A BRIEF HISTORY OF ETHICAL THOUGHT
It is impossible in this text to give a complete history of ethical thinking. Numerous books, some of them quite lengthy, have already been written on this subject. However, it is instructive to give a brief outline of the origins and development of the ethical principles that will be applied to engineering practice.
The moral and ethical theories that we will be applying in engineering ethics are derived from a Western cultural tradition. In other words, these ideas origi- nated in the Middle East and Europe. Western moral thought has not come down to us from just a single source. Rather, it is derived both from the thinking of the ancient Greeks and from ancient religious thinking and writing, starting with Judaism and its foundations.
Although it is easy to think of these two sources as separate, there was a great deal of infl uence on ancient religious thought by the Greek philosophers. The written sources of the Jewish moral traditions are the Torah and the Old Testament of the Bible and their enumeration of moral laws, including the Ten Commandments. Greek ethical thought originated with the famous Greek philosophers that are com- monly studied in freshman philosophy classes, principally Socrates and Aristotle, who discussed ethics at great length in his Nichomachean Ethics. Greek philosophic ideas were melded together with early Christian and Jewish thought and were spread throughout Europe and the Middle East during the height of the Roman Empire.
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