Ethics is this context needs to be understood to be a form of praxis, an individual practice which has collective implications, the ethical relation to the other has now come to the fore through a worldwide pandemic of COVID-19 and its aftermath. This highlights how my inaction or action has direct impact upon the collective good. The question that Greta Thunberg poses is ‘how dare you not react?’. The ecological questions and the ethical question become one and the same.

The project, therefore, is developing an ethical framework from the work of contemporary philosophy, including the work of Deleuze and Guattari on The Three Ecologies and Paul Ricoeur in relation to his work on ‘little ethics’, and Bernard Stiegler on the development new forms of knowledge. The first phase of the project has seen the development of the theoretical philosophical ethical framework as distinct from traditional fields of applied ethics. This new framework is based upon a virtue ethics framework and narrative theories of techne and technology.

Ethics traditionally understood as applied ethics is not equipped to deal with the questions posed by the relation between technological development and ecology. The application of pre-existing ethical frameworks has not led to the desired results and has been reduced to the introduction of ethics onto the engineering degree programmes. This is partly to the cultural contexts of technological innovation and on the other hand to the sheer speed of technological change. The EthiCo project is developing specific methodologies of the ethics and ecology within the education not just of engineers but all students within higher education.

The project also develops a value system and framework through philosophical research and secondly, it is developing a teacher training module for the teaching and integration of ethics into the curriculum (including engineering, natural sciences, business, arts and humanities). This teacher trainer module was subject of specific Intensive Study Programme (ISP) in the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 7-9 March, 2023. Thirdly, the project developed a standalone student module on ethics and ecology for level 8 programmes. Fourthly, the project hosted an international conference on ‘Ethics and Ecology in Technological Education’.

The key objective of the EUt+ is to create an inclusive university, founded on the ethical principles of fairness, respect for human rights and European citizenship values. EUt+ is committed to providing every student with the resources to achieve the necessary requirements and realize their potential across European campuses.

The EthiCo project is following this aim, choosing a holistic approach and facilitating stakeholders (=participant) involvement from the very start of the development process to encourage co-creation and participant feedback. This pre-determined the need to design an educational framework through which engineering becomes an essential part of society through ethics and ecology and to ensure that inclusion and personal contribution are the beginning of EthiCo.

EthiCo plays a significant role in the development of the EUt+ alliance to establish a new type of institution on a confederal basis. Within this project, discussions have already been initiated about the slogan "Think Human First", its controversial nature and what the EUt+ consortium is trying to convey by placing it at the forefront of all its operations.

The project is giving EUt+ an opportunity to clarify that “human” in the statement “Think Human First” does not mean “anti-nature”. As stated in the Executive Summary of the EthiCo, environmental ethics has extracted the human from nature, put naturalism against humanism, making the aforementioned statement problematic; therefore, one of the main missions of the EthiCo will be to find precise wording on what do we mean when we say “Think Human First”.