Chapt 5 Virtue Ethics

The idea of virtue seems stodgy and out of place in a popular culture which

stresses rapid flows of money, glamour, information, and fashion. The Victorians

were virtuous. We moderns are often uncertain about the very meaning of the term

virtue. Is it not just the chastity young people are supposed to protect until marriage?

That is part of it, but virtue also refers to the general sense of moral excellence or

goodness. And indeed morality and the ideas of good and evil seem to be ubiquitous

these days. The events of nine-eleven, the hurricanes of 2005, the Enron scandals, the

high school shootings in places like Littleton, Colorado, the Iraqi Wars, and the 0. J.

Simpson trial: all these episodes in recent history have stimulated endless debate

about the nature of good and evil. Though terms like virtue and vice are not in wide

circulation, what those terms refer to certainly is. In this chapter, I look at virtue ethics

for engineers, particularly pre-modern engineers, and the relationships of engineers to

morality, ethics, and the common good.

In the last chapter, I investigated the character of the pre-modern engineer,

who came into being and flourished in the time period roughly from the pyramids to

the cathedrals. The spirit of that character, even today, is very much present within

engineering practice, especially in those projects which employ heuristic and intuitive

methods. The character of the pre-modern engineer, in fact, was seen to have much in

common with the character of the modern or contemporary engineer. The character of

the pre-modern engineer was and is gauged by ethical and moral assessments. The

primary ethics extant in the pre-modern era was virtue ethics, and that was and is the

type of ethics appropriate to the pre-modern engineer. However, I imagine the ethics

employed in concrete situations in pre-modern times, instead of actually evaluating a

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situation on the basis of an ethical theory, was something like using one’s intuitive

grasp about what is right and wrong. Though that remains even today the most

common approach to resolving ethical dilemmas, virtue ethics and other ethical

theories do have a pivotal role to play in the moral assessment of the engineering

project, particularly in those cases where intuitions fail us.

The modern era, as we saw in earlier chapters, brought several other types of

ethics, most notably the conceptual schemes of consequentialism and deontology, into

the arena of ethical and moral discourse. The modern engineer can profit from both

the virtue ethics to be looked at in this chapter as well as what I have called process

ethics, which was discussed in chapter two. Then, as I intend to show, the focal

engineer can profit from three kinds of ethics: virtue ethics to be discussed in this

chapter, process ethics of chapter two, and material ethics to be considered in chapter

eight.

Any discussion of ethics invokes the notion of ethos. Ethos commonly refers

to how we are, whereas ethics refers to how we ought to be. As I mentioned in the last

chapter, ethos referred not only to character but also to place where that character is

enacted. The pre-modern engineering endeavor took place in some specific location,

whereas the modern engineering enterprise likes to imagine itself independent of the

particulars of place and situated only in abstract space. The focal engineering venture,

as I will indicate later, is again place-oriented and the particulars of place make focal

engineering inherently a local phenomenon. I will take a look at the local/global

debate a bit later in the text. Once more I must note the “oscillation” of a phenomenon

from the pre-modern to the modern to the focal, or along the past/present/future time-

line. Modern engineering diverges away from pre-modern engineering, but focal

engineering converges back toward it. The ethos that mattered much to the pre-

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modern engineer, matters less to the modern engineer, but then matters much again to

the focal engineer. I wish to stress, however, that focal engineering is not a retro-

movement which attempts to return to those wonderful days of yore when pre-modern

engineering was a holy endeavor. Focal engineers constitute their world by taking the

best from the world of pre-modern engineers and the world of modern engineers, then

incorporating a lot of other elements as well.

The culture of engineering is shaped by the practice and conduct of individual

engineers who adhere to certain moral and technical values, e.g., thoroughness,

honesty, industriousness, and efficiency. Those values are manifest in the character of

engineers at work on a given engineering project. In the last chapter, I presented a

general view of the character of the pre-modern engineer at work within the culture of

the pre-modern engineering endeavor. Character, habits, and customs generally

become in-grained in a pre-reflective manner. For the most part, though not entirely or

necessarily, we take them on with minimal deliberation. According to Gregory

Trianosky: “Character is the product not only of voluntary action but also of the

activity of temperament, along with upbringing, childhood experiences, social

environment, peer expectations, and pure happenstance.”1 When I was a child, for

instance, my mom insisted that I pick up after myself and in complying with her

wishes over the years I developed the character trait or habit of orderliness. Though I

am distinguishing technical and moral values and focusing on the latter, these values

in practice are often overlapping. For example, to be honest in reporting some test

results, I need to be thorough in my experimental procedures, and to be thorough

implies I do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

In general, habits may be deemed virtuous, as John Dewey maintains, because

they are sustained by social approval and admiration.2 But such virtuous habits

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constitute what Dewey calls customary morality as distinct from reflective morality.

Customary morality is pre-reflective. The customary morality of the typical pre-

modern or modern engineer is exhibited in the array of her or his character traits. This

is the way we have come to be as a result of social approval for the things we do. In

this chapter, I turn toward reflective morality, and look at development of a system of

virtue ethics that might support the moral life of pre-modern engineers as well as

modern and focal engineers. Plato insisted that basic values were the foundation of

moral and immoral behavior which may exist in any organized whole. As Sherwin

Klein puts it: “the values that guide those wholes mold the character of people who

participate in the organizations, and the moral and immoral conduct exhibited in

organizations is a product of the character of its people.”3 The character of the

engineer serves the values of the engineering culture – the organized whole of concern

to us – while those values, in turn, shape that character. We have a closed loop

feedback system here. We might want to modify the values of the given engineering

culture, for instance, by shifting from pure profit motive bottom-line values to a

“double-bottom-line” orientation that values both the profit-motive and social justice.

If so, what kind of character shift entailing the practice of what kind of virtues might

be appropriate to the mandate of these new values?

A Story

I opened chapter four with a story about my first job in the aerospace industry.

I was just out of college with an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, proud to be

contributing to the American effort to get a man on the moon. But by 1970, as I

mentioned, the glamour of aerospace work began to lose its luster for me. The moon

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landing in 1969 was a peak experience for the space program, and after that things

began to flatten out. For one thing government funding began to dry up. In addition,

the times they were a changin’, counter-cultural ideas were everywhere, and the nine

to five routine was starting to get me down. So I decided to return to graduate school

to study EE and also to try to “find myself.” I didn’t. But I did get a Ph.D. in EE and

in the mid-70s set out in pursuit of an academic position. They were few and far

between. Positions in general in engineering and science were not plentiful in those

turbulent and economically recessive times of the mid-1970s, characterized by the

winding down of the Vietnam War and a peaking of opposition to the military-

industrial complex.

There was music in the cafes at night

And revolution in the air. Bob Dylan

While finishing graduate work in engineering and completing a thesis in the

area of differential game theory, I was simultaneously attempting to give myself a

liberal arts education, which I had successfully avoided as an undergraduate. I did

succeed in deepening my interest in philosophy, politics, and poetry and was looking

for some way to apply the technical work I had done to a domain of discourse that

promoted the social good in a tasteful if not poetic sense. Though there was poetry, I

thought, in some of the beautiful equations of differential game theory, poetry and

game theory, by and large, seemed miles apart. Most of the work in differential game

theory, in fact, was in the arena of military applications and war games. So my quest

for an ideal career was going nowhere. I considered driving a taxi and did work for a

few months in a 7-11 store. However, some industrial positions were becoming

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available, and after much job searching as well as soul searching, I landed an

interview with a large aerospace company in the Silicon Valley. I was delighted to

finally be having an interview. During the interview the engineers in my prospective

group enthusiastically described the system they were developing. It sensed the terrain

with an ingenious radar mechanism, employed an elaborate feedback control

structure, and made determinations on the basis of statistical decision rules. The job

offered fascinating prospects for sophisticated engineering designs. But after the

interview I perused the material I had been given and took a wider look at the project.

The technical details were so interesting to me at the time of the interview that I failed

to realize the system I’d be working on was to form part of the signal processing unit

of the “aircraft” that came to be the Cruise Missile.

CORPORATE FAUST!

Hungry green-faced conglomerate

Seeking bright brained graduate.

Run with the giants at the leading edge,

Join us and we give you our pledge

Wealth and prestige will be yours for the taking

Just don’t ever ask what we’re making. Jan Browne

Here was a serious dilemma. I had been brought up to think that war was good

for “absolutely nothing” except possibly making the rich people richer. The question I

had to face was could I contribute to such a project and thereby to the militarization of

the planet? This is not an uncommon problem in techno-science fields: here was a

technically “sweet” project whose intended use was at best unsettling. What to do?

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My instincts told me to back down. I did and was fortunate soon afterwards to get an

academic position, which was more suitable to my temperament.

Reflecting on this situation, I realized that I had not explicitly employed any

particular type of engineering ethics, any system of ethical thought, to guide my

decision about a situation that had obvious moral import. I didn’t, for example, make

the decision by seeking out the greatest good for the greatest number. I came to a

decision based on my character, my internalized values or ethos, my customary

morality. The problem is that this scenario wherein personal values rather than moral

systems guide ethical decisions appears to be quite common, as I mentioned earlier.

Such an approach might be adequate for ordinary dilemmas, but with complex

dilemmas, often a more explicit approach is called for. The question arises: what

values would be most positive for engineers and engineering to cultivate in an explicit

manner? The values of an engineer are revealed in the character or ethos or life-force

of that engineer, and these values, collectively, are mirrored in the character of the

engineering culture.

Even though systems of ethical thought grounded in abstract principles began

to appear shortly after the dawn of the modern age, engineering ethics did not come

into its own as a separate discipline until the late 1970s, focusing its concerns on

codes of ethics. Codes existed prior to the 1970s – in fact, since the late 1800s for

most traditional fields of engineering – but engineering ethics in general and codes in

particular were relatively unknown to most, including me at the time I faced my

ethical dilemma. Codes did attempt to encapsulate modern rule-based and duty-based

ethical concepts appropriate to the engineering enterprise. They aimed to guide the

actions of engineers toward doing the morally right thing in their employment of

engineering methodologies. Within this type of ethics, the rightness of an action takes

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priority over the goodness of the agent. In contrast, in this chapter, I will emphasize

virtue ethics, which links directly to character or ethos of the agent, the engineer,

particularly the pre-modern engineer. Virtue ethics functions not as a counter to

modern process engineering ethical systems, like consequentialism and deontology,

but as a complement to them.

Ethics and Morality

In ordinary conversation, most of us most of the time conflate ethics and

morality. In my own philosophical musings, I have tended to associate morality with

conduct and ethics with principles, although some ethicists seem to reverse these

associations in discussing ethical practice or moral theory. I am essentially talking

about the theory/practice distinction here. Ethical theory informs moral practice.

