Ethics within chemistry education: options, challenges and perspectives

2.1 The meaning of ethics and its operational implications

There are some basic features that are recognised as good or evil in all (or nearly all) contexts: what harms other persons is evil, and doing something that helps other persons is good (Mammino, 2010). This can easily be translated into operational criteria (Gaie, 2002):

1. One ought not to inflict evil or harm.

2. One ought to prevent evil or harm.

3. One ought to remove evil.

4. One ought to do or promote good.

These guidelines can be unified into the utilitarian-ethics concept that “whatever promotes the most good for the highest number of people is morally right and ought to be pursued, whatever does the opposite is morally wrong and ought to be avoided” (Gaie, 2002). Being focused on consequences, this concept can be functional as a first-approximation approach (whereas deontological-ethics discourses – focusing on the nature of a given action – would require more extensive familiarity with philosophical argumentation).

Knowledge is a necessary condition for the implementation level. A person who wants to pursue good, or to prevent evil, must know how to go about it. In other words, the wish to ‘do good’ and the knowledge of how to do it are both essential for ethical behaviours (Mammino, 2010); if one of them is absent, it is not possible to attain ‘good’. Examples can be found both for the wish to do good without adequate knowledge of how to do it and for the presence of knowledge without the wish of using it to do good. For instance, the congregation of people in churches, during Middle-Ages plagues, to pray for the plague’s end, was motivated by a desire to do something good, but the absence of knowledge about contagion entailed the risk of increasing the number of infected people. Conversely, wars are examples of utilization of various types of knowledge in ways that are totally detached from desires of doing good (they actually respond to desires of doing evil). A summary-outline illustration is offered in Figure 1.

Figure 1:

Illustrative outline of ethics and ethical behaviour.

Presentations following the just-outlined basic pattern proved effective also with secondary school pupils. For instance, a presentation to a group of secondary school students focusing on the concepts of recognising what is good, wanting to do good, and identifying the knowledge necessary to be able to do it, obtained a variety of articulated responses, leading to the inference (by the students) of the importance of chemical literacy to protect the environment (Mammino, 2015).

2.2 Chemistry – a science capable of bringing a lot of good and a lot of harm

Chemistry is the science of substances. Because of it, it opens the opportunity to do a lot of good as well as to do a lot of harm.

The duality of this possibility had been perceived since ancient times. The knowledge of substances was considered too powerful to be made accessible to everybody, with the risk of misuses. In ancient Egypt, it was reserved to priests. Alchemy – the ‘ancestor’ of chemistry, and the first science to develop a laboratory – reserved it to the initiated, by using an allegoric language that only the initiated could understand.

When chemistry started to develop from alchemy (16th – 17th century), its main objective was set as the search for medications that could better treat diseases. This stream (iatrochemistry) prompted the inclusion of chemistry under the medical faculties in some European universities. The objective was obviously under the ‘doing good’ ethical category.

The awareness of the need for more complex ethical considerations developed after the evidence of the environmental impacts of the massive production and utilisation of new chemicals in the last two centuries on the one hand, and the realisation of the horrors of chemical weapons on the other. Both aspects are considered in the next sections, with greater attention to the former because of its connections with, and effects on everyday life.

2.3 Sustainability – a leading thread to and through ethics discourses within and for chemistry

Since chemistry is the science of substances, its progress determines most aspects of everyday life. The huge expansion of the number of commonly available substances has improved many practical aspects, but their unchecked release into the environment has created problems that need adequate addressing to ensure the health and wellbeing of human beings and of all other living beings. This prompted the development of the sustainability concept.

Green chemistry (Anastas & Williamson, 1996; Tundo & Anastas, 2000) is the chemistry’s response to the importance and urgency of sustainability. Most studies considering relationships between chemistry and ethics devote broad attention to green chemistry and the roles of chemistry for sustainability (Chen, 2014; Frank et al., 2011; Kovac, 2015; Mahaffy, 2023). Many of the topics considered in the “Ethical Case Studies of Chemistry” special issues pertaining to HYLE (International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry) concern effects on the environment or other aspects that can be easily related to the green chemistry principles (Anastas & Warner, 1998), and cover a broad range of questions, such as the possibility of slowing down climate change through the capture of carbon dioxide from air (Scott, 2018), the consideration of the effects of permanent chemicals in the environment, the atmospheric ozone depletion (Schummer, 2020), the omnipresence of DDT (Børsen & Nielsen, 2017), the prevention of industrial disasters (Eckerman & Børsen, 2018), and many others.

