TU Delft would like to educate engineers with a broad, ‘comprehensive’ perspective, who are not only trained to be technical experts but also who are able to reflect on societal aspects of technology. For this reason, TU Delft would like to see to it that all students are offered training in ethics.
Our ethics education come in two basic versions, which we call Ethics 1.0 and Ethics 2.0 respectively. Briefly put, in Ethics 1.0 we tailor a course to a specific engineering education program (e.g. ethics of aerospace engineering or ethics for applied mathematics). In Ethics 2.0 we offer learning lines in the BSc and thematic Ethics courses in the MSc. Thus, ethics 1.0 is program-specific, and ethics 2.0 is thematic. We are transitioning to ethics 2.0 as it has the advantage that it integrates ethics in their education via the learning lines in the BSc and in the MSc, and thus it brings together students from different programs, which facilitates their interdisciplinary working together, and the courses are based on our cutting-edge research. You can find more information about our two approaches in the pages below.
Ethical thinking is about connecting abstract concepts and real world problems. Anyone can have an intelligent opinion, but how to systematically use the abstract thinking of ethics in real world problems is the real challenge.