Moral practice grounds ethical theory. One can, for instance, speak of moral theories

abstracted from grounded concrete conduct. This, I believe, is one way virtue ethics is

developed. One can speak of conceptual ethical theories deduced from abstract ethical

principles. Ethical theories, particularly virtue ethics theories, as practical theories,

might be seen as mid-range phenomena, lying between the concrete and the abstract.

German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

proposed a kind of practical reasoning grounded in what he calls Sittlichkeit, which

can be translated as ‘moral substance’ or ‘moral life,’ the practical realm of moral

being and conduct. It is the world of our everyday involvements in which we

encounter reality directly, bearing always already some sense of how to be in accord

with ‘the ought’ or ‘the should.’ Robert Piercey views a Sittlichkeit as a concrete

historical community which has a shared way of life. “It has its own conception of

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duties, virtues, and the good, conceptions which are taken for granted in this

community but which need not be accepted in others. From this standpoint, to be a

good agent is to be a good member of one’s Sittlichkeit – to know one’s station and

one’s duties.” 4 The moral life of one’s Sittlichkeit is contextual and communal and

corresponds to Dewey’s notion of customary morality. Sittlichkeit also resonates with

the notion of Gemeinschaft in Ferdinand Toennies’ Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft

distinction referring to two fundamental types of human association. Gemeinschaft is

restricted and exclusive but heart-felt and familial, whereas Gesellschaft is objective

and reflective but more inclusive and open. More about Toennies later.

Now, even though moral reflection within one’s Sittlichkeit appears, at best, as

a vague pursuit, contemporary philosopher Paul Ricoeur believes we can flesh out our

indefinite intuitions by following Aristotle and explicating moral reflection which

aims at a ‘good life,’ with others and for others and within just institutions.5 More

precisely, we must first of all inquire about the good life and take steps toward a

realization of it. Secondly, we must do so in the context of being social animals, even

though we might prefer to keep our own company. Thirdly, we must proceed with

fairness toward others we encounter within the historically conditioned social

institutions we find ourselves thrown into. These are the tasks, according to Ricoeur,

to which we humans are assigned in order that we might flourish in the fullness of our

moral experience. These are the first steps in development of a theory of virtue ethics,

and they correspond to a movement away from one’s Sittlichkeit.

But if we move away from Sittlichkeit, toward what do we move? Hegel

distinguishes Moralität from Sittlichkeit. Moralität is the realm of practical ethical

judgments, based largely in the philosophy of Kant, within which a general notion of

duty is paramount. The notion of Moralität insists that the duties which we have in

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common have nothing to do with the particulars of our ethical communities, or even

with anything in the phenomenal realm, because pure reason gives a moral law to

itself, and this law obliges unconditionally. It is always and everywhere valid.6 Hegel

had in mind specifically Kant’s deontological moral theory of duty, which I looked at

earlier in the text. That theory is centered in the Categorical Imperative: always act in

such a way that we treat persons as ends in themselves, and never merely as means,

and if everyone did the same, then the world would be a better place. Moralität is

essentially the realm of ethical principles and the practical judgments stemming from

them. It resonates with Gesellschaft in the Gemeinshaft/Gesellschaft distinction.

Different from deontological theory, consequentialism, as discussed in chapter

two, is another form of ethical theory that would be at home in the realm of Moralität.

The most familiar form of consequentialism is utilitarianism which has wide

circulation in today’s world. Ethical theory comes in many guises. P. Aame Vesiland 7

distinguishes three kinds, which are all in various ways rule-based: deontological,

utilitarian, and environmental. Deontological theory, as we have seen, bases decisions

on presupposed notions of duty, like “promises must always be kept” or “lying is

wrong.” Any ethical situation which arises would then have to be dealt with on the

basis of these presuppositions, without regard for consequences. Utilitarian ethics, as

the most popular but not the only kind of consequentialism, assumes that one should

always seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It would, for

example, not require that a promise be kept if the greater good can be achieved by

breaking it. Environmental ethical theories can be either deontological or utilitarian,

but with the added feature that the environment now has a stake in moral decisions.

The greatest good, for example, must include nature or the environment as a

beneficiary. But as Vesiland indicates, these rule based systems stem from

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interpretations grounded in what Hegel would call our Sittlichkeit.

According to John Rist, Hegel was wary of an over-reliance on these rule-

based systems and this realm of principle, this Moralität: “any moral system based on

references to rules and principles alone (and which thus discounts the emotions and

intuitions, including empathy, as well as the proper satisfaction in doing good both

immediately and habitually) is unlivable and necessarily leads either to hypocrisy or

to the abandonment of morality itself.”8 In addition, as conceptually interesting and

coherent as these rule-based systems might be, they have lately come into question,

not because they are not useful, but rather because they are not used. In fact, as I

mentioned in chapter two, one study concluded that most engineers do not explicitly

follow a code or system of ethics when responding to moral situations; they respond

instead in an intuitive, spontaneous way in accord with their character or ethos from

within their particular Sittlichkeit.9 Though a given system of ethical rules might in

fact be highly coherent, it often appears ambiguous to a typical engineer untrained in

ethical theory. Yet, he or she bears an intuitive sense of right from wrong, good from

bad. Development of that sense of the moral life is the project of the most ancient of

philosophical ethics, virtue ethics, an approach based largely on Aristotle’s

Nicomachean Ethics. Virtue ethics focuses on the agent’s character in contrast to rule-

based ethical systems, which focus on the agent’s acts. Of course, the agent is the one

who acts and the act is the act of an agent. The two cannot be separated though they

can be distinguished.

He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good. Rabindranath Tagore

Is Hegel’s Sittlichkeit/Moralität distinction the same thing as the

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ethics/morality distinction? If we envision ethics as a theoretical concern with

principles developed from moral practice, then we can say that ethics is more at home

in the Hegelian realm of Moralität. And if we envision morality as actual human

conduct enacted in a pre-thematic and circumspective manner in the world of our

everyday engagements, then we can say that morality is more at home in the Hegelian

realm of Sittlichkeit. I think it is useful to view the Sittlichkeit/Moralität distinction

along a continuum. At one end, there are highly theoretical and abstract ruminations

about ‘the ought’, and at the other, there are totally concrete and experiential

practices. In between, there is experiencing, being, doing, and multiple forms of

thinking: abstract thought, more practical thought, commonsensical thought, intuitive

thinking, circumspective thinking, etc. Matters of ethical and moral import participate

in a dialectical or hermeneutical oscillation of the elements of the

Sittlichkeit/Moralität continuum. Theories of virtue ethics, developed within the

continuum, are practically oriented. Concrete agents of virtue ethics, pre-modern

engineers in our case, practice their particular virtues within a familiar and everyday

world, their Sittlichkeit, and those agents have always already some kind of

circumspective understanding and some degree of affectivity concerning what it is

they are about.

The Virtuous Agent

When agents, engineers, act intuitively in a virtuous manner, we say they are

acting in accord with customary morality. But what we are after in this chapter is

Dewey’s notion of reflective morality. How can the ancient ethics of virtue be seen as

an instance of reflective morality? Its affinity for the affective life puts a theory of

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virtue ethics toward the middle of the Sittlichkeit/Moralität spectrum. Julia Annas

maintains that ancient ethical theories are centered on the life of the agent as a whole.

Concern with character, choice, practical reasoning, and the role of the emotions is at

the heart of these theories.10 Still, theories are only theories, and as Annas cautions us

“all theories, whether deontologieal, consequentialist, or virtue-based, direct us toward

the principles we need to apply to produce right answers, but this does not mean that

they give us the answers; we apply them to give the answers.”11 That application and

the interpretation of the results that follow, along with the development of the theory

itself, are precisely the tasks of the virtuous agent acting in accord with reflective

morality.

Theories of virtue ethics do not typically follow the model of scientific theory,

which involves abstraction, reduction, and formulation of principles from which

practice proceeds. Theories of virtue ethics do not tend to be hierarchical and

complete. They evolve more as a set of notions that includes, primarily and

primordially, the agent’s final end, the telos. They involve, as Ricoeur claims, aiming

at some notion of the ‘good life,’ engaging with others and being for others, and

working out details in the context of a just institution, which for us is engineering.

Although there is general agreement that our general telos is happiness (eudaimonia),

the nature of that happiness is a wide-open topic, which requires an enveloping

conversation.

The framework of particular virtues, of concern to a theory of virtue ethics, is

generally non-hierarchical. Scientific theories postulate general principles, which

attempt to subsume particular cases in a clear and distinct fashion. Theories of virtue

ethics embrace the character of the person/agent/engineer in the wholeness of their

historical being, and unlike scientific theories, they function more like a web of

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relationships thrown over a sector of reality that structures and shapes that reality.

So how do virtuous agents, like engineers, for example, plying their trade

within the institution of engineering, put into play a virtue ethics? The principles of a

virtue ethics would be the virtues themselves and their advocacy. Which ones is a

crucial question we will take up with shortly. How are the virtues to play a role in the

formation of the character or ethos of the traditional engineer? We need to take

another look at the notion of character which was discussed in the last chapter. Joel

Kupperman maintains that, in general, character is a web of involvements which

includes the presence or absence of:

(1) dispositions to recognize certain situations as ethically problematic,

(2) dispositions to treat certain factors as having special weight in ethical

decisions,

(3) concerns for certain things thought to matter,

(4) commitments that provide a connecting thread among different moments of

the agent’s life.12

Commitments, concerns, and dispositions – as well as the volition needed to put these

ways of being into play – are all involved in the formation of ethos or character

fundamental to the development of a virtue ethics.

A framework for a theory of virtue ethics might consist of an initial ethos, a

desired final ethos, and virtues to be practiced as means to get from the one to the

other. Greek ethics, the quintessential type of virtue ethics, had a theoretical structure

consisting of three moments. Initially, William J. Prior maintains, “there is an ideal

form of human existence, which individuals strive to attain and which it is possible for

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them to achieve. Second, the virtues are necessary to the attainment of this ideal.

Third, wisdom or knowledge is at least one of the virtues needed for its attainment.”13

The wisdom I have in mind, which was mentioned in a previous chapter, is the

practical wisdom, or phronesis, recommended by Aristotle. More about it in a bit.

There is another tri-polar design for a theory of virtue ethics from Alasdair Maclntyre.

His structure consists of the three questions: who one is, who one ought to become,

and what form of action will bring that person from the present to the future.14

Now, although it is common to say that a virtuous person is a person of

character, I think it is important to keep clear the difference between character and

virtue. Character is who we are in terms of concerns, commitments, dispositions, and

volition. Virtues quite simply are those dimensions of a person’s character that have

moral worth, over which a person has some freedom of choice. They can, in other

words, be held responsible for the exercise or failure to exercise their virtues. If I think

I have the virtue of tolerance, and fail to be tolerant in some case or other, then I can

certainly be said to be intolerant. More actively speaking, virtue is what the virtuous

agent does or practices to exhibit those qualities of character having moral worth, or to

transform that character into something better.

