Moral and Civic Virtues in Engineering: Reimagining Engineering Ethics to Cultivate Virtuous Engineers

Unlike other professions that require post-baccalaureate education, engineering education must offer graduates not only technical depth but also professional acumen like ethics, communication, and team effectiveness during the undergraduate program. While engineering ethics has traditionally focused on two major ethical theories - deontology and consequentialism - which emphasize compliance-based rules and responsibilities, virtue ethics is a third and less prominent lens of ethics that offers a more humanistic approach to dilemmas facing engineers in everyday practice. Virtue ethics, which is often associated with character education and character development, can guide engineers with professional growth in areas of teamwork, collaboration, leadership, communication, and most certainly ethical reasoning. Virtue ethics offers a lens upon which to understand dispositions so that we can think and act responsibly. Virtues like integrity, courage, service, purpose, humility, justice, empathy, resilience, curiosity, and practical wisdom are essential to the practice of engineering. Virtuous engineers are responsible engineers who use their judgement to balance conflicting demands. This session serves the purpose of engaging the engineering and computing educators to understand virtue ethics and the importance of character education with a primary focus on moral and civic virtues (honesty, courage, justice, self-control, compassion, generosity, empathy) in alignment with intellectual and performance virtues (critical thinking, resilience, teamwork, curiosity, creativity). Pedagogical approaches will be discussed during this session and participants will have the opportunity to identify everyday situations where virtue ethics can be applied to support character and leadership development for their students.