Have I acted in a responsible fashion?
In many ways, this theory may seem to be mostly personal ethics and not par- ticularly applicable to engineering or professional ethics. However, personal moral- ity cannot, or at any rate should not, be separated from professional morality. If a behavior is virtuous in the individual’s personal life, the behavior is virtuous in his or her professional life as well.
How can virtue ethics be applied to business and engineering situations? This type of ethical theory is somewhat trickier to apply to the types of problems that we will consider, perhaps because virtue ethics seems less concrete and less susceptible to rigorous analysis and because it is harder to describe nonhuman entities such as a corporation or government in terms of virtue. However, we can use virtue ethics in our engineering career by answering questions such as: Is this action honest? Will this action demonstrate loyalty to my community and/or my employer? Have I acted in a responsible fashion? Often, the answer to these questions makes the proper course of action obvious. To use virtue ethics in an analysis of an ethical problem, you should fi rst identify the virtues or vices that are applicable to the situation. Then, determine what course of action each of these suggests.