Collin Lucken

Engineering ethics education often relies on case-study methods focused on disaster prevention and professional codes. Recent work in virtue ethics and professional identity has begun to develop a possible alternative, but the philosophical foundations of engineering’s ethical character remain underdeveloped. This paper argues that engineering constitutes a morally significant professional identity: a life-shaping practice whose internal goods are oriented toward the development of central human capabilities. Drawing on Appiah’s (2005, 2018) identity framework, MacIntyre’s (2007, 1999) theory of practices and his account of compartmentalization, the capability approach as formalized by Robeyns (2017), and Wolfendale’s (2007) regulative-ideal account of professional integrity, I analyze engineering identity through institutional analyses of France’s École Polytechnique and the United States’ Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). I argue that engineering’s normative regulative ideal is the development of human capabilities, and that this orientation provides the philosophical grounding for an identity-based approach to engineering ethics education that connects ethical development to the cultivation of engineering character. The account developed here deepens Davis’s (1991) identity-inflected reading of engineering professionalism and translates across the Franco-American tradition to non-Western frameworks (e.g., Lan et al., 2021) with which it converges.