Moral Sensations are Like Taste Buds
We all have them, yet we experience them differently
In Professional Engineering Ethics, I reviewed the obligations that engineers have to society, the public, and the profession. And I talked about why it is essential for professions like engineering to adopt codes of ethical conduct. Nevertheless, the codes themselves are not as important as the principles and motives behind these codes, because professional ethics requires the professional to confront situations that are not explicitly addressed by the code.
When thinking about obligations to others, professional engineers face moral, ethical, and legal considerations, each operating at different scales. These differences can be confusing. Philosophers often use the terms moral and ethical interchangeably, and students often confuse ethical and legal. This article helps sort out the differences, and explain what morality is.
Moral Reasoning Requires Moral Sensations
Although philosophers often conflate the terms morals and ethics, for our purposes they are different. Morals exist at the scale of the individuals who experience emotions. They do not have to be shared, or agreed upon, or validated by others, because emotions need no such legitimization to be real. It is important to recognize…
