Ethics Education in Engineering and Technological Institutes in India: Challenges and Looking Forward

In India, many engineering and technological institutes have incorporated ethics into their curriculum. Ethics or professional ethics is added as an elective course separated from the mandatory subjects in these institutes. There needs to be more than the existing codes of ethical conduct for the instructors and the learners at the higher education level to prepare them for ethical decision-making. Learners lack a foundation in the subject, as ‘ethics’ is not taught as a core subject in schools in India. Moral education offered at the school level in India focuses only on human values and cultural expectations, not the discipline of ‘ethics.’ The examples in the textbooks hardly invoke critical thinking skills among learners. This lack of ethics education at the lower level makes it hard for teachers to impart ethics at the higher level. In addition, there are sociocultural challenges in imbibing the concept of ‘ethics’ in the minds of students. Reflecting on one’s decision-making process is necessary to improve one’s ethical sensitivity. Integrating critical thinking in terms of analyzing issues from multiple perspectives and logical reasoning in terms of constructing inductive or deductive arguments while inferring ethical judgment as part of the teaching pedagogy can address these challenges. Instructional methods, which make the learners participate in the teaching-learning activities focusing on multiple perspectives, enable them to look at an issue from various perspectives. Improving meta-moral cognitive skills help the students to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses in their ethical decision-making.