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I! "#$ %&'(!) *+ 2010, a social media company in Seattle (Social Strata, Inc.) o,ered to their workers unlimited vacations. Not only did Social Strata o,er vacation time without any restrictions whatsoever, they made it clear that they were o,ering unlimited paid vacations.1 And this com- pany is not the only one in recent months to do so!

-e logic of the “unlimited paid vacation movement” seems to be that challenging work is sometimes so meaningful that it can be “addic- tive” in the best sense of that term. Employees not only enjoy what they do, they .nd themselves highly, highly motivated to sacri.ce—both in terms of time and energy—for the joy of keeping on working. So, Social Strata and others are not really in danger of going bankrupt when employees take advantage of the new policy. Quite to the contrary, they expect pro.ts to rise, because their employees will be both jazzed and well rested.

What is it about the nature of these jobs that inspires such loyalty and labor from the workers? What is it about the nature of these jobs that em- ployees, becoming hooked, inspire such complete trust from their bosses? -is isn’t a game of merely exchanging favors: “Give me more vacation and I’ll work harder.” Rather, the workers inspire trust because they have already become trusted as dedicated workers. In fact, the very nature of the job has somehow helped them become increasingly trustworthy the longer they work there. Something about the nature of the work is morally formative. I am willing to bet that engineering, under the best conditions anyway, is one of these morally formative vocations. We will label morally formative occupations with a philosophically technical term: Practice. Before we can unpack the .ve marks of a Practice, let’s remind ourselves of something we learned in chapter 1, namely, the huge role that design language plays in

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the formation of engineering practitioners. It is language that makes the di,erence between Og-the-caveman and the modern engineer.

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Ethics and design are cousins. To engage in either requires us to participate in practical reasoning. And skills in both ethics and design are cultivated as we build /uency in a language. On the one hand, at the core of design is design discourse. Remember that according to MIT professor Louis Buc- ciarelli, designers share a world, a world that they talk about. In fact, any given design team may talk in ways that are entirely unique to the team.2 On the other hand, moral agents also share a world-of-things-that-they- talk-about. -ey talk perhaps least frequently about whether X is right or Y is wrong. However, they very frequently talk about a host of non-engineer- ing things like happiness, friendship, milkshakes, commitments, sports, cars, marriage, divorce, sickness, weather, su,ering, o0cemates who are greedy, jealous, lazy, mean, arrogant, the purpose of living, the nature of love, of beauty, of truth, and so on.3 -ese complex but very ordinary con- versations constitute “communication,” a term from the Latin co-munus, meaning “a shared world.” To share a world is to communicate about it. If you and I occupy di,erent worlds, it is not because my surroundings and possessions are di,erent than yours, but because you and I happen to talk about di,erent things and therefore inhabit di,erent modes of discourse. Each of us talks with friends, with coworkers, with classmates, with neigh- bors, in such places as the gym, church, at parties. -e kind of “world” we inhabit at any given moment is re/ected in what we talk about.

Now, let’s be honest: language is not a favorite topic among engi- neers. I remember as a small boy that my dad (a mechanical engineer) had to give a speech in front of a large audience. He was clearly nervous. Talking was not his strong suit. He was good at mechanical design, not giving speeches.

But when MIT professor Bucciarelli or Austrian-born engineer Witt- genstein talks about “language,” they don’t simply mean giving speeches or writing papers. In fact, in the case of engineers, words themselves are only a small part of engineering “language.” Physicist Richard Feynman (per- haps best known among engineers as the hero investigator of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster) once told this story:

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One time, we were discussing something—we must have been eleven or twelve at the time—and I said, “But thinking is noth- ing but talking to yourself.” “Oh, yeah?” Bennie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the cranksha1 in a car?” “Yeah, what of it?” “Good. Now tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself ?” So I learned from Bennie that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal.4

Feynman’s point is that engineers think in pictures. Of course, they o1en talk in pictures too. Perhaps you’ve seen them hunched over a table furiously passing sketches back and forth—“What about this?” “Okay, but then this happens . . .”—accompanied by more sketching. Sketching is a crucial part of communication for engineers. So when Bucciarelli refers to “design discourse” and Wittgenstein talks about “/uency,” they mean sketches as well as words.

But wait, there’s more. Sketching is not the only nonverbal language that engineers must master. -ey also communicate by building mock-ups and prototypes and by giving live demonstrations that combine objects and gestures. When they do deign to talk, their speech is o1en sprinkled with heuristics (“You’d better clamp that before drilling!”) and verbal pictures borrowed from other conversations (“It .ts snugly but not too tight, like piston and cylinder.”)

Keeping in mind that engineering “language” includes all these non- verbal “dialects” as well as the verbal ones, close attention to how language works reveals surprising insights about excellence in both design and daily life.

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What makes us human? Ancient thinkers gave quite di,erent answers than those we might hear today. -eologian and bishop St. Augustine (d. 430 2$), for example, spoke of immaterial souls housed in material bodies. All dogs don’t go to heaven because no canine has that kind of soul. But, according to Augustine, human beings do have souls. Ergo, we all survive the death of our bodies. He borrowed this “dualism” (i.e., we are composed of two fundamental parts, material body + immaterial soul) from the sec- ular philosopher Plato. Body-soul dualism has a long and distinguished

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history. And it has its advocates even today. But it is important to see that dualists have assumed the key question about what makes us human is primarily concerned with stu! (what philosophers call “ontology”): What kind of stu! are human beings? More particularly, how many stu!-parts have human beings got—one, two, maybe more?

Philosopher and theologian Herbert McCabe thinks that the dualists are asking the wrong question. So, he answers a di,erent question than the one posed; what it means to be human is not something that can be counted. Rather, homo sapiens are “human” in virtue of the fact of their distinctive manner of existing. Whatever “stu, ” comprises human beings, it is clear that we are the linguistic animal (68).5 Here the word linguistic is not the name of a property, like gorillas are strong, cheetahs are fast, and humans are talkers. Rather, the word indicates a distinct mode or manner of existing or living. -is mode of being is “new” in the sense that it emerged out of the evolutionarily older animal mode of existing. But it is also “new” in the sense that it cannot be comprehended by the level of existence that preceded it. -ere is a sense in which we can understand animals where they cannot understand us. (“Blah, blah, blah, Fido, blah, blah, blah,” hears the dog!6) While both humans and animals act for a reason, only humans can be said to have a reason.