A number of important attitudes, dispositions, and virtues – some involving

technical worth, some moral worth – appear as themes in the following story. I once

did an engineering consulting job for a company that designed and developed an ultra-

sound body-scanning device for medical applications. The problem was to design a

compensator circuit to stabilize an actuator whose dynamic operation had to be very

fast but still smooth enough to allow for accurate readings. I tried to recall what

qualities of character, constituting or at least contributing to my ethos, I needed to

complete the design. I needed knowledge, to be sure, both intuitive knowledge of

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what ballpark values to use in choosing compensator gains and explicit conceptual

knowledge of design procedures, like Nyquist and Root-Locus techniques. I had to

look at the problem objectively and fairly size up the constraints, especially those due

to cost and the short time I was given to come up with a solution. This required

alternating between a broad holistic perspective and a focused detailed manipulation

of relevant parameters. Also, I had to trust in the honesty of the people I was working

with even though I didn’t know them personally. They provided me with a reliable

mathematical model of the device and, of course, I had to trust their judgment in

arriving at the complex set of equations that constituted the model. Honesty, trust,

knowledge, alternating perspectives, and a sense of objective fairness were all

involved and all contributed to the quality of character I needed to engineer the

problem at hand.

Many of the virtues indicated in this example will re-appear as part of a

proposed virtue ethics advocating care, honesty, and objectivity I will shortly detail.

The practice of such a system of virtues should lead to an ideal quality of character, an

ideal ethos characterizing the pre-modern engineer. I am assuming that the virtuous

agent of the pre-modern era was primarily a moral, rather than ethical, agent, simply

because ethical systems as conceptual frameworks, developed within Hegelian realms

of Moralität, only came into being with the rise of modernity. Within modernity,

ethics became more predominant and morality took a back seat to ethics. As Zygmunt

Bauman puts it, it was not until the pre-modem era had run its course that within

modernity “morality was a product of ethics; ethical philosophy was the technology,

and ethical preaching was the pragmatics of moral industry; good was its planned

yield, evil its waste or sub-standard produce.”15

In recent years, within the postmodern turn, we have witnessed a decline in the

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authority of ethical rule-based or law-based systems. Does this mean that in the future

ethics will disappear? Probably not. But, as a matter of fact, a world without ethics

need not be a world without morality. The moral practice of, say, the virtues of care,

honesty, and objectivity, by a virtuous agent/engineer might just indicate a flourishing

of morality within the realm of Sittlichkeit – not only within the pre-modem era of the

traditional engineer, but also in the present era of the modern engineer and in the

coming postmodern era of the focal engineer. Bauman, again:

It may well be that the power-assisted ethical law, far from being the

solid frame which protected the wobbly flesh of moral standards from

falling apart, was a stiff cage that prevented those standards from

stretching to their true size and passing the ultimate test of both ethics

and morality – that of guiding and sustaining inter-human togetherness.

It may well be that once that frame has fallen apart, the contents it was

meant to embrace and contain will not dissipate, but on the contrary

gain in solidarity, having now nothing to rely on but their own inner

strength. It may well be that with attention and authority no more

diverted to the concerns with ethical legislation, men and women will

be free – and obliged – to face point-blank the reality of their own

moral autonomy – and that means also of their own non-get-riddable,

inalienable moral responsibility. It may happen (just may) that in the

same way as modernity went down in history as the age of ethics, the

coming post-modern era will come to be recorded as the age of

morality...16

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Practice

Virtuous engineers need to exercise not just their technical skills but also their

moral virtues. A single good act does not a good person make. Practice makes perfect.

Although a person might be naturally inclined to lead a good life, generally a good

character will emerge only by following a virtue ethic of some kind in a more or less

explicit fashion. A practice like engineering, of course, is an act and moral judgments

concerning acts fall typically within the domain of rule-based ethics while virtue

ethics focuses on the agent and considers the character of the agent involved in the

practice. Within the practice of engineering, then, virtue ethics and rule-based ethics

tend to coalesce. Hence, codes of ethics in which rules, standards, values, and ideals

of the engineering profession are most explicitly formulated should reflect the virtues

that indicate the morally good engineer. An engineer, for instance, who practices in

accord with a code of ethics should become a virtuous engineer, while a virtuous

engineer would no doubt abide by the code of ethics of his or her discipline.

As an additional point of interest, David Braybrooke discusses the virtue of

epieikeia which is a Greek word meaning roughly having a disposition to adjust rules

to circumstances. For example, the rule is that one should repay a financial loan when

it is due; but epieikeia dictates that it should not be repaid if someone has gone mad

and would put the money to evil use.17 The point, for our purposes, is that the virtue of

epieikeia presupposes the existence of rules in order to be manifested. Braybrooke

goes on to show how moral rules presuppose the enactment of virtues in order for the

rules to take shape. Virtues depend on rules; rules depend on virtues. Engineering

codes of ethics, then, in order to take the shape they do and to serve as guidelines for

the ethical practice of engineering, must presume that the people who worked out their

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formulation acted in a virtuous fashion, for example, exhibiting the virtues of honesty

and objectivity.

Up to this point, the notion of virtue means something like disposition, or

character trait exhibiting moral worth. Julia Annas maintains that virtue is not a

neutral kind of excellence or an excellence in achieving some non-morally specified

way of being. Virtue is “a complex disposition to do the morally right thing for the

right reason in a consistent and reliable way, in which one’s emotions and feelings

have so developed as to go along with one’s decisions.”18 Dispositions, however, need

to be enacted in order to be manifest. So, we can take virtue in a more dynamic sense

as a practice in search of a moral excellence, which, of course, presupposes a

disposition to engage in the practice in the first place. Alasdair MacIntyre defines

virtue as “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to

enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which

effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”19 These practices involve

interpersonal relationships and social cooperation.

Crucial to Maclntyre’s analysis is the distinction between internal and external

goods. Money, for example, is an external good that might come from the practice of

baseball. But an external good is a good that can be achieved by engaging in other

activities as well, like making good real estate investments. On the other hand, there

are goods internal to the playing of baseball that cannot be explained, experienced, or

understood apart from the specific context of the practice. For example, becoming an

excellent line-drive hitter is an internal good in baseball.20 An example from

engineering of an internal good: becoming an expert or even a virtuoso in the design

and implementation of digital networks for a wide variety of engineering problems.

Having that proficiency is a good in itself in the sense that it embellishes the

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practice of engineering, advancing its benefits to society at large. In the process of

acquiring that skill the engineer engages with others in a variety of cooperative

ventures. It is precisely within that engagement that virtues are exercised. Of course,

an engineer can use this internal good to achieve an external good, like fame, by

presenting papers at conferences or writing textbooks. Another example takes

engineering broadly as a social practice: an internal good would be to engage with

others in a virtuous manner to engineer and build roads that are aesthetically in

harmony with the environment. An external good associated with this activity would

be money, like the salary a typical civil engineer earns.

In light of these examples we can distinguish between an engineer practicing

as an individual and practicing as a member of a collective. Practicing as an

individual, one practices ethically if one does so for the sake of others. If I, as a

consulting engineer, for instance, work alone to design a piece of electronics, I do not

just complete the design in a vacuum. It is for the sake of the company which hired

me or the customers of the company. The connection to others is always already a

given. And the collective practice of engineering is more obviously for the sake of

others. They may be those in my group, the company itself, or the potential customers.

Seung21 takes MacIntyre to task for ignoring the role of the individual engaged in

practices. Nevertheless, for our purposes, the practice of engineering is most

accurately viewed as a collective practice with a collective sharing of common

standards. Even though individualism is still a leading value in the Western world,

gone are the days of isolated eccentric engineers laboring away in their cubicals

without need for human contact. Communication skills are stressed more and more in

contemporary engineering practice because the engineer of today is inevitably part of

a group or team assigned a project with a deadline all overseen by a group leader.

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 The ethos of engineering is the ethos of engineers practicing as engineers. And

that generally means practicing collectively. This is not to belittle the achievements of

individual engineers. Their acquisition of skills is an essential element in both

traditional and modernist engineering practice. The point is that their technical skills

as well as moral virtues are never truly possessed unless they are exercised and that

exercise is invariably a collective enterprise. The collective practice of engineering

must be distinguished from the institution of engineering. The collective practice aims

at internal goods. The institution aims at external goods. Institutions form the

necessary context for the practice. They are structured in terms of power and prestige.

They distribute money, power, and status as rewards.22

The pursuit of external goods does not require the exercise of any special

moral virtues, but depends on ambition and self-interest, natural human drives that

institutions organize and channel. The problem is that even though the pursuit of

external goods through its institutions is a necessary part of engineering practice, the

pursuit of internal goods and the engagement of the virtues in engineering practice

might bar us from being rich or famous or powerful. Thus, although we may hope that

we can not only achieve the standards of excellence and the internal goods of certain

practices by possessing the virtues and also become rich, famous and powerful, the

virtues are often a potential stumbling block to this comfortable ambition.23

The possible conflict between internal and external goods is a serious concern,

but the possible conflict between different types of internal goods is even more

serious. The question of goods internal to engineering is complicated by the fact that

the engineer is engaged in a practice that has various dimensions, which often exhibit

value conflicts. Like many a modern engineer, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was

attracted to a problem that to him was technically sweet but morally repugnant:

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nuclear weapons work. Oppenheimer was enthralled by nuclear science but was also

deeply troubled about atomic weapons. He sought to delay the development of the

hydrogen bomb while avenues for arms control could be explored.24

The question seems to be: how can engineers, while exercising technical

virtuosity, design and create devices, networks, organisms, structures, and systems

that influence society in ways that enhance the common or social good? The social

good is an internal good of engineering practice that should take precedence over

other forms of internal goods. Recall from our discussion about conceptual ethics and

codes of ethics that most engineering codes of ethics give the highest priority to the

common good in terms of the health, safety, and welfare of society. Discussion of

codes and of which values serve society in the most ethical manner were brought into

our discourse when we looked at process ethics, the ethics of the engineering

enterprise, in chapter two.

Morality stems from our connections with each other in shared worlds of our

everyday commitments and concerns. Those connections between human and non-

human beings take on myriad shapes, some of which are of particular pertinence to the

engineer who engineers the engineered. The three kinds of connection I look at here

are characterized by being-toward the other, being-with the other, and being-for the

other. The ‘other’ will usually refer to other people, either directly or indirectly. But

the ‘other’ might also refer to non-human things, systems, tools, structures, devices,

resources, etc. One might wonder how it is that moral notions can intrude upon my

engagement with non-human entities. Do I not, for instance, use this oscilloscope for

these measurements and that’s the end of it? Technical excellence might be at stake,

but moral excellence? Such a use of such a tool could in fact be a beginning of a

human relationship, because the tool is always eventually used for the sake of some

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human. Via such employment of equipment in an ‘equipmental totality’25 other

humans are indirectly referenced.

