In higher education there seems to be a ‘gap’ between the levels of undergraduate student expectation of being confronted by ethical issues in engineering work, and the amount of effective ethics education. Within this context, the purpose of this empirical research is to investigate engineering students’ views on two issues: a) How vital professional ethics are in their field, and b) whether they believe that professional ethics must be a part of the syllabus in their School. Findings indicate that teachers should make special reference to and strongly emphasize in class the value of an engineer's ethical responsibility. Furthermore, they need to spend a number of teaching hours on tackling problems in professional ethics as well as organize conferences, workshops, lectures and discussions, where the main speakers would be experienced engineers and academics. This way the technical and technological education incorporates more the responsibility of building professional integrity that can guarantee the much needed social goods of progress and prosperity, along with safety.

Although recent empirical research suggests that there is a gender gap in Anglophone philosophy, no research has been done on the representation of women in non‐Anglophone philosophy. The present study constitutes a first step toward filling this void in the literature by providing empirical evidence on the representation of female students and female faculty members in Greek universities' departments of philosophy. Our findings indicate that the underrepresentation of female students in philosophy is not a universal phenomenon, since female students constitute the majority of philosophy students in Greece at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. However, our findings also suggest that the low number of women in philosophy at the faculty level is not a problem unique to Anglophone philosophy, since female faculty members comprise, on average, only 29% of philosophy faculty members in Greece. In order to explain these findings, we argue, first, that the teaching of philosophy at the secondary level may motivate female students in Greece to enter and persist in philosophy, and, second, that since the gender gap at the faculty level in Greece cannot be attributed to the low number of female students in the philosophy pipeline, the causes of women's poor participation in philosophy at the faculty level should be looked for elsewhere.

Professional ethics refer to the rights and obligations of practitioners within any profession or sector. Engineering ethics can be discussed based on the nature of the engineer profession and its implications for professional morality. This paper takes the virtue ethics lens to discuss engineering ethics and argues that, since human and social good derives from professional virtues, protecting the public interest is a professional virtue of engineers. Further, since the protection of the public interest redounds to human and social good, then engineers are bound by the nature of their professional role to achieve these two interconnected aims, namely, protecting the public interest and promoting human good. The importance of virtues is eminent in the way an engineer improves her professional conduct and this has an impact on the social environment and on human good in general. Given an engineer’s concern with the broad public needs of people, the engineer’s function counts as a morally good role, and therefore can be described as one that can lead to human flourishing.

Philosophy courses help students develop logical reasoning and argument skills or so it is widely assumed. To test if this is actually the case, we examined university students’ familiarity with the basic tools for argument. Our findings, based on a sample of 651 students enrolled in philosophy courses at six Greek universities, indicate that students who have prior experience with philosophy are more familiar with the basic tools for argument, and that students who have taken philosophy courses at the university have stronger argument-recognition and argument-evaluation skills compared to university students with no prior experience with philosophy. Moreover, our findings suggest that students get more familiar with the basic tools for argument as their level of engagement with philosophy increases, and that they get significantly better at evaluating arguments when they become graduate students in philosophy. However, our findings also suggest that the majority of students in philosophy classrooms haven’t developed fluency in (at least some) basic argument-related concepts and skills. To remedy this, we argue that philosophy instructors need to re-think (a) the place that the teaching of argument has in philosophy courses, and (b) the way that they teach students about argument.

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