-e phrase “mode of being” is McCabe’s way of referring to diverse kinds of “world.” By “world” McCabe means not something already out there to which we subjects accustom ourselves, such as when we buy thicker coats when living in Canada. To use “world” in the already-out- there sense is to speak in strictly empirical language. But that is not what McCabe means. Rather, the kind of “worlds” he is talking about are the worlds that are made.7 Not “made” like artifacts are made, but “made” as in “made sense of.” Perhaps this is an unusual use of “world.” We usually think of “world” as stu, that surrounds us, like the desk I stubbed my toe on or the sun that tans my skin from ninety-three million miles away. But there is a limit to thinking of “world” in terms of brute surroundings. Even engineers must confess that we cannot ever get to “bare reality” that un- derlies our interactions of “stubbing” and “being warmed.”8 MIT professor Bucciarelli confesses,

I am a realist. I believe that there is a material world apart from me (and you). But I also suspect that we can never know its true essences, “. . . the bare reality itself.” We see “shadows on the wall of our cave,” “now through a glass darkly,” but never “the thing in itself.” We do fairly well, though, constructing general

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theories framed with mathematical rigor and working up phe- nomenological laws linking cause to e,ect—as well as thinking up cause and e,ect—and these su0ce, at least for a while, to explain the workings of “bare reality.” -ey su0ce in that they provide a set of coherent, socially valued and useful stories—ex- planations that enable us to make sense of the world around us in quite general terms and to remake the world to our liking in many particular ways.9

-e closest we can come to “bare reality” is our activity of interact- ing with our surroundings. In other words, human activity is even more fundamental than the surroundings themselves for our knowing. For all practical purposes, world-as-human-activity is good enough, because hu- man activity is all we need in order to be able to talk.

Human interactions with their surroundings cannot help being col- ored by our perception of signi.cances, of things that are meaningful to us. Something analogous happens for other animal species. Animal subjects inhabit one kind of world. Dogs see in shades of gray, and so “color” is not signi.cant or even intelligible to dogs. But “color” means something to human beings, thus we talk about beautiful sunsets and brilliant autumn leaves. Our human “world,” therefore, is composed of things and topics that are signi.cant to us as human subjects. So “world” is short for “world- as-experienced” or “world of meanings” or “world of signi.cances.”10

-e tricky part to keep in mind is that we understand something of the animal world of meanings, since we are animals ourselves. Obviously, living things exist in a di,erent mode than nonliving things. -ings that are alive “experience” their surroundings, and seem to do so in a holistic way. For the cheetah, the “world” is something that can be run through (clearly not true for the rock!). Moreover, we say that the cheetah as a unit is fast. But notice: we don’t say, “Its legs are fast.” In other words, speed is the property of the whole animal. If the cheetah injures a paw, the pain in the paw is experienced by the whole animal; we say, “-e cheetah is in pain” (not “-e paw is in pain.”). So, one kind of world is the animal world. A “world” is the sum total of things that are signi"cant or meaningful to the animal as a whole organism.11

-e range of things that count as “signi.cant” or “meaningful” to a given animal are (1) conducted to the animal through its sensory ap- paratus and (2) for which the animal’s nervous system is “wired” (by a combination of genetics and parental conditioning) to respond. If a wolf walks within range of a sheep’s senses, the presence of a wolf is taken up into the sheep’s nervous system via its senses, and the sheep responds to

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the wolf as a meaningful part of its world. Bodily senses, then, are avenues of response to an environment and therefore determine the shape of this animal’s “world.”12 A sheep has a sense-shaped world. It has no world other than what it is able to detect by means of its senses. And of course not everything theoretically detectable by its senses is signi.cant to the ani- mal. In escaping its notice, such things are not in the animal’s world. My dog never notices butter/ies, but will stop, back up, and detour around bumblebees. -ere are no butter/ies in the world of Angie the dog, but there are bumblebees. For my dog, bees are signi.cant, butter/ies are not.

A given collection of signi.cances, which is to say the “world” for the sheep or bee or dog, “becomes the clothing of the animal and in a way, the extension of its body . . . almost like another skin.”13 We typically think that the skin is the outer limit of “me.” But McCabe is saying skin is only the outer limit of one’s tactile world. Other senses, like hearing and sight, extend the radius of the world even further. So, if the “world” is what is detected by the animal, then the whole collection of signi.cances—in- cluding the sighting of a waterfowl that makes the dog point or scent of a rival canine on the wind—constitutes Angie the dog’s world.

Animals “communicate,” but only a1er a fashion. McCabe explains that for animals, communication is nothing other than “actively sharing a common life” (73).14 -is is only to say that a pair of dogs, who share the same sensory capacities, will take up meaning from the environment in virtually identical ways. -us they share a world: co-munus, co-world. -e thing to keep in mind about animal communication is that it is not the sharing of information. -is is di0cult for us to understand. Although it looks to us as if they are conveying information, that is just our anthro- pomorphic projection on animal behavior. Members of the pre-linguistic world simply react to stimuli—as an animal, a human will squint at bright lights, my dog barks at the mailman rattling the mailbox, and bees laden with pollen dance in the presence of their fellows. -e bee that dances as if to show the others where the pollen is, is no more (and no less) sharing information with its fellow bees than when it shares their lives in other ways (73). -ink about the last example. -e bee’s dance is a genetically determined response; its fellows are wired to respond to the scout’s dance in the same way they respond to the #ower itself. In other words, bees do not decode the dance of their fellow and subsequently draw a cognitive map of the location of pollen before /ying out to .nd it. Rather they respond instinctively and mechanically to the wiggles and turns of the dancing bee.

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(For this reason they never get lost or make a wrong turn, like I do when I’m following someone else’s directions.)