One of the early – likely, the earliest – recognition of the ethical value of green chemistry came from a philosophy lecturer at the University of Botswana, on responding to a call for contributions about green chemistry; his work (Gaie, 2002) highlights correspondences between the ethical criteria of doing good and preventing harm and the green chemistry principles. The very fact of this recognition by a humanities-based researcher brings to light the huge potentialities of the ethical aspects of green chemistry for building bridges between humanities and sciences (Mammino, 2010); this, in turn, is in line with the multidisciplinary perspectives that are fundamental for sustainability.

3.1 How green chemistry education expanded the scope of chemistry education

Green chemistry education has become a centre of attention soon after green chemistry started developing (Braun et al. 2006; Collins, 1995; OECD Workshop on Sustainable Chemistry, 1998; Tundo & Patti, 2002a, 2002b). Its explicit concern for sustainability and for the environment has made it attractive for young persons, slowly encouraging an image for which chemistry can actively work to reduce pollution (Hjeresen et al., 2000; Patti & Scott, 2002). It has radically changed chemistry education (Anastas et al. 2009). The expansion of its scope to the various features and implications of the life of a substance (Guinée et al., 2022; Juntunen & Aksela, 2013; Lankey & Anastas, 2002; de Waard et al., 2022) has built bridges between chemistry and a variety of environmental and societal aspects. In this way, chemistry has increasingly become a conducive centre of various multidisciplinary webs (Mammino, 2010).

The links with sustainability education were the most immediately identifiable and have been extensively researched (Aubrecht et al., 2019; Eilks & Rauch, 2012; Marques et al., 2020; Zuin et al., 2021). Multidisciplinarity characters entail bridges with other areas of chemistry, such as environmental and analytical chemistry (Hill et al., 2015; Mitarlis et al., 2017; Płotka-Wasylka et al., 2021), as well as societal areas like health protection, and environmental aspects such as the effects of chemicals on the animal and plant species living in a certain area and the further impacts stemming from such effects. In turn, ethics considerations find important roots in the information from all these areas.

The incorporation of ethics into chemistry education largely relates to the “revolutionary change” brought about by green chemistry: “chemistry was assuming its responsibility for environmental and health hazards, and proposed to become one of the main actors in preventing them (Maxim, 2017)”.

3.2 Why it is important to adopt ethics-based behaviour patterns

It is important to identify convincing motivations for choosing ethics-compatible behaviour patterns. In other words, it is important to identify satisfactory answers to the question of why one should put efforts to pursue good and prevent harm.

A simple guiding criterion could entail a rewording of the so called “golden rule” to adapt it to sustainability and environmental issues. The golden rule is expressed as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (or “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you”). This concept is present in the Gospel (Luke 6:31, Matthew 7:12), and also in many other teachings, such as Confucius (5th century BC), Plato, or Aristotle (https://www.quora.com). It refers to relationships between people and/or between actions affecting people. If a person is concerned for the future of humankind and the planet, and how human actions impact on the environment, the rule can be worded as “Behave in the way in which you would like others to behave” (Mammino, in-press-b), and implies that sustainable behaviours concern each individual. Many young people are particularly sensitive to issues concerning sustainability; thus, students may be invited to analyse the concept, and also to try and propose complementary statements.

3.3 Case studies as functional approaches to examine ethical issues

The consideration of specific cases illustrating the significance of ethics in relation to chemistry has the advantage of making the discourse concrete. It is recommended for its pedagogical value (Mahaffy, 2023) and is often selected as an investigation tool, as in HYLE’s specials issues “Ethical Case Studies of Chemistry”.

