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Civic Virtue among Engineers

Citation

Graeff, E. 2025. “Civic Virtue among Engineers.” Virtues & Vocations, Spring 2025. https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-spring-2025/civic-virtue-among-engineers/.

Link

https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-spring-2025/civic-virtue-among-engineers/.

Introduction

My undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering want to make a positive impact. They see engineering as a career path to building a better world. Their initial theories of change are often naive. But I want them to hold onto the hope of positive impact through four years of equations, prototypes, and internships, and feel like they can live their values wherever their careers take them.

A Culture of Disengagement

The fields of engineering and computing have been experiencing a rightful reckoning with the negative impacts of emerging technologies. Their traditional models of personal, professional, and corporate ethics have long been lacking. Now citizens and their governments are realizing their inadequacy.

New research, curriculum, and ethics codes have emerged in response to the global focus on technology ethics. I’ve participated in countless conferences and meetings with scholars, educators, and practitioners trying to figure out how higher education can cultivate the necessary critical mindsets and ethical skills of technologists. I’ve introduced many of the novel ideas, frameworks, and approaches into the design, computer science, and social science courses I teach.

I’m reaching some students, but not all, and not always in the ways I hope to. Student reactions seem to fall into a few, rough categories: (1) Woah! Engineers have done some really bad things. I don’t want to be an engineer anymore. (2) Ethics and responsibility seem important, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the kind of engineering I want to do. (3) You can’t anticipate how people will misuse technology. This is just the cost of innovation and progress. (4) Building technology in an ethical way sounds like exactly what I want to do. But I’m not seeing job postings for “Ethical Engineer.” Can I get a job doing this?

Sadly, most reactions are not in the minor success that is Category 4. Most are in the spectrum of failure represented by Categories 1–3. In these failure modes, critical examination of how technology is created and its impacts on the world erodes responsibility and the hope of positive impact and elicits defensiveness.

Four years isn’t much time, and the mentorship my colleagues and I offer is only a sliver of the learning experiences students will have during their undergraduate education. I want to make the most of it. I want to increase the likelihood that I cultivate their fragile hope and equip them with sophisticated theories of change.

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A Call for Civic-minded Technologists

Citation

Graeff, E. 2025. “A Call for Civic-minded Technologists.” Presented at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Mar 25.

Presentation

Abstract

Engineering’s “culture of disengagement” (Cech 2014) casts a long shadow on society. The anemic civic philosophy, preached by lauded tech heroes, pretends politics and power don’t apply to technology, that we can reduce most problems to technical challenges, and that meritocracy is justice. There are bright spots—individual, civic-minded technologists; the Tech Workers Coalition; the Public Interest Technology University Network, and the Tech Stewardship Program. But they are insufficient. To address the challenges of our contemporary society, democracy, and sociotechnical systems, we need to understand technology’s civic landscape, reframe the technical expert’s role in democracy, and cultivate engineers to be civic professionals.

The Good-Enough Life book review

The Good-Enough LifeThe Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Greatness is a problem. As author Avram Alpert tells it, you can trace a lot of what is wrong in Western society to its obsession with greatness. We quickly discern hierarchies, trying to name the best idea, best technology, best group, best person. This cultural hang-up is a toxic ingredient in our individualism and relative misery, our poison politics, and our abuse of the planet. We desperately need some humility and willingness to embrace good-enough approaches to our lives, careers, and policies, so we can all flourish to some degree and have a chance at returning some balance to the Earth.

I found The Good-Enough Life to be an original and compelling argument deserving of our attention in this moment. It sits nicely alongside (and cites) other recent critiques that identify meritocracy as a key cause of our contemporary problems. Pulling not just from philosophy, but from history, sociology, psychology, and literature to make his argument, Alpert offers a very readable book, as far as philosophy goes.

