About the Program
The Philosophical Embedded Ethics Program (PEEP) integrates philosophical ethics directly into undergraduate courses across disciplines at the University of Toronto. Rather than relegating ethics to standalone electives, PEEP places philosophical analysis at the point of contact: inside the courses where students are already grappling with questions that have real ethical stakes.
PEEP modules are designed for adaptation to different disciplines. Each module addresses an ethical topic that matters across many fields, and comes with explicit prompts and guidance to help instructors adapt the core material to their own disciplinary context. A single module on data visualization, for instance, can be delivered in a computer science course, an epidemiology course, a social science methods course, or a journalism programme, with different disciplinary examples but the same philosophical scaffolding.
Each PEEP module is a self-contained intervention: a set of lecture slides and accompanying materials that a course instructor and a philosophy instructor co-deliver during an ordinary class meeting. Modules are designed to be adapted: instructors shape the material to fit their course content, student population, and pedagogical goals.
A central aim of PEEP is to develop students' capacity for civil discourse, the ability to engage seriously with contested ethical questions while maintaining respect for those who hold different views. The modules do this by teaching students to reason philosophically: to structure disagreement around premises, arguments, and objections rather than around conclusions or identities.
PEEP deliberately chooses topics and case studies that encourage reasonable disagreement, questions where thoughtful people, reasoning carefully, can reach different conclusions. Students practise raising dissenting views, identifying where arguments go wrong, and distinguishing the merits of a position from the people who hold it. Experience from E3I, PEEP's predecessor initiative, shows that students feel comfortable doing this when the pedagogical framing emphasises arguments over verdicts.
Engage with ideas critically, but engage with individuals respectfully. University of Toronto Working Group on Civil Discourse
An important secondary effect: faculty members who adapt PEEP materials for their own courses also develop skills in philosophical argumentation, building capacity for civil discourse across the university's academic community.
PEEP modules are structured for co-delivery. Each presentation distinguishes between content best delivered by the course instructor, who provides disciplinary context and situates the ethical questions in students' existing work, and content delivered by the philosophy instructor, who introduces concepts, definitions, and arguments from ethics and political philosophy.
The colour coding in PEEP slide decks reflects this division:
PEEP is an offshoot of the Embedded Ethics Education Initiative (E3I) at the University of Toronto, co-led by Steve Coyne, David Liu, Diane Horton, and Sheila McIlraith. Where E3I modules are custom-built for a specific course in close collaboration with one instructor, PEEP modules are designed from the outset for adaptation to different disciplines, allowing a single module to reach students across many departments and disciplines with relatively modest additional effort.
Support for PEEP comes from the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Computer Science.
All PEEP materials are released under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Instructors at other institutions are welcome to adapt and use the modules under the terms of that licence, provided attribution is given and derivative works are shared under the same terms.
If you are a course instructor and would like to collaborate on delivering a PEEP module in your course, or on developing a new module for an underserved topic or discipline, please get in touch.
Interested in embedding an existing PEEP module in your course, or proposing a new one?
Contact us here →