Like the animals, humans occupy a world shared among all those with human bodies. Our senses play an obvious role. Imagine I encounter a /ock of sheep while out running (this actually happened to me in the hills of Southern California). Imagine also that I encounter a bear. (-is also happened, but on a di,erent run.) If I see the same bear that the sheep see, my body will take up the sensations of the bear (sight and sound, etc.) into my neurological hardware much like the sheep does. And our animal limbic systems respond: nostrils /are, eyes widen, muscles tense for action. Of course, hormones and genetics may play a part in the style of one’s reaction. But on this occasion, both my style and that of the sheep would be for /ight rather than .ght. Both the sheep and I share a visceral reaction to the danger signi.ed by the bear.15

So far, so good? Now for something completely di!erent. Beyond the animal level of existing, humans also occupy an expand-

ed (or meta-) “world.” To repeat: our human world is, of course, undeni- ably sensory—but only in part. Because it is partially sensory, we share some signi.cances with other animals. Both my dog and I run for cover when an unexpected cloudburst catches us by surprise. Yet, in addition to that which is meaningful via the sensory conduit, humans have a linguis- tic conduit that animals lack. Human communication simply transcends animal communication, although in both cases “communication” is not fundamentally the transfer of messages but the sharing of life.16 Perhaps unfortunately, the “world” we share as humans is simply inconceivable to the animals. Whatever can be talked about has the possibility of constitut- ing a given human’s “world.” Of course, humans do share information. But we also say many, many things that are not informational; we say things that cannot be judged either true or false (like an informational sentence can): we give orders, speculate about an event, form a hypothesis, invent a story, tell a story, playact, sing a jingle, make up a joke, tell a joke, ask for something, thank, curse, greet, pray, and so on.17 All these innumerable ways of talking constitute the human world we share.

-e emergence of talking on the evolutionary stage constitutes a new level of existing: “With the appearance of language we come, in evolution, to one of those radical changes. . . . a change in which we do not merely see something new but have a new way of seeing; in which something is produced which could not be envisioned in the old terms and which changes our whole way of envisaging what has gone before” (75).

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-is is the emergence of non-reductive capacities.18 -e newness is so radical that it is properly “revolutionary” in that, like Edwin Abbot’s Flatland, it involves a higher dimension that cannot be adequately de- scribed in terms of lower ones.19

In this higher mode of being, “the central point is that with the linguistic animal [a.k.a. human beings] the media of communication are created by the animal itself” (76). Not only do we create messages, we (to- gether) made up the language for expressing messages. For dogs and bees, the media of communication are determined by what kind of body the animal has; the means of communication are hardwired into the animal (both the means genetically inherited and those acquired by nurture). No animal can innovate novel ways of sharing the world, of co-munus. McCabe quotes Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Conrad Lorenz in this re- spect: “the automatic and even mechanical character of these signals [bird calls] becomes strikingly apparent and reveals them as entirely di,erent from human words” (cited 79). So, animals are born with built-in systems of communication, “whereas for children the entry into a language is a personal matter, a matter of their own biography” (79). A bluebird cannot learn to moo with cows, but I might have very well been raised to speak Romanian rather than English.

In short, we humans are able to tweak and invent our very means of communication, whereas animals are stuck with whatever built-in system they are born with.

McCabe compares and contrasts human language with animal com- munication in three ways: nature, history, and biography. -e .rst aspect is one that typi.es other mammals as well as humans. By nature McCabe means the physical aspect of learning a language by immersion into a particular physical form of life. Chimps and wolves, but neither frogs nor turtles, are socialized into family communication. To learn a new language at the natural level, human beings, like wolf cubs, must become a “tuning fork” and resonate with the rhythms of the host pack, whether in Beijing or the Bronx (79–80).

By history, McCabe means the fact that a speaker joins a language already in play. Before I was born, English was being spoken by the com- munity into which I was born. -e language I pick up is a product of that community-over-time. Since language is an evolutionarily new way of being in the world, it makes sense to ask not only “What do you eat?”—a question appropriate for asking any animal—but also the meta-level ques- tion, “What does eating mean in your community?” (84). Always keep in mind that in contrast to animal behavior, human language involves an

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emergent property that is evolutionarily new: a new way of seeing and be- ing. My dog and I may share bread; but I experience the bread in ways that transcend what the dog can understand. For both of us, the bread is food (we both salivate and chew). But for me, the bread is meaningful in other ways as well. I can ask numerous questions about the bread that mean nothing to the dog. -e bread is signi.cant to the dog only as food. But for me as a human the bread may be signi.cant in other ways, for example, as a trigger to the childhood memory of my mom baking rye bread, or of present-day consecration of the eucharistic host, and so on. (-ink of what “last meal” means to the inmate on death row as compared to what it means to Christians celebrating Maundy -ursday before Easter.)

What makes our mode of being, our manner of existence, a human one is not as body-soul dualists envision it. Our bodies are not shells that house a little tiny person at a control center in the head. I am not a lone homunculus who uses words as public pictures of private thoughts like the High Priest of Baltia uses his humanoid host to convey information. No, my world is not inside, but outside. My world is not private, but so- cial. My world is shared with others. What we call “concepts” are nothing like experiences of some little person inside my head. Rather, what we call concepts “are simply skills in the use of words” with others (86). McCabe’s account nimbly steps over body-soul dualism: “Instead of saying that I have a private mind and a public body, a mind for having concepts in and a body for saying and hearing words, I say that I have a body that is able to be with other bodies not merely by physical contact but by linguistic communication. Having a soul is just being able to communicate; having a mind is being able to communicate linguistically” (86).

If it is the historical community that “inhabits” the language, then the community inhabits the world-of-signi.cances too. As individuals, each of us joins a “world” that has been talked into existence long before we were born. “Meanings, then, belong .rst of all to the language, to the community who live by this language; the individual learns these mean- ings, acquires these concepts, by entering into the language, the culture or history of [this] community” (87). -is means that as far as I, as an individual, am concerned, many meanings have a “quasi-objective” sta- tus, because they exist prior to my birth and independent of my will. No strictly private language is possible, nor can one change meanings on a whim any more than one can alter the temperature of a piece of metal by telepathy. -e quasi-objective character of meanings is crucial to mo- rality. Morality answers the “what” question: what is right (or wrong)? Being able to answer the “what” question correctly indicates that one has

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the ability to keep playing the game with everyone else.20 “Moral values are objective in the same way as meanings and, indeed, are the meanings of behavior” (89, emphasis added). (A certain arrangement of pieces on a board is “objectively” a checkmate, but only for those who inhabit the world of chess playing. -e term objective can only be relative to a given world-of-signi.cance.)

