Introduction Activities in Swedish schools are formed by curricula, such as the Education Act and the Compulsory School Ordinance. These are documents which are set out by Parliament and Government to establish the fundamental values that are to permeate the schools' activities. Within subject areas the activities are formed by syllabi, both central and local, stipulated by the Board of Education and by individual schools. This paper compares the central syllabi with local ones from different schools to find out how these schools deal with the necessity for pupils to relate to ethical issues in science education as part of the aim to educate for citizenship. The need for citizens to take ethical standpoints Society today has many different ethical questions to deal with. Progress in the field of science research opens many ethical questions on what is right and wrong, e.g. questions concerning genetic engineering and handling the energy supply in a global perspective. One of the main function for schools is to educate citizens. Citizens who can create, take part in, and take responsibility for a democratic society. In the analysis of the central syllabi from the National Agency for Education, two of the most important aims of science studies stood out; that pupils acquire the ability to present arguments and gain insight into different ethical views. These skills are examples of the knowledge pupils need to become responsible citizens of society today. Studies of local school syllabi To study how local schools formulate their interpretation of the importance of teaching pupils how to argue and how to gain insight into ethical views, I picked out 10 compulsory schools who publish their syllabi on the Internet and analysed how they described their goals and mark criterion for the science subject. To classify the syllabi I used standards for science curriculum (Bybee, 2002) but found that the standards were limited in focus concerning the need for knowledge on ethnical standpoints in science. The concept which corresponded the most was "Science in Personal and Social Perspective". The result was that even though the central syllabi present ethical competence as basic knowledge many local syllabi place the competence to discuss ethical questions as distinctive - a competence necessary only for those who get the highest mark. Since the teachers who work at the schools write the syllabi themselves, this would seem to show the outlook of the teachers. Analyses of the Result The result of the comparison between the central and local syllabi can be queried with the aid of different theories in order to explain the difference between central and local syllabi. My interest is; why do the teachers not see the importance of the competence to take an ethical standpoint in science education as basic knowledge? Focusing in on this question is going to be done from different points of view, e.g. post-modern ethics (Bauman, Beck) and moral philosophy (Kohlberg, Benhabib).