Prepositions as parts of speech indicate relationship or connection. Being-

toward suggests a kind of objectivity. More completely, being-toward means finding

myself being-along-side those other humans and non-human beings toward whom or

toward which I have already adopted an attitude. I feel compelled to treat objectively

and fairly the other toward whom or toward which I relate as an engineer. I may in

fact not do so, but then I am not being virtuous in the sense of objectivity. Being-with

encompasses being-toward because it presumes being-toward but includes an

additional realization that ‘we are all in this together.’ If so, being-with necessitates at

least a sense of honesty. I feel compelled to treat in a spirit of openness and

truthfulness the other with whom I relate as an engineer. Again, I may not do so, and

may fail to be a virtuous engineer by being dishonest. Being-for the other

encompasses both being-toward and being-with the other. In being-for the other,

according to Zygmunt Bauman, we follow our most basic moral impulse. “Following

the moral impulse means assuming responsibility for the Other, which in turn leads to

the engagement in the fate of the Other and commitment to her/his welfare.”26 As

John D. Caputo quite succinctly puts it: “Obligation Happens.”27 Being-for the other,

then, is not something we design or intend. It befalls us. “Eyes stop wandering around

and glossing over moving shapes, eyes meet other eyes and stay fixed – and a

commitment shoots up, apparently from nowhere, certainly not from previous

intention, instruction, norm; the emergence of commitment is as much surprising as its

presence is commanding.”28 Being-for the other implies that I care for him/her/it. I

feel obliged to treat with compassion, empathy, and understanding the other for whom

or for which I relate as an engineer. This being-for each other is sometimes seen in

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engineering teams whose members have developed a deep sense of belonging-

together – with the emphasis on the belonging, as Heidegger would say – usually over

a period of several years.

The practice of the three virtues of care, objectivity, and honesty, united in an

intrinsic oneness, are for the sake of the moral integrity of engineers engaged in the

project of engineering. That integrity authenticates the place of that project within the

human family. In speaking of the unity of the virtues, one other virtue, which I

mentioned earlier and which was introduced by Aristotle, namely phronēsis, plays a

role in these deliberations. It is roughly translated as ‘practical intelligence’ and it is

the general disposition to make good moral judgments in order to live well. I will

incorporate phronēsis as an integrating theme, not only in bringing together care,

objectivity, and honesty, but also in bringing together the whole of my ethical

reflection, involving virtue ethics, conceptual ethics, and material ethics.

In this discourse, I am talking about the practice of a system of virtues for the

pre-modern engineer, but as seen from the perspective of contemporary times. The

pre-modern engineer of ancient times may certainly have practiced a different virtue

set, perhaps involving virtues like temperance, loyalty, obedience, justice, etc. It is

important to keep in mind that the ancient form of virtue ethics was a rather different

affair, not only content wise but also structurally speaking, than what we moderns are

apt to embrace. This is because in the ancient world ethical theory was not viewed as a

problem-solving mechanism. Ethical theory emerged from the need for people to

reflect on their ultimate goal in life and on how the practice of virtues led to a life of

happiness. For such a task, the need for ethical theory that led to solutions of ethical

conflicts was secondary.30 In the modern world, especially in the case of the practice

of engineering, problem-solving is paramount, and we would no doubt like to have a

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virtue ethics which incorporates that fact. My intention is to lay out a virtue ethics that

follows an ancient virtue ethics structure, providing a place from which an engineer

can evolve into the fullness of his/her being, but at the same time involving an

assessment mechanism – to be sketched out at the end of the chapter – that leans in the

direction of the practices of a more modern agenda.

Objectivity

My suggestion is that engineers should practice the virtues of care, honesty,

and objectivity in order that they might inculcate an ideal character in the service of

the traditional values of the engineering endeavor. If all engineers are of authentic

character, then the culture of engineering will be tuned to the good, and the virtuous

practice of engineering will be in the service of the common good and betterment of

society.

The practice of virtues will no doubt be motivated by external goods of

money, power, and fame; yet, this motivation rather than being unbridled should be

guided by both virtuosity values and social values in pursuing internal goods. One

reason I am suggesting the virtues I do for engineers is that care, honesty, and

objectivity encompass many of the proposals offered in the literature. For instance,

Edmund Pincoff advises, for the modern world, and not necessarily just for engineers,

that persistence, courage, and unflappability in face of setbacks are desirable

instrumental virtues and tolerance and tact desirable diplomatic virtues.31 These

virtues, it seems, do speak to the needs of the engineer and many of them fall under

the broad heading of care and objectivity, among the virtues I am suggesting

engineers ought to practice.

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 Another set of virtues, even more closely aligned with mine, comes from

MacIntyre who advocates the practice of the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty.32

He sees these as being essential for governing social relations involved in all our

human practices. One more recent exposition of a system of virtues can be found in

the book The Moral Sense by James Q. Wilson.33 He suggests that we work on

developing the innate sentiments, common to all humans, of sympathy, fairness, self-

control, and duty. MacIntyre’s notion of justice and Wilson’s notion of fairness

resonate with what I am calling objectivity.

Objectivity is delineated, first of all, not merely as the disposition of treating

things as objects, but also, and essentially, as the disposition of impartiality and all

that that connotes. Following Lawrence Haworth, I downplay the narrow sense of

objectivity, which includes connotations of coldness, lack of emotional involvement,

bureaucracy, and the pursuit only of economic efficiency, even though that sense of

objectivity might in fact be crucial to the technical virtues which guide the

engineering project in the pursuit of external goods. I instead advocate Haworth’s

broad notion of objectivity as roughly synonymous with a personal outlook or stance

of impartiality or fairness, but with the added sense of being oriented outwards onto

the objects I encounter, locating meaningfulness in those objects themselves rather

than in the way those objects impact me or the groups with which I identify.34

To be objective is not to be aloof, uninvolved, or uncommitted. It is to be

disinterested rather than uninterested: To be objective is to take account of all relevant

factors. To resolve an issue objectively or disinterestedly is to have a trait of character

as a standing disposition which takes account only of the facts, interests, and beliefs

that are relevant to the issue at hand, setting aside one’s biases and singular interests,

deciding the matter on its own merits. We all have that disposition to some extent, but

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no one exhibits it consistently or totally.35 My proposal is that engineers embrace this

kind of circumspect objectivity as a contribution to a positive engineering character.

Though most engineers are so inclined to some degree, I want to designate this sense

of objectivity as an explicit ingredient in the proposed virtue ethic. This kind of

objectivity, practiced as a virtue, seems to provide the conditions that make possible

an open minded consideration of rule-based ethical systems, such as codes of

engineering ethics. This notion of objectivity refers to a self-transcendence – a

transcendence of the self, but not a transcendence of the project – within which I

move beyond mere self-interests. I become more than myself by affirming my

individuality but at the same time affirming my connection to the other beings in my

world of involvements, my social world. The objective engineer practices in a socially

responsible way. Such practice, says Haworth, “directs the person outwards, toward

other persons and objects to which value is attributed, and the self affirmed through

the activity is one defined by its relationship with those persons and objects.”36 (italics

are mine)

Here is an example. A positive engineering solution to the problem of land

erosion calls for a practice of the virtue of objectivity toward grazing land. Many

ranchers graze cattle in small fenced-in areas, because cattle are easier to control this

way. The problem is that the cattle in such circumstances tend to consume all the

green edibles in that area, which leaves nothing to hold the topsoil together, causing

erosion of the soil. Agricultural engineers, working perhaps as a consulting team hired

by the ranchers, might suggest to the ranchers that the solution to their erosion

problem is to graze the cattle in larger areas. Cattle will then only eat the greenest

grass and leave much foliage that will hold the topsoil together. Of course, this

solution is expensive. Can ranchers afford it? Can they afford not to? The view of land

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as a resource that has value only to the rancher who owns it must be expanded

“objectively” to be able to see the land as having value in its own right and to persons

and animals other than the land owner. This is the ‘big picture’ view that is fair and

impartial. Such a view might decrease short-term profits to the owner and thus be seen

to be in opposition to the pursuit of their external goods. Most ranchers are business

people who aim to make money. The consulting engineers in my example are also in

business to make money, but for them to act as true professionals seriously engaged in

objective engineering practice, they must look at the erosion problem with the widest

possible perspective. That invariably implies that they recommend environmental

responsibility, the long-term approach, over the short-term profit motive. Trade-offs

will be necessary. The conflict between short term and long term goals will be an

inexorable presence in much professional practice. Nevertheless, the objective

engineer, in the face of a variety of allegiances – to client, company, profession, and

the social world – must practice in an environmentally and socially responsible

manner, which may be at odds with the pursuit of external goods. But not necessarily,

because in our example the pursuit of the internal good of environmental

responsibility will be in the long term in harmony with the external good of making

money. Without a sustained ecology there will soon be no grazing land left from

which to profit.

The element of self-transcendence as part of objective engineering practice

also enhances the professionalism of engineering. The dedication of engineers to their

profession implies that they are not only directed toward satisfaction of personal

wants, but also directed toward expressing the values of the socially defined practice

of the engineering profession. An engineer will ideally value and be directed towards

the practice that holds the highest standards. These standards are passed on through

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the various ways that engineers learn to engineer within the social tradition of

engineering practice. For example, even though formal apprenticeship programs do

not exist as much today within engineering as within medicine, newly hired young

engineers are usually called on to assist senior engineers in various projects. Also,

codes of engineering ethics, reflecting and summarizing the social traditions of

engineering practice, articulate what the tradition views as responsibilities

practitioners have to one another as participants in their practice. Treating each other

fairly as codes of ethics mandate, for instance, implies the practice of an underlying

virtue of objectivity in the sense discussed here. The professional aspect of

engineering practice was a major topic in discussions of modern engineering in the

first part of the text.

Now, the virtue of objectivity as fairness is also called justice. But I want to

reserve the concept of justice, in particular social justice, as discussed in chapter two,

as a value of engineering as process, rather than as a virtue recommended for the

engineer as person. I could speak of a personal justice (fairness/objectivity) and a

social justice. As a Platonic and Aristotelean virtue, personal justice had its roots in

self-mastery in the sense that one was to bracket one’s desires and temptations. In

personal justice we allow each person to receive their due without regard for our own

interests. Justice implies a balance between the divergent interests of the many. The

emblem of justice is the scales. To demand justice does not mean simply to claim

one’s rights but to see one’s rights in relation to those of others.37 Personal justice may

be blind but, as objectivity, it implies everyone gets a fair shake, and it is a virtue I

suggest engineers take to heart. Social justice was a topic for discussion falling under

the auspices of deontology and utilitarianism from chapter two. To further sharpen the

notion of personal justice as a virtue, as Paul Ricoeur has indicated, it can be

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systematized, along with honesty and care, for example, into a virtue ethics. Social

justice, as we saw, is more explicitly conceptual and can be explicated in a variety of

theories of justice.