By the third facet, biography, McCabe has in mind the fact that we all live at the intersection of multiple overlapping communities, some of which are subsets of other larger ones. You are simultaneously a member of a family, a neighborhood, a school, and perhaps a congregation, but also (in the near future) an engineering .rm. Just as history indicates that a human joins in the speaking of a language that has been going on for a long time, so, too, each sub-community has its own dialect in which the subject not only shares but also contributes to the ongoing evolution of the dialects in which they live. Human creativity is such that “no traditional interpretation of the world is .nal; [we reach] always beyond the language [that humans have] created, towards a future which, just because its lan- guage does not yet exist, can be only dimly perceived. -is means that every language is in the end provisional, or at least can be seen [someday] by hindsight to have been provisional” (90).

For McCabe, biography is simply the history of the sub-communities. Biography is not an individual’s private story but rather the individual’s story as the intersection of several sub-communities. We are never the sole authors when it comes to our own story, but coauthors at the mercy of others who write in the book of our life.21

We can see how McCabe’s model of humans as linguistic animals .ts with our understanding of design. Design is one of the things that can hap- pen when my body communicates with other bodies. A world is shared by a group, and sometimes the group encounters a problem. -e longer it takes to seek out a satisfactory solution, the more a dialect emerges that enables them more e,ectively to talk together about proposed solutions. To recall Bucciarelli’s words, designers share an “object world” and the dialect that emerges is our “design discourse.”22

How does all this relate to ethics? Just as for animals, the human body is intrinsically communicative, capable of sharing a “world” with similar bodies. Moreover, “all behavior is in some sense linguistic” not only in the sense that human activity is always potentially the sharing of a world, but also in that human activity can play a role in communicating with another human body. “We call a [person’s] activity [his or her] ‘behavior’ when it plays a part in [his or her] communication with others. A piece of

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human behavior is not simply an action that gets something done, it also has meaning, it gets something said” (90–91). -e activity of speaking a sentence is not on a di,erent level than the activity of voluntarily mowing my neighbor’s lawn when she is ill. Both are behaviors that communicate, that are inherently communicative.23

Sometimes, but not always, an act is meaningful because of close connection with outcomes: “It is because of the e,ect on you of having a knife stuck into you that my act of kni.ng you has the meaning that it has” (92). Other times the meaning of an act is context dependent: being struck in rebuke versus being tackled in a football game. In the .rst case the child will cry. In the second instance the child will laugh—even if the tackle is physically more forceful than the swat.

In chapter 3 I gave a provisional de.nition of “ethics” as answering the “why” question: why is ABC right (or wrong)? But here is a more nu- anced de.nition: “Ethics is just the study of human behavior in so far as it is a piece of communication, in so far as it says something or fails to say something” (92, emphasis added). Hmm, that’s not very satisfying. What is McCabe getting at? -e human language is never the language of mere facts (as if the language of human behavior was the language of the physi- cist24). Rather, human talking is a conversation about signi.cances, about meanings, about the things that matter most.

According to McCabe, learning ethics is akin to taking a literature course. A good teacher of literary criticism enables students more deeply to enjoy a piece of literature—say, a poem—by teaching them how to re- spond more sensitively, that is, “by entering more deeply into [the poem’s] signi"cance.” McCabe says that something similar holds for ethics: “Now the purpose of ethics is similarly to enable us to enjoy life more by responding to it more sensitively, by entering into the signi"cance of human action.”25 (For this reason, when it comes to learning ethics, novelists o1en o,er us more help than do philosophers!26 -e analogy holds in another sense: neither ethics nor literary analysis comes to an end. -ere is always some- thing more that can be said.27)

-e same sort of comparison might be made between ethics and mu- sic appreciation, or ethics and carpentry, or ethics and . . . In other words, ethics can be compared to any discipline that helps a student enjoy a .eld more fully by entering more deeply into the signi.cance of the subject matter. Important for our purposes is the fact that the list of enjoyment- expanding enterprises includes engineering, most obviously engineering design. Design is formative to the extent that doing design work under the watchful eye of a mentor sensitizes the novice to things that matter most.

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If ethics involves gaining attentiveness to meaning and signi.cance, ethics is not a “level” of analysis. (Much less is it an isolated design crite- rion.) Rather, the conversation called “ethics” permeates all of living and talking. Here is the upshot: Ethics simply is the ongoing quest for the less trivial.28 For McCabe, if we follow this “less and less trivial” toward its asymptote, we may realize that it points to God.

McCabe’s analysis may seem pretty abstract. It is important for us, however, because it not only .ts our best scienti.c understanding of hu- man evolution, it also gives an account of how we can be animals whose concerns include but also transcend bodily concerns. We are bodies whose behaviors are aimed at the Good and bodies whose behaviors are communicative. All our intentional bodily action is part of sharing a world (co-munus, co-world). Remember, we’re not talking about the world-as- inert-cosmos, but a world comprised of topics that are signi.cant to us and therefore worth talking about. On the one hand, we share many topics of signi.cance with the animals: food, shelter, sleep, etc. On the other hand, because we are gregarious animals, the sharing of a world contributes to the making of friends.

For the rest of this chapter, we need to get clear on the role that one special kind of “friendship” formed within one special kind of sub-commu- nity plays in cultivating sensitivities to those things that are signi.cant to a good engineer. -is is the world of “practitioners.” -is sub-community may be smaller than a regional language group (for example, the funny way Minnesotans speak). But it is not as small as a single design team. -e “world” in question is the world of all engineering practitioners. Such a community is broad enough to have a rich language at play at any given moment.29 It is equally important to note that such a community exists through time. It may be di0cult to settle whether contemporary engineers trace their roots to Ancient Greece or Rome or whether they have their origins rather in the sixth or the ninth or the seventeenth century 2$.30 -e point is that what I am here calling “practitioners” of engineering were striving to take the cra1 to the next level decades—even centuries—before you or I even contemplated getting into the game.

