As an engineer, you have a duty to maximise the public good and minimise both actual and potential adverse effects for your own and succeeding generations. Should you break the law to uphold this principle?

This is the dilemma presented in our Engineering Ethics Toolkit case study Engineers and Public Protest.

The engineer in this case has to weigh personal values against professional codes of conduct when acting in the wake of the climate crisis. This case study allows students to explore motivations and justifications for courses of action that could be considered morally right but legally wrong. 

We’ve provided this, and other case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching. If you’re new to ethics, we have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started.

Want to contribute your own content to the Ethics Toolkit? Get involved here.

You’re an engineering student on an industrial placement year at a company that manufactures cosmetics. The company is involved in a big project that focuses on alternative, more environmentally friendly cosmetic chemistries. You notice that a batch of products might have been contaminated with microplastics. You flag this up to your supervisor but they wave your concerns away. What do you do?

This is the dilemma presented in our Engineering Ethics Toolkit case study Microplastics in cosmetics.

We’ve provided this, and other case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching. If you’re new to ethics, we have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started. Please take a look and give us your feedback.

Want to contribute your own content to the Ethics Toolkit? Get involved here.

With over 60,000 views to date (as of April 2025), it’s not surprising that awareness of the Ethics Toolkit is growing. This has also been boosted by academics and advocates including the Toolkit in their events and talks.

In the last few months, the Ethics Toolkit has been featured at recent events both home and abroad:

July 2025

• The Engineering Ethics Toolkit  was promoted at the Faculty of Architecture and Physical Planning of the University of Eduardo Mondlane, in Maputo, Mozambique, on July 29th 2025, by Dr Manuela Rosa, Professor at the University of Algarve, in her presentation “Sustainable and Resilient Cities”.

June 2025

• The Ethics Toolkit was promoted at a stand at the EAN Annual Congress and was very popular, with lots of academics talking to Toolkits project manager Dr. Sarah Jayne Hitt about how they can get involved, and lots of Ethics business cards being handed out!
• The Ethics Toolkit will be featured in a workshop at the Twelfth International Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development to be held at King’s College London in June 2025. The workshop will be conducted by Elizabeth Robertson (Ethics Toolkit contributor) about how ethics is essential to the next generation of engineering changemakers. Sarah Hitt (Toolkits Project Manager) will also deliver a keynote address.

December 2024

• At the 2^nd International Congress on Public Administration in 2024, held at Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in  Campo Grande, Brazil, the 13th-16th November,  Dr Manuela Rosa, Professor at University of Algarve and EPC Ethics Ambassador, promoted the Sustainability Toolkit in her presentation “Resilience and Territorial Sustainability”.

November 2024

• Ethics Toolkit project manager Dr Sarah Jayne Hitt promoted the Ethics Toolkit in her keynote speech at INCOSE UK’s ASEC2024 conference, held in Edinburgh, 5 – 6th November 2024.
• Ethics Toolkit project manager Dr. Sarah Jayne Hitt chaired a panel on ‘Ethical Practice – What, Why and How?’ at the Hazards Forum in Manchester on 4th November, and promoted the Engineering Ethics Toolkit to audience members from academia and industry.

October 2024

• At the 24th International Walk21 Conference on Walking and Liveable Communities, held at ISCTE in  Lisbon, Portugal, 14th-18th October,  Dr Manuela Rosa, Professor at the University of Algarve, and Ethics Ambassador for the EPC, promoted the Engineering Ethics Toolkit in her presentation “Layouts of pedestrian crossings for inclusive and age friendly society”.

July 2024

As academics know, it’s been “conference season” recently, with the usual rush of meetings and symposia and events that mark the beginning of summer. We’re pleased that the Engineering Ethics Toolkit has been featured at several of these, both home and abroad:

• At the SEFI Spring School, held at TU Berlin the 10^th – 12^th April, the SEFI Ethics and Sustainability Special Interest Groups convened to consider “Democracy in Engineering Education”, and the Ethics Toolkit was featured in a workshop on the knowledge, skills, and mindsets of engineering educators.
• An interview with Ethics Toolkit project manager Sarah Jayne Hitt was the subject of Episode 22 of the SEFI podcast.
• At the EPC Annual Congress, held at Cardiff University the 9^th-11^th June, the Facial Recognition case study was mentioned during conversations about AI Ethics, and the Constructive Alignment tool was showcased as a way to plan for weaving ethics into almost any learning outcome.
• At the UK and Ireland Engineering Education Research Network Annual Symposium, held at Ulster University in Belfast the 17^th – 18^th June, the Guidance Articles were presented as a great place to get started in learning more about teaching engineering ethics.
• At the American Society of Engineering Education conference, held in Portland, Oregon the 23^rd-27^th June, Sarah Jayne Hitt presented an impact study that she and Sarah Junaid conducted on use of the Ethics Toolkit, featuring both website data analytics as well as information from user interviews.

September 2023

• We presented a workshop at the 2023 SEFI Conference in September: Using a practical toolkit for embedding ethics in the engineering curriculum. You can read more here.

Between February 2022 and April 2025 the Ethics Toolkit has had over 60,000 views, so we know you’re looking at it, but we also want to know about where you’re talking about the Ethics Toolkit! Have you featured a resource in a conference presentation or meeting? Tell us about how the resources have helped you over the past year—we’d love to feature your story.

This post is also available here.

“There are three lenses that we can use when thinking about ethics within Engineering: Professional, Theoretical, and Practical.”

If you’d like to improve your own ethics learning, then our Engineering Ethics Toolkit guidance article What is ethics? is a great place to start.

This article should be read by educators at all levels in higher education who wish to better understand ethics and its connection to engineering education. It will also be useful for students who are being introduced to the topic. 

We have a growing library of guidance articles available to support you as you expand your understanding of engineering ethics, and begin to embed it within the curriculum, and an Ethics Explorer to get you started. We also have a library of case studies, for you to use and adapt in your teaching.

Want to contribute your own content to the Ethics Toolkit? Get involved here.