Approaches to the teaching of bioethics and professional ethics in undergraduate courses

The role of ethics in bioscience undergraduate degrees is now widely accepted but how ethics should be taught who should teach it and what the curriculum should include are matters for debate. This article discusses teaching strategies: specialist options or embed ethics in other courses or both; use of professional philosophers or bioscientists with ethics teaching training or both. Experience from a bioethics programme at the University of Glasgow is discussed including the need or not to teach technical philosophical terminology; the aims of ethics teaching (with a strong distinction made between professional ethics in science and more personal issues like animal experimentation); strategies for sustainability in staffing; and teaching and assessment methods.