Students can be invited to analyse cases described in literature (like those in HYLE’s “Ethical Case Studies of Chemistry”) as well as cases that they can propose from their direct experience or from the context (community, region) in which they live. The latter may prompt outreach actions, like the initiative of separate refuse collection carried out for some years by chemistry students at the University of Venda (Mammino, 2023), which was motivated by concern for their community and the desire to do something good by promoting sustainable practices.

The consideration of concrete cases is bound to lead to analyses involving other disciplines besides chemistry, thus providing hands-on recognition of the importance of multidisciplinarity for any sustainability discourse.

3.4 Challenges inherent in the nature of chemistry

The identification of what corresponds to “doing good” and “preventing harm” is not always easy when substances are concerned. What a substance can do once it reaches the environment is not easy to predict. On the one hand, it can come in contact with thousands of different animal, plant or microorganism species, and the effects can be different for each of them; for instance, it may accumulate within some of them, leading to damages. On the other hand, different fates may happen to the substance itself, such as photo-dissociation or other reactions yielding other substances, which, in turn, enter the environment and have their own impacts. In addition, the balance between the benefits and the harms that may derive from the use of a certain new substance is often not sufficiently clear before it starts being used, posing challenges to decision-making.

Chemists have learnt from a variety of occurrences that happened without having being anticipated. For instance, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) appeared to be ideal as refrigerators, solvents, and vehicles for sprays: they are not toxic to any living species, and they are stable, i.e., they do not dissociate in the environment to yield other products whose effects may be unknown. It could not be predicted that their being persistent would become the cause of environmental problems, as they slowly moved to the stratosphere and started depleting its ozone layer. The case indicated that it is safer to avoid substances that can remain in the environment for too long, because their long-term effects cannot be predicted. This criterion has been included in the green chemistry principles.

Another substance that proved persistent is DDT. Its case illustrates the challenges inherent in trying to choose the greater good (or less evil). It was very effective to control insects, thus enabling the reduction of serious diseases like malaria; but it was also destroying useful insects (e.g., those essential for pollination), and it spread in all the media in the environment, being found in living tissues, in mothers’ milk, and practically everywhere. Because of this, it eventually had to be banned.

Both cases (DDT and CFCs) clearly highlight the importance of the second conditions inherent in doing good and preventing harm – knowing how to go about doing it, i.e., having sufficient information to be able to make decisions that one will not have to regret. In many cases, chemical knowledge is not yet adequate to enable clear identification of possible benefits and harms, or to evaluate how their extents compare, and how hazardous are the possible harms to the environment and to human health. Other sciences (e.g., genetic engineering) encounter analogous problems. The awareness that unpredicted effects may be irreversible and the damages that they produce may be severe and irreparable suggests caution. The awareness of the presence of uncertainties stemming from incomplete knowledge, in turn stemming from incomplete predictive abilities about all the possible fates of new substances (or new “items”, like genetically modified organisms) if they enter the environment, prompted a novel ethical approach, emphasising humans’ responsibility (Jonas, 1979). This has led to an ethical guideline called the ‘precautionary principle’, which is meant specifically to prioritise health and environmental protection when deciding about the utilisation of new substances or the application of new technologies (Cafferatta, 2004; Godard, 2013; Persson, 2016; Read & O’Riordan, 2017; Rivera-Ramírez, 2020; Rogers et al., 1997).

Not much literature is available about the presentation of the precautionary principle within chemistry classes. On the other hand, its presentation is important. Acquiring sufficient awareness of the presence of uncertainties and of the responsibilities inherent in decision-making is relevant for everybody. Scientists need to be aware of these aspects, so that they try to obtain as much evidence as possible about possible impacts and make all the evidence available to decision-makers. The general public needs to be aware of them to make informed inferences when analysing possible options or already-taken decisions. High secondary school and university students can be guided through a historical review of how the principle was developed (e.g., along the presentation lines of the previous paragraph) and through some concrete recent cases for which it is manifestly relevant (e.g., De Smedt & Vos, 2022; OECD, 2023).

Examples may expand to the prediction of the properties of not-yet-synthesised molecules and how the associated uncertainties can be safely managed on decision-making. For instance, if modelling approaches predict considerable toxicity levels, the molecule has to be discarded (no need to synthesise it). If they predict low toxicity levels, further studies are necessary (including experimental ones) to confirm the low toxicity.