Virtues are qualities necessary to achieve the goods internal to practices.

Practicing the virtue of objectivity leads to a self-transcendence which opens up the

context of engineering practice. Within that expanded view, we see that internal goods

can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves within engineering practice in our

relationship to other engineers. As practicing engineers we are always already in

relationships to other engineers with whom we share the kind of purposes and

standards which inform the practice of engineering.38 Virtues are not only qualities

necessary to achieve the goods internal to practices, but are also the qualities

contributing to the good of one’s whole life.

In addition, virtues are related to the pursuit of a good for human beings the

conception of which can only be elaborated and possessed within a continuing social

tradition. Being-toward the other, then, in an objective fashion, points to the fact that

we are already engaged in relationships with others. The objective virtue of objectivity

suggests an inter-subjective being-with a host of others. To flourish in such

relationships, engineers need to practice other virtues, and of particular importance is

the virtue of honesty.

Honesty

Honesty is the best policy, as Cervantes claimed, but it is also, according to

Nietszche, the only virtue. In his Autobiography, Ben Franklin makes a confession

about a youthful indiscretion: when he was a young lad, he and his pals stole stones

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from a house about to be built. They used the stones to build themselves a little wharf

for their fishing-hole. Franklin: “The next morning the workmen were surprised at

missing the stones, which were found in our wharf. Inquiry was made after the

removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of us were corrected by our

fathers; and, though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that

nothing was useful which was not honest.”39 True utility, which is at the heart of the

engineering endeavor, in fact, calls for a sense of honesty on the part of all involved.

Even though Franklin suggested hard work and frugality as primary individual virtues

required of us all, he declared honesty to be his primary social virtue. “Whereas

effective people tend to be distinguished by their hard work and frugality, effective

societies tend to be distinguished by their social commitment to honesty.”40 The

society we have in mind is the society of engineers, working together, being-with each

other, connected in a cooperative and truthful manner. And they are not just connected

to other engineers but also to people in the social world who motivate their endeavors

and are impacted by their products.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Old Testament was pretty clear about

honesty, as expressed in Ephesians 4:25: Wherefore putting away lying, speak every

man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. In being-with we

are certainly connected, each to each. Many moral codes, like the Ten

Commandments, are absolute about the matter of truth telling: thou shall not bear

false witness. That means always be honest, always tell the truth. However, in being-

with each other, even though we would like everyone to speak the truth, to reveal the

whole truth sometimes turns out to be disparaging, as in brutal honesty. Knowing

when to speak and when to keep silent requires the integrative virtue of phronesis. As

Maclntyre tells us: ”Lutheran pietists brought up their children to believe that one

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ought to tell the truth to everybody at all times, whatever the circumstances or

consequences, and Kant was one of their children. Traditional Bantu parents brought

up their children not to tell the truth to unknown strangers, since they believed that

this could render the family vulnerable to witchcraft. In our culture many of us have

been brought up not to tell the truth to elderly great-aunts who invite us to admire

their new hats.”41

For virtue ethics lying is of course wrong, but in a manner that is not as direct

or as strict as it is for the deontological ethics of Kant, which makes it manditory that

in order to act with moral rectitude we do not lie. Virtue ethics does not judge an act

to be right or wrong based solely on reason. What one ought or ought not to do,

according to the virtue ethicists, is based on one’s over-all character. Virtues are

positive qualities of people – culturally ingrained on the one hand, but freely chosen

on the other – which orient us toward certain types of behavior and not others.

Objectivity and honesty, for instance, are virtues engineers might practice to help

fulfill their human potential. From the virtue ethics perspective, to practice the virtues

is to be ethical. With virtue ethics it is difficult to assess, in an unambiguous manner,

the morality of distinct acts. Nevertheless, virtue ethicists typically consider lying

wrong since it is in opposition to another virtue, namely honesty. But there is on-

going discussion about whether a lie might be acceptable when told in the service of

another virtue. There is the classical example of a conflict between honesty and

compassion: the son’s lie to his drunken father is in the service of compassion for the

mother and her physical safety. Conflict between virtues is ameliorated by appealing

to a notion of the unity of the virtues, which is really just another version of practical

wisdom or phronesis. In accord with this unity, the ideal virtuous person achieves all

the virtues whenever he or she achieves any one of them. What this might entail is to

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emulate an ethical exemplar, a person whose ethicality comes across as balanced,

centered, focused, and neutral. In looking at lying from this broader perspective,

virtue ethics would find it to be immoral only if it indicates a divergent movement

away from, rather than a convergent movement toward, the process of coming into the

fullness of our moral being within the context of being-with others.

To be with the other in a way that leads to a flourishing existence requires

certain minimal things, e.g., that we practice a certain civility, that we mind our

manners. And we must be honest in order to learn to trust each other. This is certainly

true of engineers. As engineers in contemporary times, whether pre-modern or

modern, working typically in teams, we strive to bring useful things into being, to

realize the promise of technology. The need for trust and therefore honesty is

amplified in team constructs. Here is where we can bring into play the

Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft distinction, mentioned earlier, attributed to the German

sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936).42 Gesellschaft is characteristic of the

being-with form of relationship, Gemeinschaft of the being-for form. Gesellschaft,

ordinarily translated as society, is largely based in functionality and characterizes the

typical engineering team. Gemeinschaft, ordinarily translated as community,

originally referred to a gathering together of folk life and culture in an organic

fashion, and might characterize a long-standing pre-modern engineering community

but probably not a modern engineering community. Later in the text I will propose the

Gemeinschaft model as appropriate to a focal engineering community.

Don't you feel the day is coming

and it won't be too soon

when the people of the world

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can all live in one room

when we shake off the ancient

shake off the ancient chains of our tomb

we will all be born again

of the eternal womb Cat Stevens

Pre-modern engineers in ancient times probably worked pretty much on their

own with perhaps several assistants under them. Monumental projects like the

pyramids required many hands, but once the procedures were laid out, the task did not

appear overly complex. Groups did not need to be tight knitted. Engineering groups,

when they existed, were probably more of a vaguely construed Gesellschaft variety.

However, in the daily lives of the engineers, familial ties predominated and a

Gemeinschaft type of togetherness prevailed. Most people shared a common cultural

identity and tended to cooperate in an open and honest manner without much

deliberation, or else failed to do so and were recognized as deviant from the common

norm. The Gesellschaft, as an individualistic type of gathering, de-emphasizing pre-

modern ties, began to gather force with the rise of the modern era. Larger multi-ethnic

and multi-cultural societies began to emerge. They were united by what Tonnies

described as Gesellschaft ties. These societies did not share common values or

historical identity. Cooperation and collaboration within them was only maintained to

allow exchange of goods and services. Their existence came to depend largely on

economic relations, and as Tonnies put it: “as a result of the diversity of cultural

values, the lack of any ‘family feeling,’ and the emphasis on economic exchange and

economic wealth, conflict over wealth and basic values was likely to disrupt the

harmony of such societies at that time.”43

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 Moral laws and moral codes were put in place to help keep the peace among

Gesellschaft members. Promotion of honesty as a virtue to be practiced in the service

of a harmonious Gesellschaft seemed like a good idea, especially with groups of

engineers who increasingly needed to work on teams. With modernism, the notion of

team-work evolved as did the complexity of engineering projects. The incorporation

of mathematical and scientific perspectives was especially crucial to the

complexification of the engineering project. Nowadays, on a typical modern

engineering team, we find engineering scientists as well as designers, analysts,

technicians, bread-boarders, troubleshooters, proto-typers, etc. We find modern

engineers generally working together cooperatively on Gesellschaft type teams, and

that work involves both interdependence among team members as well as individual

accountability. Each must pull his or her own weight. ‘Slip-streamers’ are generally

ferreted out sooner or later. Honesty is paramount.

To practice the virtue of honesty in its purest form means to tell the truth, to

avoid the lie. Honesty is a virtue we would no doubt like everyone to practice. It

greases the wheels of social interaction. In the practice of science and engineering,

lying can cause severe problems. As Edmund G. Seebauer and Robert L. Barry

maintain, misrepresenting data or procedures de-rails the effort to discover truth about

reality, and inflating one’s contribution to a project at the expense of others corrodes

the team effort needed for long-term success.44 In their seminal work on engineering

ethics, Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins point out seven different ways that engineers can

misuse the truth. These include intentional falsehoods or lies, deliberate deception,

withholding information, failing to adequately promote the dissemination of

information, failure to seek out the truth, revealing confidential or proprietary

information, and allowing one’s judgment to be corrupted.45

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 The classic example of honesty as well as misusing the truth is the case of the

1986 Challenger disaster.46 The problem of the faulty O-rings is widely known within

the engineering community. Morton-Thiokol engineers Roger Boisjoly and Arnie

Thompson expressed their concerns about the booster rockets under cold weather

conditions. They were trying to be virtuous engineers. The cold would exaggerate the

problems of joint rotation and O-ring seating. Predicted temperature at flight time was

to be 26°F, but the lowest temperature ever experienced by the O-rings in any

previous mission was 53°F in a 1985 flight. Even at this temperature, the boosters had

experienced O-ring erosion. Since the engineers had no low temperature data below

53°F, they could not prove that it was unsafe to launch at lower temperatures. The

engineers recommended that NASA should delay the launch. A management decision

was called for, and after much haggling, management decided that from their

“engineering assessment” a launch was recommended. These manager/engineers were

not really being honest in facing up to the risks involved. They simply did not know

what would happen at those low temperatures. And especially the seven Challenger

astronauts who lost their lives, would they not have liked to have had the O-ring

information disseminated to them?

Generally speaking, while the technical side of an engineering project is

usually known for its impeccable honesty, the business or management side is another

story. Alan Wolfe, in his book Moral Freedom, argues that, especially in reference to

private industry, that business is business and the intensity of the competition often

makes for a certain amount of corner cutting.47 From my experience, the cooperative

mode of interaction seems to gravitate more toward the honesty end of the

honesty/dishonesty spectrum, and the competitive mode of interaction toward the

dishonesty end. Some consequences of these observations are interestingly portrayed

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in a game theoretic scenario called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It can be illustrated in a

2x2 matrix formulation. Assume we have two players A and B. Each can choose one

of two strategies I or II. The first strategy (I) refers to cooperation, and the second (II)

refers to competition. Assume that the pair of numbers in each matrix location refers

to costs, the first entry to A’s cost, and the second to B’s cost. The matrix appears as

follows:

I II

A I ($1, $1) ($100, $0)

II ($0, $100) ($10, $10)

Here is the analysis. If A and B agree to cooperate, they both pay only one dollar. We

assume they both are honest in their dealing with each other, as is typical, for

example, of an engineering team. If they both compete, both play strategy II and each

pays ten dollars. On the other hand, if A cooperates assuming B will do the same, and

B plays the competitive strategy, then A is said to be “double-crossed” and must pay a

hundred dollars while B pays nothing. B could be dishonest with A by agreeing to

play cooperatively at first but then switching to the competitive strategy. Likewise, B

can be double-crossed by A. The point here is that playing cooperatively yields an

excellent result for both, but it is risky. Playing competitively yields not such a good

result, but it is safe. In other words, if anyone deviates from the competitive strategy,

they can only harm themselves, but if anyone deviates from the cooperative strategy,

they make out like a bandit.

