The Aims and Practice of Ethics Education in an Undergraduate Curriculum: Reasons for choosing a skills approach

In 1998 the author, working in the University of Glasgow Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences with European Commission funding, set out to design an integrated ethics approach in the undergraduate curriculum. This paper describes the choices made in relation to the aims and methods of teaching ethics in an undergraduate bioscience curriculum. The acceptable and reasonable aims for a ethics teaching are skills based: ethical sensitivity and moral reasoning. Behaviour/value and virtue/character approaches are rejected. An ideal ethics intervention would last 4-12 weeks and be based on studentcentred teaching methods involving student participation in ethical dilemmas.