Teaching

The Centre aims to develop ethical competence: the ability to recognise ethical issues, understand different positions, weigh values, and justify decisions. Ethical issues are not the concern of philosophy alone; they form part of the responsibility of every discipline and profession.

Our goal in teaching has been to coordinate the teaching of ethics across the curricula and in different faculties of the University of Tartu. At present, various university lectures are offered in bioethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, media ethics, ethics of science, and business ethics. Research integrity counsellors of the University of Tartu also contribute a great deal to cooperation with various faculties.

Jointly taught courses involving teaching faculty from different disciplines have also been very fruitful. A large student audience was commanded by the course co-taught by Estonian literature Professor Tiina Kirss and Philosophy Professor Margit Sutrop, titled “Ethical Dilemmas in the Works of Jaan Kross”. Participating students were able to meet and converse with the internationally recognized Estonian author Jaan Kross himself. In collaboration with the Centre of Ethics and with the support of VolkswagenStiftung, Prof. Tiina Kirss offered a course, “Academic Writing: Skills and Dangers,” which evolved into a university-wide elective for doctoral students, and a textbook to be published about this topic.

The Centre developed the large university-wide courses Foundations of Ethics and Key Topics in Ethics. They introduce the principal concepts, problems and theories of ethics, engage students with classical and contemporary texts, and develop skills in argumentation, analysis and discussion. Ethics teaching reaches students in philosophy, law, medicine, education, information technology, management, and many other fields. The Centre teaches pedagogical ethics, teacher ethics, and values education to education students, bioethics to medical students, and ethics to master’s students in strategic management. Discipline-specific teaching connects moral philosophy with the real choices and responsibilities of professional practice.

Ideally, students in all areas of academic specialization should have the opportunity to obtain fundamental knowledge in ethics and to familiarize themselves with the major ethical questions in their area. One of our objectives over the years has been to find students willing to specialize in the ethics of their discipline, and who would later also be able to teach it. In the first years of our activities, with the support of the VolkswagenStiftung we were able to provide stipends to doctoral students in different faculties to focus more intensively on questions of ethics. As a result of this, nine of these scholarship holders have defended their dissertations. Often these doctoral students become our ambassadors to other academic departments.

Research Ethics for Doctoral Students

Since 2018, the Centre has taught the university-wide course Good Research: Framework Requirements, Values, and Principles of Action to doctoral students at the University of Tartu. It is offered in Estonian in the autumn semester and in English in the spring. The course connects the principles of research integrity with questions arising in researchers’ everyday work, including participants’ rights, data use, authorship, conflicts of interest, supervision, publication, communication, and responses to possible breaches.

The Centre also teaches research ethics to doctoral students at the Estonian University of Life Sciences and the Estonian Academy of Arts, to master’s students at Tallinn University, and at Tallinn Health Care College. This cooperation enables teaching to respond to the needs of different fields while resting on shared principles of good research.

Education Beyond the University

The Centre organises training programmes, seminars and workshops for teachers, researchers, public officials, healthcare professionals, businesses, and other specialists. Research provides their intellectual foundation, while practitioners’ experience brings new research questions to light. Teaching, in turn, allows knowledge to be tested, refined, and developed further.

The Centre for Ethics is developing an e-learning course on research ethics and integrity for biomedical researchers across the Alliance4Life_Bridge project partner organisations. Informed by a 2025–2026 survey and an expert-led ethics seminar at the University of Tartu, the course addresses the research community’s key needs and priorities. The course will be available through the project e-learning platform in December 2026.