Since the engineering team represents a paradigm case of a cooperative

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venture of honest engagement, any instance of a lie or dishonesty on the part of any

single team member – in light of the Prisoner’s Dilemma – can cause serious disaster

to the entire team, with all the other members feeling double-crossed. On the business

or management side of engineering, however, we almost expect fudging or corner-

cutting or even what some might consider dishonest behavior here and there. The

participants might be seen not as unique individuals but rather as various companies,

or representatives of various companies, involved in free-market competition. That

does not necessarily imply a lack of honesty, but the likelihood is no doubt greater

than it is in-plant on an engineering team where the participants are cooperatively

seeking goods internal to an engineering practice.

While it is true that I am advocating a set of virtues that should guide the

engineer into being a moral practitioner, it is no secret to most observers of life in

general and engineering in particular that honesty is often compromised in real world

practice. Alan Wolfe has explored morality in the world of choice by talking to people

from all around the US about an array of traditional virtues, including honesty. He

looked at the fierce competition among Internet start-up companies, and found it

difficult to believe that companies like Microsoft or Oracle could became leaders in

their field without bending some of the rules of the road. Wolfe found it “refreshing to

talk with Calvin Lister, the software executive, who acknowledges that ‘we don’t sit

there and advertise about all our warts. Why would we do that?’ Mr. Lister is fairly

realistic in his outlook on the world. He sees Silicon Valley as a place that requires

both cooperation, which encourages honesty, and competition, which does not.”48

In the US, we have witnessed a dark history of corporate crime. The bigger,

older, and more respectable the organization, in fact, the more likely they seem to be

involved in dishonest practices. In the past we have had characters like J.P. Morgan

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and John D. Rockefeller whose dishonest practices were legendary. In contemporary

times the Enron and other corporate scandals capture the headlines. Boeing has been

accused of unethical bidding on U.S Air Force contracts worth billions. Big

corporations that produce goods of various kinds generally tend to be hierarchically

structured and power differentials between different levels abound, tending to yield

competitive rather that cooperative relationships even within the same company.

Flattening of these hierarchies into networks dependent on human brainpower,

popular in recent decades, especially with the shift in the US economy from an

emphasis on goods to an emphasis on services, seems to mitigate this problem. Tasks

are now assigned in a sideways fashion rather than through up-and-down chains of

command. The result is more open lines of communication and more egalitarian social

relations. By stressing honesty in these new high tech industries, there is a hope that

the new economy will reward a virtue like honesty more than the heavy industry of

yesterday. As Wolfe says: “It is as if an old-fashioned technology like manufacturing

is stuck with a kind of postmodern disrespect for the truth, while a postmodern

industry like information technology can restore old-fashioned, traditional virtues.”49

With all this talk about corporate crime and immorality in big business, as well

as discussions about possible brighter futures, we have wandered too far from the

focus of this chapter, which is the ethics, not of engineering as process, but rather of

the person as engineer. The modern engineering enterprise – under the umbrella of

corporate capitalism – has been investigated in the first part of the text. The question

here remains: how should the person of the traditional engineer be in order to be

considered a good engineer? He or she ought to at least practice the virtues of

objectivity and honesty. And? The virtue of care is the third virtue in the trilogy 1 am

proposing.

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Care

If I am being-with a group of other humans, say my colleagues or my friends

or even a group of people on the street, and practicing honesty in an intersubjective

manner, I might want to further my connections by asking: what else is there? The

next step beyond mere being-with is being-for, as propounded by philosopher

Emmanuel Levinas. His thinking initiates from the idea that ethics arises out of the

relation to other people and not by a reference to the universality of a law.50 The

unique other, the incomparable, is the source of meaning in our lives. The other,

imposing upon my responsibility, is the outstretched hand, the stranger in whose eyes

I recognize myself. That condition is primal, even though we can turn away, and no

doubt often do in view of the press of other responsibilities. As Pink Floyd puts it:

Strangers passing in the street

By chance two separate glances meet

And I am you and what I see is me.

And do I take you by the hand

And lead you through the land

And help me understand

The best I can…

No one speaks and no one tries

No one flies around the sun....51

Though caring for the other may not require flying around the sun, it may

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require doing something that true being-for demands. To the helpless I must provide

help. To the starving I must provide food, etc. The care exercised in the being-for

relationship opens up the possibility of an authentic being-with and being-toward

exhibited in the practice of objectivity and honesty. If I am being-for the other, caring

for him/her, then I would certainly be honest with him/her and bear no false witness

toward her/him. Care makes us one. Care in the widest sense links humans to their

world. I care about “x” and “x” is thereby incorporated into my world, my context of

involvements, which in turn grounds and conditions me. Care is connective. It is the

spontaneous enactment of the relationship of being-for the other. Just as being-toward

may elicit a deeper relationship of being-with, so too can being-with erupt into an

intractable being-for relationship. Here is Zygmunt Bauman echoing Levinas:

To take a moral stance means to assume responsibility for the Other; to

act on the assumption that the well-being of the Other is a precious

thing calling for my effort to preserve and enhance it, that whatever I

do or do not do affects it, that if I have not done it, it might not be done

at all, and that even if others do or can do it this does not cancel my

responsibility for doing it myself...As the greatest ethical philosopher

of our century, Emmanuel Levinas, puts it – morality means being-for

(not merely being-aside or even being-with) the Other. And this being-

for is unconditional (that is, if it is to be moral, not merely contractual)

– it does not depend on what the Other is, or does, whether s/he

deserves my care and whether s/he repays in kind.52

The care I have for her/him flows along the threads of the web of relationships.

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That web of life, claims Carol Gilligan, depends on connection and is sustained by

activities of care. It is based on a bond of attachment rather than a contract of

agreement.53 Like Levinas, Gilligan detects a totally different approach to ethical life

than acting on universal principles. The idea of ethics based on universal principles

has appeared earlier in the text when we discussed the ethics of Kant. The ‘different

voice’ Gilligan wants us to hear is the voice of care, doing instinctively whatever the

situation demands.54 Though it is generally the case that the male voice responds more

to the universal principles of rule-based ethics and the female voice to ethics of care,

Gilligan maintains that the different voice she describes is characterized not by gender

but by theme. It is an empirical observation that associates care with women. But, she

insists, this assertion is not absolute, and the contrasts between male and female

voices merely highlight a distinction between two modes of thought, which requires

an interpretation, rather than presents a generalization about either sex.55

Nel Noddings elaborates on Gilligan’s Ethics of Care, providing distinctions

and definitions for a philosophical analysis of care. Noddings distinguishes the care-

giver as the “one-caring” from the recipient as the “cared-for,” insisting that both

parties must be involved in this relationship if caring is to be complete. Noddings also

contends that our obligation to actually be caring is limited by the possibility of

reciprocity. We are not obliged to act as one-caring if there is no reciprocity, no

possibility of completion in the other.56 This implies that ethical caring is restricted to

the human domain. As we move from the human level to the animal level to the plant

level to the thing and idea level, we move “steadily away from the ethical toward the

sensitive and aesthetic.”57 We can have a kind of non-ethical or aesthetic caring,

Noddings suggests, for beings that are not members of the human race.

But this seems a bit contrived, a move by Noddings to save her notion of

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reciprocity. Levinas and Bauman, in fact, argue just the opposite, that the other’s mere

presence obliges us to be there for him/her/it. Deane Curtin, writing from the

ecofeminist perspective about the treatment of nonhuman animals and environment,

generalizes and expands the idea of care advocated by Noddings by distinguishing

between caring about and caring for.58 I care about a general idea. I care for a specific

person. And I can care about things as well as ideas. My involvement with a rock, an

idea, a tree often involves an ethical dimension, an “ought.” The ought of

environmental ethics, for instance, insists that we listen to the voice of nature.

Though the needy other may oblige me in such a way that I respond without

thinking of any kind of reciprocity, there is still a kind of reciprocity, or at least

connectivity, at work among humans and between humans and the non-human world.

I project my possibilities onto an “x” that I encounter. But to live in fullness of the

experience of “x,” I ought to embrace the possibilities that “x” projects onto me, to let

“x” speak in a sense. This field of mutually projected possibilities is the world of care,

and this world includes humans I care for from whom I can hope for – but not require

– some kind of reciprocity, as well as things I care about, which from time to time

grace me by the presence of their being. This field of possibilities is the place of the

being of Dasein, as the Heideggerian analysis in the last chapter indicated. Other

projecting onto me sets up in me an affectivity, and at the same time, I project onto

other in the process of understanding.

To be sure, we humans are caring creatures in the sense of being connected to

our world, typically interacting with a variety of other humans, pursuing goals,

enacting roles, and employing an interconnected array of tools, devices, structures and

systems. The question becomes: how might these ideas of the broad sense of care

speak more directly to a possible virtue ethic for engineering? Written some ten years

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before the work of Gilligan, Noddings, et.al., Milton Mayeroff’s slim volume On

Caring lacks their philosophical depth and political urgency; nevertheless, his view of

the caring relationship is very specific and systematic and seems especially relevant to

the world of engineering. Following Mayeroff, I will view care as the practice of

helping the other to grow, where other can refer to people, places, projects, ideas,

things, etc. I experience what I care for (a person, an ideal, an idea) as an extension of

myself and at the same time as something separate from me that I respect in its own

right.59 The idea of something separate from me that I respect in its own right recalls

the virtue of objectivity as treatment of the other with fairness. In caring for the other I

do not insist on my own agenda, but I appreciate the needs of the other and I follow

the direction of the other’s growth. Generally, Mayeroff maintains, I experience the

other’s development as bound up with my own sense of well-being. How I am and

how it is are mutually interdependent because, in the context of care, I am always

already in the world, in relationship with an array of others.

Mayeroff’s notion of care is very broad and subsumptive. It is synonymous

with mutual concern, benevolence, and the kind of love that was known as charity in

the medieval world. St. Thomas viewed charity, caritas, as the greatest of the virtues.

