Abstract
This paper articulates an Aristotelian theory of professional virtue and provides an application of that theory to the subject of engineering ethics. The leading idea is that Aristotle’s analysis of the definitive function of human beings, and of the virtues humans require to fulfill that function, can serve as a model for an analysis of the definitive function or social role of a profession and thus of the virtues professionals must exhibit to fulfill that role. Special attention is given to a virtue of professional self-awareness, an analogue to Aristotle’s phronesis or practical wisdom. In the course of laying out my account I argue that the virtuous professional is the successful professional, just as the virtuous life is the happy life for Aristotle. I close by suggesting that a virtue ethics approach toward professional ethics can enrich the pedagogy of professional ethics courses and help foster a sense of pride and responsibility in young professionals.
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Notes
On page 154 Harris writes “…80% of the code of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) consists of provisions which are negative and prohibitive in character.”
While my approach here looks at examples of virtue ethics in a specifically engineering ethics context, the method pursued offers a way of characterizing a notion of Aristotelian virtue that generalizes over other professional disciplines.
Cf., for instance, Foot (1978, pp. 2–4). Foot discusses there the trouble of preserving an Aristotelian conception of virtue ethics given the way the word ‘virtue’ has taken on a meaning rather different than the original ancient Greek arête.
For the purposes of this paper a discussion of whether Aristotle’s conception of the ergon of human beings is correct is not important. Rather, the aim here is to present Aristotle’s view so as to exhibit the way the general method—specification of a thing’s function as the means for delineating its virtues—can be applied to the field of professional ethics. For even if human beings were not created with any functional role to fulfill, the case of the professions that structure our society is another matter. While the issue of Aristotle’s treatment of human beings as the rational animal is an interesting one, we need not here take up in earnest a discussion of its authority in order to use it as a model on which to build an analysis of the functions peculiar to the professions that structure our society.
Aristotle counsels us that virtue most often lies in tending slightly toward the opposite extreme of that which we are naturally inclined toward, so that good counsel would be for the athlete to err slightly on the side of self-denial while the ascetic should perhaps aim for the opposite, depending on their peculiar dispositions.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that this point be emphasized.
Talk of excellence rather than virtue is sometimes taken up; see Harris (2008). But in this paper I will follow the tradition and continue to use the term “virtue.”
“We said, then, that happiness [eudaimonia] is not a state. For if it were, someone might have it and yet be asleep for his whole life, living the life of a plant, or suffer the greatest misfortunes. If we do not approve of this, we count happiness as an activity rather than a state…” (Aristotle 1985, Book X, Chap. 6, 1176a33–1176b2).
Insofar as our earlier decision to continue using “virtue” was influenced by trends in the philosophical debate on morality, we might remark that there is a similar disciplinary reason impelling us to jettison the use of “happiness” here. For this term has largely been appropriated by utilitarian theories, and it would do us well to select a different word to characterize the form of life associated with the practice of virtue. Of course one could simply legislate that we understand the term “happiness” in discussion of Aristotelian virtue to be such as his theory requires, but there are better terms for translating eudaimonia, terms more consistent with our pre-theoretical understanding of them.
In Hutchinson (2007) the “eudaimon” life is translated as the “successful” life. We will here reserve “successful” as the characterization of the virtuous professional life.
In part a holdover from Plato’s influence on Aristotle, no doubt. But again, we need not be concerned with defending the methodological motivations of Aristotle’s conception so long as we see the cognitive value in the distinctions he cuts.
This does not mean that such an action never can cease, only that it doesn’t need to cease to be successful at the end for which it aims—for its end is the activity itself. So, for instance, if contemplation of the divine is conceived as the highest good, then it is something that never needs to reach a result—otherwise the result would be the end and the action would not be intrinsically worthwhile—while for many reasons such contemplation can cease.
Aristotle also views the reliance on external goods as a dividing line between the intellectual and ethical virtues. At 1178a8–14 (Book X, Chap. 8) of the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes those virtues concerned with contemplation, which are divine, and those concerned with action, which are human. “The life expressing the other kind of virtue [i.e. the kind concerned with action] is [happiest] in a secondary way because the activities expressing this virtue are human. For we do just and brave actions, and the others expressing the virtues, in relation to other people, by abiding by what fits each person in contracts, services, all types of actions, and also in feelings; and all these appear to be human conditions.” (Bracketed remarks preserved from Irwin’s translation). At 1178a24–35 (Book X, Chap. 8) Aristotle says that the human virtues require a greater reliance on external factors (power for bravery, money for generosity), and so insofar as a human being can exercise the human virtues he or she must have the sorts of external goods necessary for these virtues. But these sorts of external goods are to some extent a hindrance to the pursuit of the divine virtues—contemplative study (though at 1178b33–6 Aristotle offers a caveat to the effect that human well-being requires at least a moderate amount of external goods, including health and food, even for the practice of contemplation).