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-e technical term Practice is borrowed from political philosophy.31 It involves a slightly di,erent way of slicing the pie than the notion of “Profession,” although there is some overlap. “Professional” has to do with the way society regards engineers, for example, whether they pay them

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highly, entrust them with large-scale projects, and grant them the right to self-governance (by means of a professional code of ethics). But the notion of “Practice” has much more to do with the character of the en- terprise as understood from within. (Admittedly, outsiders to a Practice will o1en misunderstand the Practice—and in misconstruing it, some- times blame practitioners for things that practitioners have nothing to do with or demand that they do the impossible.) While it is hoped that every professional is a genuine practitioner, it is sometimes the case that a fully developed practitioner is not granted recognition as a “professional.” Such was the case with American engineers in the eighteenth century. Highly skilled practitioners, with geniuses among their number, had to claw their way to respectability during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries.32 And even today, engineers do not command the same level of awe and respect (not to mention the salary) that society seems happy to grant doctors and lawyers.

Mark #1: C3—Coherent, Complex, and Cooperative

Many human activities are coherent. “Coherent” just means that the activ- ity aims at something. Coherent actions span a wide spectrum, from the trivial to the monumental. In taking a shower a1er mowing the lawn, I am aiming to get clean. Showering is an intentional act and therefore quali- .es as “coherent.” In building a durable bridge that can withstand spring /ooding in a remote corner of Ethiopia (whose town became known simply as Sebara Dildiy, literally, “broken bridge”), Ken Frantz also acted intentionally.33 Obviously, Frantz’s bridge is more monumental than my shower. Yet both actions are intentional.

A word of caution: It is easy to get the idea that everything we do is intentional. But that isn’t quite right, because many actions that we perform go unnoticed. If my chin tickles just now, I scratch it absent- mindedly. Scratching an itch is one of those behaviors that my dog does too. Here’s the point: if an action is absent-minded and animalistic, it is an animal act—in particular, “an act of homo sapiens.” As an animal act it has zero moral content. But in sharp contrast to animal acts (argues medieval theologian St. -omas Aquinas), if an action has even a speck of intentionality of which we are conscious, then it falls into a di,erent class. Intentional actions are “human acts.” Every human act is a moral act. A human act may be trivial (taking a shower) or monumental (building a mercy bridge), but both the trivial and the monumental intentionally aim

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at something good. It is the “aiming at something good” that gives them an unavoidable moral quality. In other words, it is morally good to take a shower when you are dirty. But obviously, ethicists don’t debate this, because it is so trivial.

To say an act is “human” one is to distinguish moral acts from merely absent-minded or animalistic re/exes. When my dog rushes to the food bowl when I set it down, she is acting for a reason. But this is not a reason she can spell out. Animals act for a reason, but only humans can also be said to have a reason. Said di,erently, only humans act intentionally. -e second c-word is complex; Practices are complex. -is further narrows the range of actions that constitute a “Practice” from “all intentional actions” to “all intentional actions that require e!ort.” As I write this sentence, the growling in my stomach reminds me that I haven’t yet eaten breakfast. In a moment I’ll seek out a bowl of cereal. (Hmm . . . I think I’ll also add a few fresh-picked raspberries from the bush.) Eating cereal is an intentional ac- tion that aims at some good (nourishment), and therefore it is a moral act. But it is not complex. My children were feeding themselves cereal since before they could walk. It is not a tough task. But now consider playing the piano. On the surface it looks as straightforward as eating Cheerios.

Put each Cheerio into the face-hole, chew, swallow. Plunk each note in sequence as printed on the score.

But of course the instructions are deceiving. Playing piano is com- plex because it is di0cult to master. It takes extended concentration and e,ort to begin even to play poorly. -e good news is that complex tasks are those at which we can improve over time. No one drastically “improves” in their eating of Cheerios. But with e,ort, concentration, and repetition, one may get to the point of obeying the command to “plunk each note in sequence as printed on the score.”

-e third c-word, cooperative, narrows the range of coherent, com- plex actions even further. Some coherent and complex acts can be done, roughly speaking, “alone.” But many cannot.

Michael Davis observes that the English word engineer is French in origin and dates from the time when France boasted a standing army of three hundred thousand. -e corps du génie were those in charge of operating the engines of warcra1; their o0cers (o$ceurs du génie) did similar sorts of research and underwent similar sorts of training as today’s engineers.34 But unique to this corps in the history of warcra1 was the fact that maintaining and operating the “engines of war” took an enormous

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amount of cooperation. (-ink of the size of a trebuchet.) Davis’s point is well taken. Whether erecting a skyscraper, collating a million lines of machine code, constructing a bridge, or building a dam, engineering by its very nature is a cooperative enterprise. As such, engineering joins a long list of human activities that aim at goods that can only be achieved together, when each team member excels at his or her distinctive role. -us, not only engineers but also quarterbacks, surgeons, politicians, and rock stars succeed only when the team succeeds.

-e clever student may see that one kind of cooperation—the very best kind, in fact—involves friends. To say that the Practice is cooperative by its very nature means that is possible, even likely, that one can form good friends inside the Practice. And if friendship is a conduit of grace (or “moral luck,” if you prefer), then Practices, because they are by nature co- operative, have within themselves resources for combating moral entropy.

Mark #2: Internal Goods

It is the coherence, complexity, and cooperation of the enterprise that make victory sweet. Players will tell you—whether they play baseball, volleyball, football, or soccer—that victory is sweetest when everything “clicked.” Sometimes a game is won in spite of the performance of a team. Conversely, sometimes a team loses despite their having played excellently. And a loss, while painful, is not quite so devastating when players know that, scoreboard aside, everything clicked.

What I’ve called “clicking” is a good internal to the Practice. Only a certain sort of player is able to savor the internal goods, namely, only a skill- ful player (a.k.a. a virtuous one). -ese goods are not a zero-sum game, or winner takes all. Rather, internal goods are shared without diminishment among all practitioners. In this regard, internal goods can be compared to victory for a sports team: the team enjoys the victory together. (-e illus- tration is imperfect, because the losing team may also experience internal goods despite the loss.)

Recall the de.nition of virtue from the last chapter: “Virtues are skilled re#exes for living well formed by habit with others in a Practice under the tutelage of a mentor.” -is de.nition is paraphrased from Aristotle.35 But the paraphrase leaves out what Aristotle said about joy. -e greatest joy of playing excellent soccer together is . . . playing soccer together well. -e greatest joy in playing music together well is simply to have played

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music well. -e band or the choir or the orchestra tastes joys the audience cannot know.