St.Augustine maintained that all we needed to do was practice charity (love, care) and

the good life would automatically fall into place: dilige et quod vis fac (love and do

what you will). Mayeroff’s notion of care implies a host of other virtues: knowing

(implicit as well as explicit knowing), patience, trust, humility, hope, courage, and

what he calls alternating rhythms (moving back and forth between a narrower and

wider perspective on a given problem). Mayeroff also mentions honesty as involved in

his notion of care, but I am breaking out the virtue of honesty and giving it special

treatment, rather than subsuming it under care. Also, as I mentioned, the virtue of

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objectivity, considered in the comprehensive manner presented previously, resonates

with many of the virtues that Mayeroff’s notion of care implies.

The notion of care is related to the idea of creativity. When one creates, one

reaches out for something that escapes one’s immediate grasp. The creative aspect of

engineering practice is most alive in the act of design. An idea comes to you or you go

out and get it. Often it is fleeting, not yet full-blown. The idea, Plato would say,

dwells in the Realm of Ideas. Some call it the great beyond, the transcendental realm.

Some call it heaven. It’s where God or the gods dwell. It’s also the origin of the Good.

It’s the other as such. We humans reach out to the other as it reaches in to us. We are

these embodied selves being in the here and now, but we are also the between,

reaching forward in an anticipatory or Promethean fashion and backward in a

reflective or Epimethean fashion. The stretched self stretching.60

Like a rubber neck giraffe, you look into my past. Leon Russell

The connective tissue, which we are, is care. Care both connects us to the earth

as the ground of human being and provides us the breath of spirit as the aspiration for

and inspiration from the heavenly realms. Care belongs together with the Good. Care,

enlivened by and enlivening the creative spirit, is at the heart of the endeavor of being

human, and that creative spirit is manifest to varying degrees in all aspects of life,

including the practice of engineering. Heidegger mentions a fable from the early

Roman era that has ‘Care’ as the shaper of clay into a creature with the human form.

Jupiter gave it spirit and Earth gave it body. Then Saturn decreed: “Since you, Jupiter,

have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth,

have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this

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creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives.”61 We live our lives – if this fable has

merit – in the embrace of care. Though some might claim we need to sever our

connections in order to do good engineering, it is only those connections that allow us,

in the first place, to comprehend the needs that provide the impetus for the

engineering project. A certain kind of disconnection, a de-worlding, was seen to be

intrinsic to the modern engineering enterprise. But, as Andrew Feenberg will

maintain, such de-worlding will be complemented by a world-disclosing process that

requires a caring connectivity.62

Another take on the idea of care is to relate it to the physical, affective, or

sensuous connection to the realm of mind, spirit, or super-sensuousness. Let Earth

represent the sensuous realm, Heaven the super-sensuous realm. Care spans the

between. We are the between, caring and being cared for. Eros and Agape. Eros refers

to the human love or aspiration to the realm of the gods, and Agape means love feast,

but its more primal meaning is that it is the love of God or the gods for humans. God

reaches down to us in Agape while we aspire upwards in Eros. Like a pulley.

The Pulley

When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by –

Let us (said He) pour on him all we can;

Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,

Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way,

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Then beauty flow’d, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:

When almost all was out, God made a stay,

Perceiving that, alone of all His treasures,

Rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should (said He)

Bestow this jewel also on My creature,

He would adore My gifts instead of me,

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:

So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessness;

Let him be rich and weary, that at least,

If goodness lead him not, yet weariness

May toss him to My breast.63 George Herbert

The human condition seems to be that we are weak and weary beings,

restlessly and relentlessly seeking after what is not. The quest is not always for the

good but more likely for the distracting, the disengaging, the dissonant, and even the

deadening. The elimination of desire for what is not at hand, as Buddhism

recommends, is no doubt a noble but unrealistic effort for most of us. Nevertheless,

contra the mere human accumulation of more and more goods, the consumptive urge,

there is a more exalted urge, the human quest to strive after the good. But bringing the

discourse back to earth, we must ask: how do we in doing engineering invoke the

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virtue of care? I think the character of most engineers is always already attuned to care

to a large degree. To increase the stature of care we need only invoke it more

explicitly. There are stories of some heroic engineers putting the resources and

expertise of their small computer companies at the service of a community center in a

poor part of town, or others going to third world countries and setting up water

procurement systems that immensely improve the quality of life for obviously needy

people. These are obviously caring engineers “flying around the sun.”

But caring practices can be seen in even the most ordinary types of

engineering activity. For instance, a few years ago I had a graduate student who

completed her MS final project under my supervision. We wanted to consider the

possible application of an area of optimal control theory, called H-infinity control

theory, of which I had heard good things but about which at the time I knew very

little. The theory is very complex, very abstract, but also very fertile. A major part of

our work was to read research papers together and discuss the ideas and eventually

focus on a concrete project. We had to fairly and objectively size up the existing field

of H-infinity control theory. That in itself was no small task. Patience was paramount.

We encountered a wealth of complicated equations and new ideas that had to be

nurtured and allowed to grow at their own pace. The rigor and abstraction of the math

involved required humility of us both. There was always a deeper level of

understanding that escaped us. But we were undaunted and remained hopeful that at

least some of the possibilities would reveal themselves to us. We employed alternating

rhythms, moving back and forth from a specialized focus to the concrete realm of

applying the theory to models of real physical systems. Though we started out

knowing very little about this specialized area, we drew from and built on the

knowledge we had (explicit and implicit) of classical and modem control theory and

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ended up with an interesting project. Many aspects of the virtues of care, then, were at

work (and play) in quite ordinary ways in our explorations.

Phronesis

I wrap up the discussion of virtue ethics for engineers by invoking once more

another particular human excellence, the perfection of the activity of deliberation,

which is called the virtue of prudence, practical wisdom, or phronesis. It is the

excellence of discerning what is truly good for us, as individuals, or for human beings

in general. It is the excellence of a certain kind of thinking – what Aristotle called an

intellectual virtue. However, phronesis plays an instrumental role in guiding action to

its proper end. It involves both theory and practice. Aristotle differentiated phronesis

from, among other things, theoretical wisdom (sophia) and scientific thinking

(episteme). Phronesis is at work in discerning and choosing appropriate goals of

ethical virtue. Thus, ethical virtue without phronesis remains directionless. But,

discernment of the good and perfection of deliberation are dependent on having a

good character. Hence, without ethical virtue, one might have cleverness in figuring

out the means to any end, but one would not have phronesis, the virtue of choosing

the appropriate means to the right end. Excellence of character, then, and practical

wisdom together form a unity. Another way to say this is that both ends and means are

central to phronesis.

The virtue ethic I propose, headlining care, honesty, and objectivity, should

promote an ideal ethos for the engineering profession. Tying them all together,

achieving the unity of these virtues, requires phronesis. How does one take on such an

ethic? Phronesis seems to take time and the incorporation and integration of the

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experience that goes with it, but to get started, no complex equations or calculations

are required. (As I will show in the next section, however, some simple equations

might be helpful in initiating the ethical discussion.) The most direct approach is

simply to begin to be and act in a more caring, honest, objective way. With practice

and experience these virtues will become part of the fiber of the being of the engineer.

Engineers, practicing objectivity, honesty, and care, over time, develop the soundness

of judgment we call phronesis. I am concerned here with the moral sphere which is

not so obvious. A technical phronesis is more apparent. We see around us those

special engineers, who have a knack, an intuition, for seeing the technically right thing

to do even in very complex situations. In the last chapter, I mentioned 19th Century

engineer James Brindley as an example of a pre-modern engineer who exhibited what

I would here call a deep sense of technical phronesis. Such engineers have developed

this keenness of insight by many years of practice. To their company, to their group,

they are probably worth ten times what they are paid. About one, I overheard at a

conference, it was said “he is so valuable to us that he has become invaluable.”

But phronesis on the moral side is more subtle, more rare, and often hard to

discern. The objective, honest, caring engineer may, in fact, be everyone on the team.

But every once in a while, someone seems to be able to put it all together, to stand out

as a champion of the common good, and they may end up as a moral mentor on an

engineering team. But not necessarily. They may in fact stir up trouble and be

considered rabble-rousers. Some may lose their jobs or be black-balled from future

engineering positions. Whistle-blowers, for example, who tell the truth about

something, who act in an honest fashion, are liable in some cases to get fired, or at

least to be ostracized by co-workers and managers. Being virtuous can be a dangerous

practice.

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 Roger Boisjoly’s experiences as a Morton-Thikol engineer involved in the

Challenger space-shuttle flight would, I believe, dignify him as a phronemos (one who

practices the virtue of phronesis). He looked at the O-ring quandary in a fair and

objective manner. There were obvious problems in that performance data was simply

unavailable at low temperatures. Boisjoly was honest in his assessment of the

situation. He forthrightly stated his belief that the flight should be delayed. He showed

that he cared about the safety of the flight and for all involved. He took his position in

the face of management pressures to give the flight a green light. Though management

ultimately prevailed and the disaster that resulted shook the nation, throughout it all,

Boisjoly acted as a true phronemos. Though his authority was limited, he acted as best

he could and made his decisions, based on many years of experience, with the aim of

contributing to the over-all common good. He can be characterized as a phronemos

not just because he practiced the moral virtues of care, objectivity, and honesty, but

also because he directed those virtues toward a proper goal, the common good, the

health and safety of all involved.

Practical wisdom keeps the Big Picture in view. It aims to change the world,

not just react to it. Practical wisdom in the practice of engineering in a caring, honest,

and objective manner can benefit the person as engineer and distinguish the engineer

as person, as well as provide a positive focus for the profession. In order to practice

the specifics of a particular task in harmony with a positive virtue ethics, we must aim

not merely at external goods like money, power, and fame, but also at internal goods

like virtuosity or social consciousness, sought in a collaborative engagement. Seeking

such internal goods in a caring, honest, and objective manner should help to ennoble

engineering practice, as the practice exhibits a more salutary influence upon the

society in which it is embedded.

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Bringing It Together Again

As in chapter 2 where I discussed a simple mathematical approach to initiating

the discussion about conceptual ethics, at this point in chapter five I will present an

analogous approach for virtue ethics. To bring all the pieces of the puzzle together, I

will consider all three virtues of objectivity, honesty, and care in terms of an example,

the same example, in fact, that I used in chapter 2 involving the engineering of Radio

Frequency IDentification (RFID) devices. Again, assume the technical aspect of the

engineering has been impeccably done, meeting all the standards of efficiency and

productivity. How might we assess the moral dimension of the engineers involved in

the engineering of RFID devices? We could certainly gauge them against the virtues I

have put forth in this chapter to constitute a virtue ethics of the engineer, namely, the

practice of objectivity, honesty, and care. This assessment can be carried out at the

company level, perhaps initially within the group. Ultimately, assessments of the

engineers involved in the RFID group will need to be done within the conversation of

the lifeworld, with all interested parties involved.

