Social Responsibility and Ethics in STEM Education: The State of the Field

The relationship between ethics education and recent scholarship on social responsibility is crucial to explore. At times, ethics education has been designed to focus narrowly on compliance with rules and regulations. In contrast, other forms of ethics education emphasize direct attention to social responsibility and the types of obligations that future professionals have to society. In this chapter, we provide an overview of social responsibility, including some of its intellectual foundations, and discuss an important distinction to the realm of ethics education between personal and professional social responsibility. We also review some of the current social responsibility literature and describe connections between social responsibility and traditional approaches to ethics education. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for future research in the realm of social responsibility, including lessons learned from our own research. In particular, there is a need for further analysis of the long-term development of student social responsibility attitudes and their impact on professional practice.