In his entry on “risk” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Sven Ove Hansson noted that there are at least five relevant senses of the word in common usage today: …

Virtuous Engineers assert their responsibility
for engaging in a combined human performance
that involves the exercise of practical judgment
to enhance the material well-being of all people
by achieving safety, sustainability and efficiency
while exhibiting objectivity, care and honesty
in assessing, managing and communicating risk.

Having laid down a lot of philosophical groundwork in this space over the last couple of years, I am finally ready to attempt to pull it all together. I will do so under three headings that correspond to the central concepts in Aristotle’s approach to virtue ethics. …

Based on the work of Allison Ross and Nafsikas Athanassoulis, I have identified safety, sustainability, and efficiency as “The Internal Goods of Engineering” (March 2013). Based on the work of Gene Moriarty, I have identified objectivity, care, and honesty as “The Moral Virtues of Engineering” (May 2013). However, I have also acknowledged the potential for dissonance among the individual goods or virtues in each list. How is an engineer supposed to harmonize them when that happens? …

According to Alasdair MacIntyre, applying virtue ethics to any practice is primarily a matter of recognizing the goods that are internal to it and the character traits that enable those who are involved in it to achieve them (“Rethinking Engineering Ethics,” November 2010; “Engineering Ethics as Virtue Ethics,” May 2011). David Miller argued that this is insufficient for practices that serve a wider social purpose (“The Proper Purpose of Engineering,” January 2013). When it comes to what constitutes a virtue in these cases, he wrote: …

In my last column, I proposed that the proper purpose of the practice of engineering is the material well-being of all people. This month, I would like to elaborate a bit on what this means and explore in more detail how engineers uniquely pursue it. …

As Joseph Dunne has noted (“The Rationality of Practice,” September 2012), a practice as defined by Aladair MacIntyre (“Rethinking Engineering Ethics,” November 2010) is “something that can succeed or fail in being true to its own proper purpose.” Both MacIntyre and Dunne had internal goods in mind, but there is an alternative sense in which a practice may have a “proper purpose.” In a 1984 paper (“Virtues and Practices,” Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 49-60), British political theorist David Miller identified two different kinds of practices: …