The STEPWISE model has been widely adopted by educators who want educational innovations within a critical, reflective and ethical perspective. Despite this, its ethical foundations do not seem to be made explicit. Many publications on the STEPWISE model explicitly mention ethics, morality, values, or value-laden terms such as altruism, justice, collaboration, and well-being, establishing a clear link between the model and ethical considerations. However, we could ask: What are the ethical grounds of STEPWISE? Taking concepts and theories from moral philosophy as a reference landmark, we analyse STEPWISE’s ethical features. More specifically, we focus our analysis on the normative ethical theories (deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics) and on the scopes of moral consideration: individualism, selective anthropocentrism, anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism, socioecocentrism. We performed a categorial content analysis of the ethical dimensions of STEPWISE, according to the three main following axes: (1) conception of ethics; (2) scope of moral consideration; (3) ethical normative theory. Our results indicate that STEPWISE has a relevant ethical dimension, and even though it does not explicitly present a definition or conception of ethics, we can find an implicit conception of ethics linked to empathy towards others. Moreover, concerning the scopes of moral consideration, although STEPWISE tends to be more biocentric, ecocentric and socio-ecocentric, we can better characterize it as embracing multiple scopes of moral consideration, towards a non-anthropocentric ethics. Concerning the ethical normative theories, STEPWISE has affinities to utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Finally, we propose some suggestions for future works on the philosophical grounds of STEPWISE.