Global society is facing formidable current and future problems that threaten the prospects for justice and peace, sustainability, and the well-being of humanity both now and in the future. Many of these problems are related to science and technology and to how they function in the world. If the social responsibility of scientists and engineers implies a duty to safeguard or promote a peaceful, just and sustainable world society, then science and engineering education should empower students to fulfil this responsibility. (...) The contributions to this special issue present European examples of teaching social responsibility to students in science and engineering, and provide examples and discussion of how this teaching can be promoted, and of obstacles that are encountered. Speaking generally, education aimed at preparing future scientists and engineers for social responsibility is presently very limited and seemingly insufficient in view of the enormous ethical and social problems that are associated with current science and technology. Although many social, political and professional organisations have expressed the need for the provision of teaching for social responsibility, important and persistent barriers stand in the way of its sustained development. What is needed are both bottom-up teaching initiatives from individuals or groups of academic teachers, and top-down support to secure appropriate embedding in the university. Often the latter is lacking or inadequate. Educational policies at the national or international level, such as the Bologna agreements in Europe, can be an opportunity for introducing teaching for social responsibility. However, frequently no or only limited positive effect of such policies can be discerned. Existing accreditation and evaluation mechanisms do not guarantee appropriate attention to teaching for social responsibility, because, in their current form, they provide no guarantee that the curricula pay sufficient attention to teaching goals that are desirable for society as a whole. (shrink)

This article reports on the development and teaching of compulsory courses on ethics and engineering at Delft University of Technology (DUT). Attention is paid to the teaching goals, the educational setup and methods, the contents of the courses, involvement of staff from engineering schools, experiences to date, and challenges for the future. The choices made with respect to the development and teaching of the courses are placed within the European and Dutch context and are compared and contrasted with the American (...) situation and experiences. (shrink)

From the nineteen sixties onwards a branch of philosophy of science has come to development, called history-oriented philosophy of science. This development constitutes a reaction on the then prevailing logical empiricist conception of scientific knowledge. The latter was increasingly seen as suffering from insurmountable internal problems, like e. g. the problems with the particular "observational-theoretical distinction" on which it drew. In addition the logical empiricists' general approach was increasingly criticized for two external shortcomings. Firstly, the examples of scientific knowledge that (...) the logical empiricists were focusing on were con sidered as too simplistic to be informative on the nature of real life science. Secondly, it was felt that the attention of these philosophers of science was restricted to the static aspects of scientific knowledge, while neglecting its developmental aspects. History-oriented philosophy of science has taken up the challenge implicit in the latter two criticisms, i. e. to develop accounts of science that would be more adequate for understanding the development 1 of real life science. One of the more successful products of this branch of philosophy of science is Lakatos's theory of scientific development, sometimes called the "methodology of scientific research programmes". This theory conceives science as consisting of so called research program mes developing in time, and competing with each other over the issue which one generates the best explan~tions of the phenomena that they address. (shrink)

In this paper I present my reflections on the ethics of science as described by Merton and as actually practiced by scientists and technologists. This ethics was the subject of Kuipers' paper "'Default norms' in Research Ethics" (Kuipers 2001). There is an implicit assumption in this ethics, notably in Merton's norm of communism, that knowledge is always, or unconditionally good, and hence that scientific research, and the dissemination of its results, is unconditionally good. I will give here reasons why scientists (...) are not permitted to proceed, as they actually do, on the basis of this assumption. There is no factual or other binding justification for this assumption, and the activities it gives rise to frequently conflict with the broadly accepted ethical principle of restricted liberty. A recent discussion on the risks and hazards of science and on the issue of relinquishment is presented. What is shown in this paper is that the scientists and technologists participating in this discussion frequently violate core values of science relating to logical and empirical scrutiny and systematic criticism, as mentioned in Merton's norms of universalism, organized skepticism, and disinterestedness. It is concluded that, in order to live up to these values and in order to operate in agreement with broader ethical principles, science should stimulate open and critical discussion on the hazards and negative effects of science and technology, and on the present failure on the part of law and politics to control those hazards and negative effects. Science should also take the possibility of relinquishing certain themes of research seriously as long as such flaws in the systems of law and political decision-making persist. (shrink)

There is a widespread approach to the teaching of ethics to engineering students in which the exclusive focus is on engineers as individual agents and the broader context in which they do their work is ignored. Although this approach has frequently been criticised in the literature, it persists on a wide scale, as can be inferred from accounts in the educational literature and from the contents of widely used textbooks in engineering ethics. In this contribution we intend to: (1) Restate (...) why the individualistic approach to the teaching of ethics to engineering students is inadequate in view of preparing them for ethical, professional and social responsibility; (2) Examine the existing literature regarding the possible contribution of Science, Technology and Society (STS) scholarship in addressing the inadequacies of the individualistic approach; and (3) Assess this possible contribution of STS in order to realise desired learning outcomes regarding the preparation of students for ethical and social responsibility. (shrink)

Summary It is shown that, besides differences in emphasis on structural and developmental aspects, there is far reaching agreement between the views of Nagel and Lakatos on structure and development of science. I argue that both views can interact very fruitfully, and by way of illustration a confrontation of Nagel's notion of a model with Lakatos' notion of a positive heuristic is pursued in some detail. The conclusion is that for microscopic theories, a Lakatosian positive heuristic is exactly the same (...) entity as a substantive model in the sense of Nagel, but that for phenomenological theories there is (as yet) no such structural concept as a model available that can be identified with a Lakatosian positive heuristic. (shrink)