-e centrality of joy for virtue is why philosopher Anthony Kenny re- minds us that the practitioner cannot be said to have mastered the virtues until he or she enjoys doing what is right.36 -e mark of true virtue is not so much obedience as it is joy. As a practitioner becomes virtuous within a Practice—both technically virtuous and morally skillful—he or she will thoroughly enjoy the Practice for its own sake. -at is why a Practice is so “addictive.” Physicians sometimes neglect other legitimate goods—getting a good night’s sleep, cultivating a healthy marriage, raising emotionally healthy children, etc.—because the Practice itself is so rewarding. Non- practitioners shake their heads and accuse such practitioners of “going overboard.” But perhaps outsiders level these accusations because they’ve never tasted similar joys. I’m not saying neglect is permissible for the doc- tor, only that it is understandable. One has to be an insider to understand just how marvelous are the goods internal to a Practice.

Mark #3: State of the Art Is Embodied in Living Experts

Players—“addicts” who can’t stop drinking more and more at the well of internal goods—can’t help making progress in their individual skill sets. -ose who have been at it the longest—and who have been both playful and lucky, both diligent and graced—evolve into masters of the Practice. It is their manner of execution that everyone else wants to resemble. In fact, everyone else ought to imitate their excellence—a.k.a. their skills and character, their virtue—because these premier players embody the highest form the Practice can take at this moment.

Another way to put this point is to say that the current standards of the Practice reside in the .ngers of the masters. -ink of the Practice called tennis. Is there a rule for how high one ought to throw the ball when serving? No. Is there a standard exemplar? Yes—Andy Roddick. Whatever else his weaknesses were before he retired, the mechanics of his power serve ought to be emulated because it was the best in the world (155 mph).

Of course, outsiders will have their share of the bene.ts of excellent Practice. But outsiders are likely to mislocate where the excellence really lies. For example, it is common for salespersons to boast, “-is home the- ater system is state of the art!” Does the current state of engineering really reside in its artifacts? -ose who are inside the Practice know better: “State of the art” refers to the human skill set needed to design and manufacture a

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high-quality home theater system.37 -e home theater system will eventu- ally break. But the state of the art called engineering keeps getting better and better.

Novices aspire to these skills. Where they really reside is in the ex- perts—not in the rule book, not in the PCOE, not in the artifacts, but in the experts themselves. How ought an engineer to behave? -e answer to that question is always to be found by pointing to living experts: “copy her, imitate him!”

Mark #4: Requires and Develops Virtue

In chapter 1 we saw that we live and practice engineering in a messy world. While models of theoretical reasoning are extremely helpful, having the tacit sense for the limits of such models is even more helpful (e.g., be- ing able to spot when a calculator display can’t be right38). In a very real way the skilled re/exes of master practitioners serve as a hedge to protect against the gung-ho spirit of young players who initially see the world with a clear-cut, black-and-white, answer-in-the-back-of-the-book sort of optimism. So, without the tacit skill set of the masters, the Practice would run aground. Conversely, without the gung-ho optimism of the new gen- eration, the Practice would soon simply die as one by one the masters re- tire. Fortunately, human bodies are the sorts of things that can be trained. -us do the masters become the mentors of the next generation.39 In time, new generations of master practitioners are formed. -e incoming crop goes through the (sometimes painful!) training paces by which the Practice “enters their bodies.”40 Novices become apprentices, who become journeymen, who become masters as they learn both the know-what and the know-how of the Practice.41

To say the same thing di,erently, a Practice is dually characterized as the sort of enterprise that both requires and develops the skills and charac- ter, a.k.a. the virtues, on which the Practice’s level of excellence depends.42

Mark #5: Evolves over Time

Imagine a group of thoroughly urbanized accountants shipwrecked on a deserted island. In order to make a go of survival, a list of important tasks (hunting, .nding water, building signal .res) is drawn up and assigned randomly to the survivors, each of whom does his or her level best. De- spite an equally devastating lack of training for each task, it may turn out

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that some of the marooned accountants discover they possess latent talent for the assigned task. -ose who display a knack for hunting will quickly be acknowledged for their prowess, and their judgment will naturally be relied upon more than those lacking natural ability in hunting.

As a .rst approximation, we might think of a Practice as the vol- untary association of those who share a knack for some task. However, if “knack” is all this community of survivors has going for it, then the manner in which hunting (etc.) is practiced by another group on another island, or by a future generation on this same island, “would be in all re- spects haphazard.”43 In other words, should those with the special knack fall ill or die, the community would be at the mercy of the Fates to grace them with another knack-endowed one, for a knack, by de.nition, dies with its possessor. But unlike the deserted islanders, novices in a Practice can be expected to grow toward excellence, not on the basis of knack but on the basis of the latent potential to be trained. Apprentices grow into journeymen who may then develop into expert practitioners. -us what may be a knack in the .rst-generation leader becomes transformed into know-how and skilled judgment in the second generation as their experi- ence matures into genuine practical wisdom. Once a Practice has gotten going, therea1er no one starts from scratch. All novices join the enterprise midstream, as it were, adopting the methods, research, and discoveries of their forebears, who are in many ways authoritative—at least provisionally so (until said novice makes enough progress to pass judgment on former things). Not to acknowledge this authority is deeply dangerous.44 Like- wise, honor is not reserved for rugged individuals who attempt to achieve excellence on their own steam. Rather, genuine honor is bestowed by experts of one generation upon up-and-coming journeymen of the next generation in recognition both of their “.t” with the current Practice and their potential to “go on.”45 Such an award could never be “people’s choice” because only the masters know what they are talking about when picking an award winner.

-e idea that novices must learn to “go on in the same way” does not mean that they are expected to slavishly follow protocol. -ey may need to do that at .rst, of course. A1er all, anything worth doing is worth doing . . . badly, that is, until one can learn how to do it better. But divine grace leaves a trace in the fact that the old skills of former generations are car- ried by newbies into new contexts and can morph into brand new skills. In other words, as novices mature into masters, they may actually raise the bar of excellence. Because Practices are cooperative, breakthroughs

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are shared by all and improvements are accumulated over time. -us the .nal mark of a Practice is simply that a genuine Practice evolves over time. A hundred years ago, physicians treated high fevers by “bleeding” their patients. Today they use Ibuprofen. Before Louis Pasteur discovered microbes, doctors actually fought duels over whether “balsam of Peru” was better than “tar oil” for treating infected wounds!46 Today doctors use antibiotics. What medicine (or engineering) will be like in a hundred years from now is anyone’s guess. But because medicine (like engineering) is a Practice, we can be sure that it will be better than it is today.

