An ethical basis for sustainability in the worldviews of first year students?

Abstract

A key focus in transforming the profession of ICT to one of contributing to a sustainable future is the education of students who may think and act as sustainable practitioners in computing. An important understanding in this is the relationship between ethics and sustainability in the student intake. This forms a baseline upon which higher education can build. It is argued that sustainability can be considered ethics expanded in time and space but it is not previously known if an ethical understanding relates to an ecological worldview or to desires for contributing to sustainability. This paper reports on a survey of the first year intake of a New Zealand polytechnic (n=52) and explores the link between ethics and sustainability in freshman students in their first week of higher education. A measure of ethical naivety was constructed based on standard measures of naive ethics (legalism, egoism, agency and relativism), the responses to this were compared to the standard measure of ecological worldview, the New Environmental Paradigm. The implications for education for ICT4S are discussed.