Much of this reading depends on how we gloss eudaimonia in the context of the pursuit for a “highest good,” and of an act being an end in itself. If self-sufficiency is the criterion of the summum bonum then the ethical virtues as what are needed to get along well in society and so fully flourish are means to an end—the self-sufficient contemplation of the divine. On this understanding of the good life it appears we have a two-level notion of virtue in Aristotle—the practice of the ethical virtues as the means to practice the intellectual virtues, and the practice of the intellectual virtues as an end in itself. But if we understand eudaimonia as an active principle of human flourishing, then it would appear that even the practice of the ethical virtues, as a practice representative of our function as rational creatures, is an end in itself regardless of whether that practice is self-sufficient. Aristotle’s remarks at 1177a13–18 would support the two-level rendering of Aristotle’s view of virtue, but much of what he says elsewhere (and much of the secondary literature) would seem to support the latter rendering. As Kraut in Sect. 2 of the Stanford Encyclopedia article “Aristotle’s Ethics” puts it “[Aristotle] says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of the soul.” Furthermore, Rosalind Hursthouse argues that eudaimonia is not the highest good, but rather that acting virtuously is (Hursthouse 2007, pp. 169–170). Her concern seems to be that the good life is too dependent upon external contingencies to constitute a realizable aim of human activity. Her argument turns on the utter contingency of realizing eudaimonia, the extent to which it depends on factors wholly outside our control, which implies that we cannot hold it as the supreme good. Instead, “[i]f anything counts as the ‘top value’ in virtue ethics, it is acting virtuously…” (ibid, p. 169). Presumably this is because we can achieve virtuous activity even in the face of adversity, though we cannot achieve the good life without external goods if the good life depends on those goods.
Articulating the relationship between the ethical and intellectual virtues is a complex affair and I do not suppose to have given the definitive account. Enough will have been done if this is an internally consistent account, one that does not do disservice to what Aristotle wrote, and one that bears value in its extension to professional virtue ethics. In this regard I believe I have been successful, though the reader is encouraged to judge its merits on their own, in particular by gauging the worth of the account of professional virtue it underpins beginning in the next section and developed in Part 2 .
A word of clarification is perhaps in order here. Some of the virtues put forward for engineering ethics might seem like intellectual rather than ethical virtues. In his discussion of virtue in “The Good Engineer,” Harris distinguishes technical from non-technical engineering virtues, and suggests that these virtues might be analogues to the ethical and intellectual virtues in Aristotle [Harris, p. 158]. In that work Harris proposes and discusses three non-technical virtues: techno-social sensitivity, respect for nature, and commitment to the public good. If the analysis given in the current paper of Aristotle’s virtue theory is sound, then the crucial difference between intellectual and ethical virtues is that the intellectual virtues are pursued as ends in themselves, whereas the ethical virtues are means to some other end. In this regard virtues such as techno-social sensitivity are instrumental in the sense required to classify them with the ethical virtues. The virtue-motivated professional engineer is concerned with the social impact of technology precisely because this impact affects the welfare of human beings through the activities of the profession. The same can be said of the practice of respect for nature and a commitment to human welfare. The engineer who pursues these interests in an exercise of specifically professional virtue must make her pursuit sensitive to the well-being of the profession, to its capacity to satisfy its role in society. No matter how intrinsic one may find the value of respecting nature, for instance, the practice of this virtue as a professional virtue requires that any motivation to respect nature must be undertaken in the service of the profession’s social role. There is, of course, an important issue regarding whether and in what way a profession’s currently perceived role in society is correct. This question of the normative judgments that go into specifying what a profession’s role should be in society will be discussed later in the paper, in “Toward the Characterization of a New Virtue: Professional Self-Awareness” and “The Virtuous Professional as the Successful Professional.” For now, note that for all I have said about professional virtue being a subset of ethical virtue, this view is consistent with their being an important difference between technical and non-technical virtues. It is just to say that the difference is drawn within the ethical virtues, even if that difference takes the intellectual virtues to be a model for the non-technical virtues. This issue may well be one at which contemporary professional virtue theory must diverge from a strictly Aristotelian framework. My thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this matter to my attention.
