses, a first-year writing and engineering ethics course and a second-year social science course, went through nanotechnology modules as a part of their regular coursework. In the first-year humanities course, we observed self-reported increases in risk awareness, significant educational impact of the module, and a greater awareness of nanotechnology’s applications and social context. In the second-year social science course, we noted changes in risk/benefit analysis as well as in the character and depth of students’ historical analysis, but no change in comparative awareness of other topics, including labor issues and corporate motivations.

It is unfortunate that it is all too easy to find examples of professional misconduct. Professionals are distinguished from the rest of us, and from each other, by learning the special skills and knowledge essential to the practice of their profession, by coming to think in different and distinct ways, and by taking on a special set of moral relations, including furthering the social purpose for which the state recognizes the profession. A professional can thus go wrong in any of a number of ways, but in criticizing professionals morally, it is often enough that we can appeal to the profession’s norms. No one is entitled to believe whatever they wish regarding ethical matters, and we need not appeal to competing ethical theories to make ethical judgments regarding matters of professional ethics.

Narrative based real world case examples are powerful tools by which to help learners more empathetically engage the complexity of ethical conflicts and interactions, enabling clearer analysis of ecological ethical issues and overcoming apathy toward real-world responses. In this paper, I develop ecological ethical inquiry as a means by which to use narrative-based case studies to help ethicists connect to and empathize with other morally relevant individuals. I argue that ecological issues not only benefit from but also require a narrative approach because of ethical and epistemic complexity. I first describe the problem of apathy toward motivation given the ethical and epistemic complexity in ecological ethics contexts; then, I offer a case study in ecological ethics that draws out this complexity; and finally, I point out several caveats concerning the conclusions I have drawn.

Sustainable development (SD) has contested meanings, and perspectives vary within and across societies. Emphases can range dramatically from recycling advocacy to eradication of poverty. Assumptions and approaches to sustainable development inherently contain many ethical considerations, yet U.S. students often have a limited understanding of ethical considerations in non-Western and global contexts. This paper describes an academic program on sustainable development we ran to Morocco and Spain. We describe the program’s pedagogy and assess learning related to ethics. The largest impact on students’ awareness of ethics resulted from their observations and experiences with socioeconomic inequities and unequal access to infrastructure. However, without explicitly teaching ethical frameworks to sustainability students, they tend to equate sustainability with morality, imputing their own normative presuppositions of right versus wrong onto the concept of sustainable development. Therefore, we conclude with a discussion on how ethics could be more systematically integrated into education for sustainable development abroad.

Foundation humanities courses often have as one of their objectives to raise awareness of ethical issues so that students get a taste for what might be involved in ethics courses and might build on that foundation in later courses. This three-week unit introduces Iris Marion Young’s social-connection model for responding to injustices caused by social structures and processes, and then applies that model to the response to injustices revealed in the memoir I Shall Not Hate by the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish. Students are then asked to make short team presentations analyzing a structural injustice they have identified.

Philosophy departments in the United States have a relatively long history of teaching ethics as part of a philosophy curriculum. Further, some innovative programs have instituted “Ethics across the Curriculum,” incorporating ethics into discipline-specific courses in the sciences, in law, in medicine, engineering, and in the humanities (see Davis, Hildt, and Kelly “Twenty-five Years of Ethics Across the Curriculum: An assessment”). In contrast, the teaching of ethics in China, particularly outside medical schools and the recent focus on international business, is extremely rare. This is slowly changing as faculty from both Chinese and non-Chinese universities are increasingly recruited to help teach ethics and to give advice on incorporating ethics into existing professional programs; this is especially true in disciplines where recent public scandals have demonstrated a pressing need. This work addresses some of the difficulties related to both access to technology and issues with censorship as possible impediments when developing and implementing ethics education and training in China, as well as suggesting pedagogical approaches that limit such effects.

This paper presents a model for integrating research ethics training into an undergraduate research program. The Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (URSP) is a five-semester training program designed to teach research methods to multidisciplinary undergraduate students at Zayed University. The main challenge for the URSP ethics training is to be relevant and broad and this is best addressed through the use of the Triplex teaching model which consists of three integrative approaches: contextualization, conceptualization and problem-centering. The Triplex model uses teaching techniques such as case studies, role-plays, and discussion which enable students to examine real-world ethical problems encountered by researchers in a variety of contexts. This article discusses the URSP program at Zayed University and highlights the manner in which the Triplex model is embedded within an undergraduate research-training curriculum. Future work will assess the success of this model after additional iterations of implementation.

This paper proposes a novel research program to assess methods of teaching engineering ethics, a program that would allow ordinary instructors, with little effort, to turn ordinary assessment tools (graded exams, homework assignments, and so on) into publishable research, whether the course in question is a stand-alone course in professional ethics or a technical course in which some professional ethics has been inserted. The paper has three parts. The first briefly distinguishes the subject of this research from the main line of research in ethics education. The main line is concerned with assessing improvement in ethical judgment (or moral development). In contrast, the research discussed here is concerned with assessing improvement in ethical sensitivity and ethical knowledge. The second part of this paper describes work already done that provides a model for what is proposed, the use of ratios between scores on course-specific pre- and post-tests to provide a measure allowing assessment across courses, programs, and even institutions.While the use of pre- and post-tests is not new, the use of their ratios across courses, programs, and institutions to do assessment is new. The third part of this paper sketches the research program itself—or, rather, a framework for answering a family of research questions.