Ecological Ethics: Towards an Education of Techno-Diversity

Abstract

The sustainable development is a big challenge for the end of the century due to earth evolution linked with anthropic activities: climate change, resources depletion, health stakes and related problems will change the way we live. Engineering design activities will have to evolve to address in a different way human's needs and also new kinds of needs. The ability to change design practices will depend on the way to think the relationship between human and nature. Ethics has a specific place for that. The proposed paper deals with ecological ethics and discuss the way it can be addressed concerning technology and the way it can be taught in terms of pedagogical methods. A first part discusses the concept of ecological ethics and proposes to avoid environmental ethics but develop an ethics of the environment. This position enables to defend to transfer the biodiversity characteristic to techno-diversity one in order to ensure adaptation and resilience, future will require for being able to keep health, comfort levels within environmental constraints. The requirement of a pragmatic approach of ethics and ecology is highlighted to be able to face and be conscious of diversity of situations. Then, a discussion on pedagogy of ecological ethics is done and shows how the link must be built with society, into pedagogical activities.

Ecological Ethics and Design for Sustainability: Co-Habitation or Roommates ?

“…An initial bibliometric analysis supports previous research results suggesting that ethical inquiry into sustainability-related issues requires a combination of methodologies from both formal and not-formal education learning, in and outside the classroom [6], [7], [8], [9]. This lines up with the conclusion of Petit et al [5], which states that in order to learn and practice ecological (and environmental) ethics, formal education needs to get inspiration from the popular education model, promoting learning outside the classroom. Popular education differs from normalised approaches to education in that it is rooted in the experiences, needs, and aspirations of community members and promotes collective action [10].…”

“…Our methodology is structured in 5 steps. First, generating a state of the art of different pedagogical activities that are transversal to ecological ethics and strong sustainability, focusing on the 3 criteria given by Petit et al, [5]. Secondly, building an operational grid to evaluate the relevance of original pedagogical activities.…”

“…To illustrate how strong sustainability and ecological ethics can be integrated and assessed in pedagogical activities, we propose an assessment grid based on the 3 characteristics described by Petit et al [5] of a pedagogy towards ecological ethics and sustainability: • Breaking down the frontier between theory and practice • Breaking down the frontier between the natural sciences and the humanities • Breaking down the frontier around universities The first characteristic is used to examine the gap between the theoretical objective of each activity and the observed practical results. The other two characteristics are detailed in Table 1, where they divide into several criteria, each defined by 3 or 4 levels of maturity (specific levels for each criterion).…”

“…Ecological ethics aims to inform actions and behaviours of design students (among others) based on a self-reflection of their roles as designers, as humans, and as the intersectional beings they are, in relation with the wider ecological systems [3]; however, unlike environmental ethics [4], its practices are harder to translate from the theory. Petit et al [5] stressed the distinction between environmental ethics and ecological ethics: while the first one focuses on the transition from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision, the latter one focuses on building a vision where all living and non-living elements are seen as part of one functional ecosystem, an ecosophy. Using Petit et al's reflection, the aim of this article is to present an analytical grid that can help identify pedagogical activities that contribute to the development of DfS while carrying an ecological ethics approach.…”