Redefining ethics and ethics research directions for environmental studies/sciences from student evaluations

The Northeast Ethics Education Partnership (NEEP), jointly coordinated by Brown University and SUNY-ESF from 2010 to 2017, organized and implemented short- and long-course training on research ethics and cultural competence to graduate students at four universities in the fields of environmental sciences/studies and engineering. This article provides findings from student evaluations of these ethics trainings which inform areas that students found useful to their careers, particularly for learning about their respective disciplines’ moral standards, codes, and ethical theories. In the post-assessment evaluations, NEEP findings indicate that collective concerns about environmental research will involve more study and analysis of moral reasoning for balancing the needs of diverse stakeholders and nonhuman life forces. Additionally, students believed that ethical research approaches will require much more attention to complexity and multiple dimensions of research impacts to humans, land and species. These findings support more extended development of new standards and norms for individual researcher ethics, for substantive ethics, and for political ethics as part of applied ethics in environmental studies and sciences. More interdisciplinary collaboration and ethical analysis of field and case studies are recommended for this development.