The precautionary principle has also brought about the issue of responsibility (Lamprou, 2007). Students can be invited to discuss this issue, including the distinction between ethical responsibility (related to the choice of doing good) and legal responsibility (related to choices or actions that have caused damages). Martin et al. (2016) list the persons/specialists involved in the production and utilization of chemicals and having the responsibility to prevent the use of harmful ones: “chemists designing molecules; managers devising business models for sustainable products; consumers making purchasing decisions; governments setting health and safety standards; groups pushing for clearer workplaces and products”. Students can be invited to analyse the ethics aspects associated with each of these roles, thus gaining a better perception of the complexity of the practical aspects of production and utilisation (including life-cycle considerations) and of the related ethical questions.

3.5 Tackling particularly delicate issues in the class

The responsibility of scientists is a challenging ethical issue that was mightily brought to light following the construction and use of atomic bombs. It entails the dichotomy between research and applications: research leads to knowledge, which can always have value; applications need careful prior considerations of risks and possible harms, i.e., the design and implementation of applications need to be guided by ethics.

There is however an area whose sole objective is the design of items capable of causing as much harm as possible to human beings – war-related research. The ethical question is very clear: “should a scientist engage in war-related research, particularly use-inspired or applied research directed at the development of the means for the better waging of war?” (Kovac, 2013). Practising scientists may face “conflicting moral and practical demands”, as they “are simultaneously professionals, citizens of a particular country, and human beings” (Kovac, 2013). Considering these aspects may expand students’ awareness of the seriousness of ethical issues that may be associated with specific types of research, including the researchers’ moral responsibility for the outcomes of the use of the “items” they design. Kovac (2013) concludes that “most, if not all, war-related research should be considered … probably as morally prohibited”. Schummer (2018) concludes that “chemical weapons research is morally wrong by all major ethical theories”.

The sustainability concept also leads to similar conclusions. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs) embed peace as a major objective: it is obvious that wars do not improve the well-being of present-generation human beings, or the well-being perspectives for future generations. The principles of green chemistry suggest analogous inferences. During one of the early IUPAC green chemistry conferences, the author of this work was asked by a journalist: “Suppose that a factory producing war weapons does that in a very clean way, without producing wastes and without dumping anything into the environment. Could we say that factory conforms to the principles of green chemistry?”. The answer is negative, because “green chemistry proposes to prevent the production of substances that can be harmful to human beings, and war-weapons are bound to be harmful to some human beings” (Mammino, 2010).

Recalling the concerns that have accompanied the development of gaseous chemical weapons, in view of their high harmful power, may provide a thought-provoking example. At the very end of the 19th century (1899), a pact had been signed at the Hague Convention to ban the use of projectiles aimed at spreading asphyxiating gases. However, gases (chlorine and, later on, phosgene and mustard) were used during WWI, with horrible effects. The Geneva Protocol (1925) prohibited the use of chemical and biological agents in war. This historical information can be complemented by information on the current objectives and activities of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

4.1 Additional reflections on pedagogical approaches

The previous sections have not provided materials such as lists of questions to propose to students, or spreadsheets with step-by-step instructions, because ethics education needs to be holistic, even when embedded into chemistry courses. In other words, it should not take the format of a sort of catechism with questions and answers that learners end up memorising. It needs to stimulate active reflections and develop through them.

Interactive teaching and other forms of students’ active engagement are the most viable options for ethics messages to have a working impact on their preparation and budding citizens’/professional attitudes. Besides in-class interactions, students can be encouraged to carry out some activities in which they have a primary role, such as literature searches on ethical questions that arise during in-class discussions. In general, it is important that students are encouraged to make their own considerations and come to independent conclusions.