If I assign a value function (Jv1, Jv2, Jv3) to each of the three virtues I am

aiming at, I can write

Jv = β1 Jv1 + β2 Jv2 + β3 Jv3

with

β1 + β2 + β3 = 1.0

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where the βi terms are weighting factors whose values are to be determined by

consensus. Initially assume all three value functions are equally weighted, so all βi

terms will be set to 1/3. Assume all three value functions can range from -3 to +3. A

minus number indicates that, say, honesty is not achieved. A positive number

indicates that, say, the virtue of care is widely practiced.

Assume the group leader is assessing the ethics of the engineers via the virtue

ethics discussed in this chapter. She decides that the objectivity or fairness of the

RFID team members was at issue. With regard to such issues, Seebauer and Barry

distinguish between different ways credit gets distributed. “Rewards include

intangibles like notoriety and influence, and tangibles like promotion and salary

increases.”63 Assume everyone on the RFID team is poised to get a 10% raise because

the team made a big breakthrough, but everyone on the team did not contribute

equally. Some members feel they did most of the work and a few who did very little

want all the credit. Seebauer and Barry: “Clearly, fairness requires that all members of

the group contribute to the effort in proportion to the time and talent available to them.

An open, honest discussion at the outset of the effort of who can best contribute what

helps to avoid misunderstanding.”64 The group leader vows to have more open and

honest discussions with her team members in an ongoing fashion and to keep closer

tabs on the them in future engagements, but in an attempt to do a fair assessment of

the current situation, she gave the group a Jv1 = -1.5 value for their fairness to each

other.

The honesty, let us say, of certain group members was also brought into

question. That sent a negative ripple throughout the group. In assessing the over-all

honesty of the group, the group leader ended up giving the group a Jv2 = -1.5 value.

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Their caring attitude, let us also say, was rather weak calling for another negative

assessment. They got a Jv3 = -1.5 for their rather negative caring attitude. In

retrospect, the team leader was surprised that the team did so well on the technical

side, because their virtue ethics profile was not so good. The total value function Jv is

computed:

Jv = 1/3(-1.5) + 1/3(-1.5) + 1/3(-1.5) = -1.5

indicating that some work needs to be done.

Again, this number is not the “answer” to the ethical question about whether or

not these engineers involved in RFID device design, development, and manufacturing

are morally good. But the number can provide a point of departure for further

discussion. The team can get together and decide that even though they were able to

do good technical work with a not very good ethical assessment, they can in fact do

even better technical work, and it will be more enjoyable for all concerned, if all team

members strove for excellence in fairness, honesty, and care in their everyday human

interactions.

Ultimately and eventually, the virtue ethics assessment profile can help to

orient the discussion about engineering ethics at the wider level, as it moves beyond

the personal level (discussed in this chapter) and the professional level (discussed in

chapter two) into the conversation of the lifeworld at the social level. As I mentioned

in chapter two, that conversation might employ a variety of discourse models, perhaps

a Danish Consensus Conference model, an approach to assessment which I will

discuss later in the text.

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Conclusions

In this chapter, I have laid out a general view of virtue ethics appropriate to the

pre-modern engineer, which is also appropriate to the modern engineer, because the

modern engineering enterprise includes the essence of the pre-modern engineering

endeavor. That endeavor involves being-toward, being-with, and being-for other

people, places, and things. I propose objectivity or fairness or personal justice as

essential in guiding the orientation of being-toward, honesty as essential to being-

with, and care as essential to being-for. In general, the practice of a virtue ethic

strengthens, balances, focuses, and centers all aspects of human being-in-the-world.

The loosely-structured theory of virtue ethics I am putting forth here lies

somewhere midway along the Sittlichkeit/Moralität spectrum. That theory involves an

initial condition of the way pre-modern engineers are, i.e., their character, as presented

in the previous chapter. How the pre-modern engineer ought to be, his or her telos, is

another key element in the virtue ethics theory. The ideal form of being for the pre-

modern engineer is that she or he be a ‘good’ engineer: not only technically proficient

but also morally good in enactment of the ways and means of the engineering

tradition. Education, training, apprenticeships, and experience lead to technical

proficiency. To attain this ideal in the moral sense, the pre-modern engineer ought to

practice the virtues of fairness, honesty, and care. The practical wisdom of phronesis

is the last essential virtue needed to keep the Big Picture in view.

Looking at the engineering project as a contextualized endeavor will help to

keep the Big Picture in view. Toward that view we now move in chapter six. We have

taken an internal look at the project of engineering and have seen the “engineer

engineering the engineered.” The three elements of person, process, and project stand

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out as essential to the internal perspective on the engineering project. In this second

part of the text we are focusing on the person of the engineer as indicative of the pre-

modern engineering project. In the first part of the text we focused on the engineering

process as indicative of modern engineering and in the third and final part of the text

we will focus on the engineered product as indicative of focal engineering. Now,

however, we take another outward look at engineering and consider engineering as

embedded in contexts of various sorts.

References

1 Gregory Trianosky, “Natural Affection and Responsibility for Character: A

Critique of Kantian Views of the Virtues” in Identity, Character, and

Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. by 0. Flanagan and A. 0. Rorty

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 104.

2 John Dewey, The Theory of the Moral Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1960), p. 91.

3 Sherwin Klein, “Platonic Virtue Theory and Business Ethics,” Business and

Professional Ethics Journal, vol. 8, no. 4, 1990, p.65.

4 Robert Piercey, “Not Choosing between Morality and Ethics,” The

Philosophical Forum, vol. XXXII, no. 1, 2001, p. 54.

5 Ibid., p. 59.

6 Ibid., p. 54.

7 P. Aarne Vesilind, “Rules, Ethics and Morals in Engineering

273
 Education,” Engineering Education, vol. 78, no. 5, February 1988, p. 291.

8 John Rist, Real Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.

120.

9 Roy V.Hughson and Philip M.Kohn, “Ethics,” Chemical Engineering, Sept.

22, 1980, p. l32.

10 Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1993), p. 4.

11 Ibid., p. 6.

12 Joel Kupperman, “Character and Ethical Theory,” Midwest Studies in

Philosophy, vol. 13, 1988, p. 116.

13 William J. Prior, Virtue and Knowledge: An Introduction to Ancient

Greek Ethics (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 4.

14 James F. Keenan, S.J., “Virtue Ethics: Making a Case As It Comes of

Age,” Thought, vol. 67, no. 265, June 1992, p. 120.

15 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995),

p. 34.

16 Ibid., pp. 36-7.

17 David Braybrooke, “No Rules Without Virtues: No Virtues Without

Rules,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1991, p.144.

18 See Julia Annas, p. 441.

19 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd Edition (Notre Dame, Indiana:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 191.

20 Randolph Feezell, “Sport, Character, and Virtue,” Philosophy Today, vol. 33,

no. ¾, Fall 1989, p. 205.

21 T. K. Seung, “Virtues and Values: A Platonic Account,” Social Theory and

274
 Practice, vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1991, p. 220.

22 See Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 194.

23 See Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 196.

24 Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The

MIT Press, 1983), p. 125.

25 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 97.

26 See Zygmunt Bauman, p. 100.

27 John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University

Press, 1993), p. 6.

28 See Zygmunt Bauman, p. 53.

29 Heidegger used the idea of Sameness meaning belonging together in his

essay entitled “The Principle of Identity.” The emphasis on ‘belonging’

indicates an intimacy between being and thinking, whereas the emphsis on

‘together’ indicates a more customary scientific unification. The reference is:

Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row,

1969).

30 See Julia Annas, p. 443.

31 Edmund L. Pincoff, Quandries and Virtues (Lawrence, Kansas: University of

Kansas Press, 1986), p. 6.

32 See Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 191.

33 James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993).

34 Lawrence Haworth, Decadence and Objectivity (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1977), p. x.

35 Ibid., p. 100.

275
36 Ibid., pp. 91-92.

37 Gernot Böhme, Ethics in Context: The Art of Dealing -with Serious

Questions, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.,

2001), p. 53.

38 See Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 91.

39 This famous quote from Ben Franklin is cited in the text edited by George L.

Rogers, Benjamin Franklin’s The Art of Virtue, 3rd Edition (Eden Prairie,

Minnesota: Acom Publishing, 1996), p. 137.

40 Blaine McCormick, Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management (Irvine,

California: Entrepreneur Press, 2000), p. 111.

41 See Alasdair Maclntyre, pp. 192-3.

42 Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society: Gemeinschaft und

Gesellschaft, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing, Michigan: The Michigan

State University Press, 1957).

43 This quote comes from a web article “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: A

sociological view of the decay of modern society” by Alain de Benoist. It is

located at the cite:

http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain6.html

According to information at the web cite it is based on an original essay by

Alain de Benoist, translated and interpreted by Tomislav Sunic, Juniata

College. The article was originally published in vol. 34, Mankind Quarterly in

1994.

44 Edmund G. Seebauer and Robert L. Barry, Fundamentals of Ethics for

Scientists and Engineers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 145. This

text is the first engineering ethics text that stresses virtue ethics.

276
45 Charles E. Harris, Michael S. Pritchard, Michael J. Rabins, Engineering

Ethics: Concepts and Cases, 2nd Edition (Belmont, California:

Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000), pp. 119-121.

46 The information on the Challenger disaster was drawn from the CD-ROM

included with the Harris, Pritchard, Rabins text.

47 Alan Wolfe, Moral Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001),

p.122.

48 Ibid., p. 122.

49 Ibid., p. 123.

50 Jill Robins, ed., Is It Righteous To Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 114-5.

51 Pink Floyd lyrics from the song “Echoes” on the 1971 album Meddle,

available on the web at

http://www.allfloyd.com/lyrics/Meddle.html

52 See Zygmunt Bauman, pp. 267-8.

53 Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

University Press, 1982), p. 57.

54 Hubert L.Dreyfus and Stuart E.Dreyfus, “Toward a Phenomenology of Ethical

Expertise,” Human Studies, vol. 14, 1991, p. 246.

55 See Carol Gilligan, p. 2.

56 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach To Ethics and Moral

Education (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1984), p. 149.

57 Ibid., p. 161.

58 Deane Curtin, “Toward an Ecological Ethics of Care,” Hypatia, vol. 6, no. 1,

1991, p. 67.

277
59 Milton Mayeroff, On Caring (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 5.

60 Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, trans., Theodore Kisiel and Murry

Greene (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 104. This

is Marx’s translation of an expression from Heidegger.

61 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 242.

62 Andrew Feenberg, “Modernity Theory and Technology Studies: Reflections

on Bridging the Gap,” published in T. Misa, P. Brey, A. Feenberg, eds.,

Modernity and Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,

2003), pp. 73-104.

63 George Herbert, “The Pulley,” in A Treasury of Great Poems, compiled and

selected by Louis Untermeyer (New York: Galahad Books, 1993), pp. 4.

64 See Seebauer and Barry, Fundamentals of Ethics for Scientists and

Engineers, p. 175.

65 Ibid., p. 175.

278