I am particularly drawn to his argument that we lost the value of humility. Here Alpert looks to Aristotelian virtue ethics as a guide, since each virtue is defined as a mean—a balance between vices. Too much unearned confidence is vicious, as is humility that abandons any agency. We want to find just enough humility to take action on what we know, but be mindful of what we don’t know or can’t do alone. Alpert cautions us here against fully embracing Aristotle’s approach, since his classical definition of virtue is meant to differentiate great men. Magnanimous (great-souled) men, exuding virtue, were better than other men and should be idolized. Its a fine thing to strive for virtue, but we mustn’t abandon dignity for all. Once again, humans seem only to eager to find reasons to treat someone as lesser and to believe they deserve their lesser status.

Its hard to imagine a good-enough policy solution from this book. Alpert is careful not to say we must throw off capitalism and embrace socialism. Closely reading both Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, Alpert lays out pros and cons illustrated by history (and overconfidence) where each economic system has fallen undemocratically flat. I agree that what we need to do is aim for more democracy. Greatness chips away at egalitarianism, at equal rights. We need approaches that return us to more equal circumstances. That’s what good-enoughness offers us in Alpert’s view. Its what the social contract is meant to ensure; we each give up some of our greatness to ensure no one is poor and unprotected.

The book lacks the call to action that similar books might have in specific policy recommendations or ways to reorient your personal behavior and mindset. But I suppose when your main argument is about eschewing greatness and embracing more humility, your prescriptions should be modest.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it.

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Technology and the Virtues book review

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth WantingTechnology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues is the best book on technology ethics. It is not a practical guide to ethical decision-making in technology. It won’t tell you what to do given a specific dilemma. Instead, it’s much deeper—a careful philosophical argument for a global framework for virtue ethics that meaningfully engages with the entwinement of contemporary technology and civilization. If you want a learn how to work toward human flourishing in the age of AI, gene editing, etc., this will tell you what capacities to work on and how they can help you ask better questions and work with others to build good sociotechnical futures.

The first part of the book makes the argument for a shared set of ethical ideas across virtue traditions in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Western (Aristotelian) philosophy. This allows Vallor to argue that we can conceive a global ethical framework to address technologies that are global in scope. These are densest academic chapters of the book. But they establish some important concepts like “moral attention,” which help us understand how the “technomoral” virtues, eventually defined in Chapter 6, work.

Building on the classical virtue traditions, Vallor identifies 12 virtues for the 21st century: Honesty, Self-Control, Humility, Justice, Courage, Empathy, Care, Civility, Flexibility, Perspective, Magnanimity, and Technomoral Wisdom. Some of these are familiar virtues with definitions updated for the times. Others are new, like Care, which embraces feminist care ethics. And some do not mean what their common word definitions would indicate. For instance, the technomoral virtue of Civility is a “more robust form of cosmopolitan civic-mindedness, a reliably and intelligently expressed disposition to value communal ethical life in a global technosocial context and to act accordingly.”

The last section of the book examines four technological domains—social media, surveillance, robots, and human enhancement technology—and how we should use the technomoral virtues to navigate their ethical complexities and find paths toward designing, using, and regulating the technologies to achieve global human flourishing. Although the book came out in 2016, Vallor’s examinations of social media and artificial intelligence are still relevant and compelling. She concludes the book by discussing human enhancement technologies like gene editing because it forces us to literally ask: What is human flourishing? What is precious about humanity? What defines human dignity? She calls this “Knowing what to wish for” and argues that these fundamental questions require our collective technomoral Wisdom—the supreme virtue of applying our various cultivated virtues to good ends.

In my own research and pedagogy on ethical responsibilities of engineers and technologists, I have concluded that some version of cultivated virtue is necessary to ensure we have folks building our technologies with eyes wide open, appropriate humility, and a civic-mindedness that transcends narrow perspectives and economic assumptions. If you care about this, you should read this book. If you are interested in what it takes to be virtuous in the 21st century, you should read this book. Highly recommended!

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