Utilitarian And Kantian View Of Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics started drawing attention since the modern ethics exposed its limitation and reconsideration about the priority was needed. Contemporary ethics focus on “What we should do”, instead of “What kind of person we should do”. In consequence, the moral codes in modern era solely emphasizes moral duty and rules, while neglecting personality and character of individuals. Virtue ethics support the traditional criterion that consider moral virtue and personality of individuals as important. The virtue of good engineer includes creativity, good understanding of culture, morality, and capability of communication. In utilitarian and Kantian view of ethics, such virtuous values are not taken into consideration. This short paper suggests how future engineers should apply the virtues and excellences in their fields and why virtuous engineers are more likely to contribute to society and make it better. In Aristotle’s view, virtue(arête) is defined as an essential factor to achieve happiness of an individual, while happiness(eudaimonia) is defined as an ultimate objective of human-being. Aristotle insisted that the order of priority may decide whether one’s goal should be considered as a means or the goal itself. In other word, a goal with lower priority can be a method to achieve a goal with higher priority. In Aristotle’s viewpoint, happiness means the supreme good among other virtues, being the ultimate goal that human-beings pursue. Hence happiness cannot be an optional