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We live in the age of Twitter. Yet not everything that is worth talking about—family, engineering, health, music, God—can be conducted in 140-character bursts. One could not employ Twitter to do engineering design or engineering ethics any more than one could try a court case or discuss philosophy by means of smoke signals! Consequently, the path to engineering excellence goes through the construction zone of language /uency: the excellent engineer is the one who can deliberate (talk well) with others. I’m not making this stu, up. Engineering .rms say that the top two skills they want to see more of in newly minted engineering graduates are (1) the ability to communicate clearly and (2) the ability to work well on a team.47

-e .rst part of this chapter tried to instill the hope that learning skills of deliberation and discourse, although di0cult, is not impossible, because talking is central to what it means to be human. As one learns to speak a new “language,” one .nds him or herself entering a new “world.” It is a world of new meanings and signi.cances. Five of those new signi.- cances that make for an engineer’s world distinguish what it means to call engineering a “Practice.”

Just as important, these same .ve marks also show how engineering is a morally formative Practice. How so? Because these .ve marks con- stitute a functional de.nition of a Practice, and as we know, a functional de.nition tells us how the thing ought to be.

Remember the wristwatch. We know how a watch ought to behave simply by knowing what it is for (its “functional de.nition”). A wristwatch is for keeping time, and therefore a good wristwatch is one that keeps time well. Or, a wristwatch ought to be accurate. And, a wildly inaccurate watch we rightly declare to be a bad watch.48 Similarly, the marks of a Practice

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help us get a little clearer on what sort of thing “engineering” is and what engineering is for. Obviously, engineering is for building cool stu,. But it is also for developing a new generation of practitioners. -erefore, a .rm in which mentoring doesn’t happen is, in this one respect, a bad .rm. It is also the nature of engineering that standards of excellence (i.e., those skills called “state of the art”) are embodied in the expert practitioners. -is too gives an angle for thinking about ethics in engineering. For those inside a Practice, moral decisions are not so much sorted out by consulting a rule book as they are by answering the question, “WWEpD?”—“What would the expert practitioner do?”

-ese .ve marks constitute another set of touchstones for moral re- /ection in engineering. As a Practice, engineering has a kind of built-in gyroscope for staying on track, morally speaking.49 Some think that this internal gyroscope is a su0cient condition for morality, which is to say, some think that the gyroscope is all that a Practice needs to stay on track. In the next chapter we will explore the phenomenon of cross-domain transfer in order to suggest that Practices may be made even more excel- lent in the presence of a catalyst that comes from outside the Practice.

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1. Apply the .ve marks of a Practice to one of your favorite hobbies in order to explain whether your hobby is or is not a Practice.

2. Give an example of a communication shortcut that you have observed among engineers at work. -e shortcut might be a made-up word, a use of pictures or sketches in place of words, etc.

3. -e idea of “internal goods” does not mean simply that one experi- ences good feelings on the inside (where else would one feel them?). Rather, the term internal means “internal to the Practice.” It could also be called a good that emerges among practitioners at work. Pick a Practice and list one of the goods that practitioners share.

4. NOVA once aired a program called Dogs Decoded that featured an Australian Shepherd with a vocabulary of over three hundred objects; the dog could retrieve them by name or even by sketch. What else would need to be true of this dog in order for McCabe to say that it has language?

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5. McCabe’s favorite philosopher, the former engineer Wittgenstein, once quipped, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Use McCabe’s notion of “world” to explain.

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1. Ludden, “Unlimited Vacation Time Not a Dream for Some.” 2. Bucciarelli, “Between -ought and Object in Engineering Design”;

Bucciarelli, “Designing, Like Language, Is a Social Process.” 3. Pinckaers, Sources of Christian Ethics, 14–45. 4. Cited in Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, 41. 5. Of McCabe’s many wonderful books, the one from which I have

drawn most heavily for this section is Law, Love and Language (here- a1er cited parenthetically).

6. Granted, dogs, chimps, dolphins (and so on) have rudimentary sym- bolic skills. But language is not merely nor primarily the ability to manipulate signs. Read on.

7. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking. 8. Critical realists call “stubbing” and “being warmed” phenomena, data

that re/ect human experiences with the world rather than data about the world per se.

9. Bucciarelli, “Knowing -at, and Knowing How,” 43. Emphasis added. 10. For a helpful introduction to this notion of constructivism, see Good-

man, Ways of Worldmaking. 11. In McCabe’s words, “Each animal is the center of a world, it is an area

of sensuous [sensory] activity that constitute a world from the envi- ronment.” McCabe, Law, Love and Language, 72–73.

12. Ibid., 71. 13. Ibid., 74. 14. Parenthetical references are all to ibid. 15. For example, human animals are wired for trust. -is is to say that

what Wittgenstein would call a primitive reaction (children are born with instinctive trust) has a biological basis—oxytocin, dubbed the

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trust hormone. See Hertzberg, “On the Attitude of Trust”; Spiegel, “When the ‘Trust Hormone’ Is Out of Balance.”

16. McCabe, Law, Love and Language, 74. -ere is a growing body of re- search that among all animals, only dogs come close to sharing the human form of life and so share rudimentary language with humans. Koko the gorilla may learn to string sytmbols together, but chimps cannot fathom the notion of pointing. Dogs not only understand pointing, they will respond even when humans point with their eyes. Moreover, some breeds of dog are able to learn not only names of objects, but also to fetch a thing a1er being shown a two-dimensional picture of it. -is is the beginning of symbology. See the Nova pro- gram Dogs Decoded, which .rst aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010.

17. -e list can obviously be extended inde.nitely! Wittgenstein, Philo- sophical Investigations, §23.

18. An example of a non-reductive property happens in the shi1 from physics to chemistry. Some chemicals have mirror image isomers called stereoisomers. -is property means that one version is inert while the other one is able to serve, say, as an enzyme. But stereoisom- erism requires three-dimensionality, something that atoms lack. So, stereoisomerism is a non-reductive property—a property that cannot be explained at the level of atoms.

