Scientific research in artificial intelligence has been immensely successful in recent years, ranging from the development of Large Language Models to the deeper integration of humanoid robots into everyday life. However. With the success of AI research come societal (Hopster, 2024) and conceptual disruptions (Löhr, 2023, ) of existing practices and norms that require adaptations on the level of larger social communities as well as the individuals embedded within.

Engineering ethics education has emerged in the last decades as a discipline in its own right, seeing philosophers and ethicists expanding their work to comprise a pedagogical focus. It becomes increasingly important to reflect on how to bring topics of philosophical and ethical significance to the awareness of engineering students, both in terms of the theoretical lens employed and through the pedagogical methods for conveying the complexity of such issues.

Despite the shared focus of climate ethics, environmental ethics, and political theory on threats to the natural environment and human well-being, these discourses have developed into largely isolated fields. One dividing line of thought is the ethical consideration of non-human entities, which is a key topic in environmental ethics, but is often side-stepped in climate ethics in favour of justice for human beings.

Increasingly emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Extended Reality (XR) and Quantum technologies are disrupting research and education practices. The way technology shapes practices is increasingly taken seriously in the research and education sector, which strives at a digital transformation in line with ‘public values’ [1,2,3]. Public values can be seen as “values whose importance we consider so high as a society that we organize them at the level of society”[4].