It may not always be easy to identify a border between chemistry and ethics. For instance, in the case of CFCs (Section 3.4.), the chemistry-related questions are straightforward: describe them as a class of chemicals; describe their uses and benefits; describe the unintended consequences and their impacts. A deeper analysis of what occurred will consider whether it was known that CFCs can react with ozone. Students may search for this and will find that it was known, but this would not have been a problem in the lower layers of the atmosphere, and chemists did not expect that the CFCs molecules will slowly travel up to the stratosphere and accumulate there in sufficient concentrations to cause damages. At this point, students can be invited to analyse other details, such as the fact that CFC molecules break under UV radiation (so, they were expected to break before reaching the stratosphere), and then make comprehensive considerations. A major consideration concerns prediction inadequacies. Another major consideration refers to a “lesson learnt”, leading to the inference that it is not safe to introduce into the environment chemicals that will remain in it for a long time, because predicting long-term effects is highly challenging. This inference can be viewed as a precautionary recommendation generated from experience and adopted for future decisions.

The just-mentioned outline for the case of CFCs also highlights another important aspect. Since substances and their impacts are different from each other, the analysis of individual cases cannot have a unique pattern, except for the basic sequence of considering the properties of the substance or class of substances, the reasons why they were used, the observed undesirable impacts, and the prediction inadequacies about those impacts. Considerations where chemistry and ethics integrate refer mostly to why the decision of using them was taken, why the damages were not predicted, and the lessons learnt from the ensuing situations.

4.2 Expected outcomes

Ethics education is an important component of the overall formation process of a young person. It may not be encountered in other subject matters, or may be encountered in courses to which students tend not to ascribe sufficient importance. Encountering it within a chemistry course automatically stresses its importance. The ethics embedded in the sustainable development concept can be outlined in simple terms (Mammino, 2010). The basic outline of the meaning of right and wrong, and the association of ethical behaviour with doing good and preventing harm, extend beyond the domain of chemistry, becoming criteria that are valid for all behaviour types. Thus, ethics education within chemistry courses contributes to the students’ overall ethics education (Mamluaturrahmatika et al., 2024), in a way that favours the mutual association of behaviour and operational outlooks.

Now-a-day, students hear about sustainability in many contexts. The association of chemistry-related ethics considerations with sustainability encourages outlooks for which sustainability entails choices from each person and depends on each person’s behaviour. It thus provides scientific motivations for opting for sustainable behaviour patterns – a choice that has also ethical value. It has often prompted outreach initiatives, through which students encourage sustainable behaviours within their communities (e.g., Mammino, 2010, 2015]).

The consideration of the crucial challenges concerning the fate of new substances in the environment contributes to promote a more complete perception of the nature of chemistry. Chemical knowledge is sufficiently certain for the phenomena that have already been observed in the laboratory or in the environment. However, the prediction of what may happen with a new substance has a considerable uncertainty range. On the one hand, this is due to the large number of living species and different molecules present in the environment, and with which the new substance may interact during its life cycle. On the other hand, our predictive tools – although continuously improving – are not sufficiently sophisticated to ensure definite and all-encompassing predictions. Some information about the complexity of the study of molecules and their interactions (Mammino, 2021) can contribute to elucidate the reasons for the predictability challenges. On a broader perspective, the awareness of uncertainties and challenges promotes a more realistic perception of chemistry and science in general, as something where knowledge continues growing, but is far from ‘knowing everything’; this also means that there is a lot to do for new generations of chemists, and that they can choose to target their work to advance sustainability and protect the environment. Promoting such realistic perceptions also responds to the ethics of the teaching activity, as it widens the students’ outlooks beyond frequently-encountered narrow visions of science and what science can do.

The general objective when designing a new substance is that of maximising its “being benign” character, whether it is a new substance meant for a specific purpose (e.g., a new drug, a new catalyst, etc.) or a substance meant to be more benign than a non-sufficiently-benign currently-in-use one and to replace it. The just outlined challenges implicated in the uncertainties of possible predictions of behaviours and effects increases the complexity of substance design. In some cases, a new substance replaced a non-sufficiently-benign one and then proved not to be more benign than the replaced one, resulting in the need to design a newer and better one. The awareness of all this does not (or should not) discourage the trend towards more sustainable substances; it should, however, promote comprehensive understanding of the unavoidable length of the overall process. A lot has already been done, and much more needs to be done. Each new step entails a huge amount of investigation. The obvious inference is that there is a lot to do for students who choose chemistry for their future professions.