Developing teaching materials in ethics for chemistry and chemistry engineering students

To meet a growing educational demand for teaching ethics to chemistry and chemistry engineering students, the author, in collaboration with editor-in-chief of the journal HYLE—International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Joachim Schummer, has edited a collection of “Ethical Case Studies of Chemistry.” This chapter introduces and analyzes the content of this collection that includes ethical case studies on misconduct, napalm, Fritz Haber, Thalidomide, chemical waste, the Bhopal accident, DDT, Bisphenol-A, PVC, interdisciplinarity, chemical climate engineering, chemical enhancement, hype, codes of conduct, and REACH. The case studies are divided into five categories: intentional misuse or misconduct, unforeseen local consequences, global and long-term influences and challenges, challenges to human culture, and codes and regulations. The chapter presents the main arguments in the case studies; clusters them in different problem areas, such as those in the five categories of case studies mentioned in the previous sentence; identifies the ethical values involved in different case studies; discusses who has ethical agency; and points toward how responsibility is addressed. The chapter finally argues that “ethics of chemistry” is a discipline itself by its own merit and cannot be reduced to a branch of environmental ethics.