Ethics in engineering education in the field of geosciences and mining

One of serious negative features of present human society is the absence of professional ethics. Unfortunately, this problem is weak point of educational effort, especially in geosciences and mining engineering. Recently, both questions of the coexistence of humankind with natural systems and problems of the utilisation of raw material resources have been intensively discussed, in connection with a population explosion and the character of the next development of society. Many experts contemplate of new ethical principles that should direct the behaviour of man in the natural systems. If we respect a holistic conception of the biosphere in the sense of Vernadsky and others, then any delimitation of new special ethical discipline named geoethics cannot be considered to be fully justified. It is the case of complicated issues that face problem of correctness of moral assertion as value assertions variable in time. When investigating the great natural systems, we run into the necessity of understanding the global regularities in virtue of the study of spatial, historical and causal aspects, which is, owing to the limited human experience, difficult. The principles of systematism and historicism lead to an integral view of the Earth, to the teachings on the noosphere as a higher develop mental stage of the biosphere, and thus to a new categorical imperative, eg in Westra conception. Factual aims of our pedagogical effort resulted from mentioned ethical principles are: education to system thinking, education to the care of natural resources and their more qualified utilisation, education to the creative analytic and critical thinking, education to the engineering approach to the setting of problems and education to ability to communicate with partners, state and municipal authorities and public. Crucial sense of university training is to educate universally developed human beings possessing the latest information on their fields, who understand the surrounding world on the basis of study of natural, technical economic and humanistic sciences.