19. Abbott’s fantasy envisions trying to explain a sphere to inhabits of a two-dimensional world! See Abbot, Flatland. -ere is a similar sort of failure of explanation that happens in scienti.c revolutions: quan- tum physics can encompass classical mechanics as a limiting case. But classical mechanics cannot account for the quantum world. Kuhn, %e Structure of Scienti"c Revolutions. Similarly, in the political realm, McCabe points out that a genuine political revolution “is never intel- ligible in terms of the society that precedes it.” McCabe, Law, Love and Language, 30.

20. Moral relativism is avoided by the conviction that God is a member of the linguistic community.

21. -e observation is o1en attributed to MacIntyre; see MacIntyre, A&er Virtue.

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22. Discussed in various places. See Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers; Buc- ciarelli, “Between -ought and Object in Engineering Design.”; Buc- ciarelli, Engineering Philosophy.

23. However, nonverbal behaviors do not communicate as visual words (say, like gestures or like charades). -e communication is not at that level of speci.city. Every act is not a gesture such that we are always “talking” without words.

24. McCabe dismisses the “Is-Ought fallacy” from the start: ethicists are wrong to worry whether it is possible to move from statements of fact to statements of value or of obligation. -e “Is-Ought fallacy,” also known as “the naturalistic fallacy,” is simply beside the point because communicative behaviors already have built-in values; all communi- cative behaviors involve things that matter. See McCabe, Law, Love and Language, 93.

25. Ibid., 95. McCabe goes on to deal with two objections to the analogy that ethics is like literary criticism: isn’t enjoy the wrong word? Isn’t it both too trivial and suggestive of the spectator stance? No. In the .rst place, see eudaimonia. In the second place, enjoyment of literature, like life, requires self-involvement and participation.

26. Ibid., 103. See also Diamond, “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels.”

27. So, it is wrongheaded to think that technical moral vocabulary some- how locks down conversation. In many ways, to say something is “good” is simply irrelevant; McCabe, Law, Love and Language, 97.

28. “[E]thics is the quest of less and less trivial modes of human related- ness” (ibid., 99). What makes a behavior evil, on McCabe’s linguistic model of being human, is not simply that it has catastrophic e,ects but that “its meaning fades relatively soon when we try to take it seri- ously. -e life of the evil man has meaning only at a fairly super.cial level. It is entirely unsurprising that Hitler’s table-talk should have been so boring (even if his public speeches were so charismatic). Bad, cheap behavior devalues the structures of human meaning in the way that bad cheap prose devalues the language” (ibid., 101).

29. In a sense, the language of “engineering” is spoken across national boundaries. -e fact that IEEE is an international society is indica- tive that American-born engineers have siblings in the Practice who are Iranian-born just as German engineers have siblings who are

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Chinese-born. -e fraternity of engineering knows no national boundaries.

30. Lynn White thinks sixth century; David Noble points instead to Joachim Fiore in the ninth century; Michael Davis thinks seventeenth- century France. For comparison, see Davis, %inking Like an Engineer; Noble, %e Religion of Technology; White, “Technology, Western.”

31. By “Practice” is meant “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially de.nitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” MacIntyre, A&er Virtue, 187.

32. -is “clawing” constituted something of a “revolt.” Layton, %e Revolt of Engineers.

33. Glick, “Building Bridges of Hope.” 34. Davis, %inking Like an Engineer, 9–11. 35. For example, “Hence also it is no easy task to be good. For in every-

thing it is no easy task to .nd the middle. . . . any one can get an- gry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; that is why good- ness is both rare and praiseworthy and noble.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ii.9.

36. Kenny, Brief History of Western Philosophy, 66. 37. Koen, Discussion of the Method, 41–57. 38. Ferguson, “How Engineers Lose Touch.” 39. -e Journal of Science and Engineering Ethics devoted an entire issue

to mentoring. See vol. 7, no. 4, December 2001. 40. -e phrase is reported by philosopher Simone Weil, who overheard

aged cra1smen respond to the complaints of aching muscles by a new apprentice that “it’s the trade entering his body!” Weil, “Love of God and A3iction,” 131–32.

41. See Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye; Vincenti, What Engi- neers Know and How %ey Know It.

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42. -is is badly put. Excellence doesn’t depend on the virtues, it is consti- tuted by the virtues. To think that virtues are the means to excellence tempts us to think excellence is one thing and virtue another. Virtue and excellence are two sides of the same coin. -is temptation (called instrumentalism) must be outgrown. See Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 34.

43. -is insight comes from Hippocrates,s writing on the nature of medi- cal Practice in ancient Greece.

44. Hippocrates writes, “But anyone who, casting aside and rejecting all these [lessons of the masters], attempts to conduct research in any other way or o1en another fashion, and asserts that he has found out anything, is and has been the victim of deception.” Hippocrates, “An- cient Medicine,” II.8–12, p. 15.

45. Today the bestowal of intra-communal honor is carried on by organi- zations such as the Honor Medical Society (Alpha Omega Alpha, est. 1902). Signi.cantly, not all awards conveyed by AOA carry a mon- etary prize. -at honor does not reduce to external rewards without great remainder is re/ected in the words of AOA’s founder, William Webster Root: “It is the duty of members to foster the scienti.c and philosophical features of the medical profession, to look beyond self to the welfare of the profession and of the public, to cultivate social mindedness, as well as individualistic attitude toward responsibilities, to show respect for colleagues, especially for elders and teachers, to foster research and in all ways to ennoble the profession of medicine and advance it in public opinion. It is equally a duty to avoid that which is unworthy, including the commercial spirit and all practices injurious to the welfare of patients, the public, or the profession.” Cited in http://www.alphaomegaalpha.org/AOAmain/History.htm.

46. Verghese, Cutting for Stone, 118. 47. For example, -omas K. Grose, a contributing editor for the journal

Prism, published by the American Society for Engineering Education, argues that today’s graduates lack what they simply must have: “To- day’s engineering students must be able to communicate well, work in teams, and take societal concerns into account.” Grose, “Opening a New Book.”

48. In the older lingo, the property that makes something maximize its functionality is its virtue. -us Aristotle de.nes virtue as “excellency

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of function.” -e virtue of a racehorse is speed, that of a thief is stealth, and that of a wristwatch is accuracy.

49. -is is a gyroscope rather than a compass. Do you see why?