I take this approach, here applied specifically to engineering ethics but with professional ethics more generally in mind, to be in agreement with Edmund D. Pellegrino’s treatment of medical ethics in Pellegrino (2007). On page 64 Pellegrino writes “The professions are distinct human activities in which virtues and ends can be linked. Professions have identifiable and defining ends, that is, each serves certain universal human needs…To attain that end, certain virtues are required…These virtues are neither optional nor merely admirable. They are entailed, on the physicians part, by the nature of the ends of medicine.”
As mentioned in Part 1 , I will remain neutral in this paper with regard to whether there is a particular ergon for human beings, and instead leave it as a place holder for building a model of the functions peculiar to social professions, which professions surely are explicitly end-directed.
This definition should be understood to include electrical and informational structures present, for instance, in electrical circuits and computational systems.
The question of what sorts of physical structures should underpin a given society, and thus what specific normative injunctions this functional definition brings with it, is an important one. A more detailed treatment of professional engineering virtue would include explicit discussion of the normative question, perhaps by linking professional virtues to an Aristotelian conception of the ergon of human life more generally. That sort of more detailed normative treatment of professional engineering will largely remain untouched in this paper. My purpose in this paper is not to look at specific practices that count as professionally virtuous, but rather to investigate the conditions under which we can understand any action, within whatever normative framework, to be an instance of professional virtue (though I will have a few remarks to make about the importance of a normative component in any actual practice involving professional self-awareness in “Toward the Characterization of a New Virtue: Professional Self-Awareness,” and about the relation between professional virtues, professional success, and a well-ordered society in “The Virtuous Professional as the Successful Professional”).
In “The Virtuous Professional as the Successful Professional” I will argue that the virtuous professional’s personal ends, pursued in their capacity as a professional, can coincide with the ends of the profession. But for now we are examining personal ends sought without regard for the ends of the profession.
Though it is outside the discussion of this paper, the adoption of this perspective could be fleshed out with the notion of a ‘moral exemplar’; patterning one’s activity on how one imagines a moral exemplar would behave—something like Aristotle’s magnanimous agent, R. M. Hare’s Archangel, or Harris’ discussion of virtue portraits (Harris 2008, pp. 157–158, 162).
Notice that the role of professional self-awareness was not derived from the functional characterization of the engineering profession. The capacity for self-reflection is a virtue in general, insofar as human flourishing is impossible without rationally assessing those conditions that must be satisfied for our flourishing to manifest itself in specific situations. Professional self-awareness is therefore a virtue for professionals in general, exhibited by the fact that its derivation proceeded from consideration of the functional role of a profession in general, rather than on the specific role of an individual profession like engineering.
These characterizations of virtue in medicine, business, and law should not be read as definitive statements of the peculiar functions of these professions, though they are hopefully not obviously false.
This is not to say that professional practice is sufficient to constitute a society, of course. A number of structural elements must be in place for professions to have any impact on a society in the first place, from political organization to the availability of natural resources to the replenishment of the labor force. It is just to say that when the appropriate background conditions are met, a society’s professions are constitutive of whatever determinate form the society takes.
And so the notion of “well” in “well-ordered society” is a teleological notion, not a normative one. That is, in judging that a society is well-ordered on this account, we are judging that it is efficiently ordered so as to foster the satisfaction of the functions of its professions, not that these functions are morally appropriate.
Hegel’s formulation of the role of education is a little stronger, and bears some relevance to the positions of classical and contemporary virtue ethicists, both in terms of the need to habituate a person to ethical activity and to do so in terms of inculcating a type of character through what Aristotle called our ‘second nature,’ a sort of social maturation. The addition to §151 in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right reads in part: “Education is the art of making men ethical. It begins with pupils whose life is at the instinctive level and shows them the way to a second birth, the way to change their instinctive nature into a second, intellectual, nature, and makes this intellectual level habitual to them” (Hegel 1967, p. 260). It is the goal of the professional virtue ethicist to encourage his or her students to make explicit the hidden motivations impelling their behavior in certain ways, to rationally reflect on these motivations and their relation to our place in society, with the purpose of fostering that second birth.
Frankena, on the other hand, views “the morality of duty and principles and the morality of virtues or traits of character not as rival kinds of morality between which we must choose, but as two complementary aspects of the same morality. Then, for every principle there will be a morally good trait, often going by the same name, consisting of a disposition or tendency to act according to it; and for every morally good trait there will be a principle defining the kind of action in which it is to express itself. To parody a famous dictum of Kant’s, I am inclined to think that principles without traits are impotent and traits without principles are blind” (Frankena 1988, p. 266).
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Acknowledgement
My thanks to C.E. Harris, Jr., William Glod, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Stovall, P. Professional Virtue and Professional Self-Awareness: A Case Study in Engineering Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 17, 109–132 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9182-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9182-x