Virtue Ethics In Biomedical Engineering

Imagine for a second that you are sitting in a hospital room. Your loved one has been admitted to the emergency room and is hooked up to an ekg monitor which is the only device monitoring them while the doctors and nursing staff leave to see other patients. Not many people think of the Biomedical engineer who built this device, and even less people consider the virtues that engineer learned in their undergraduate degree. Consider the outcomes of this scenario if the person who built that device was not a virtuous human being.

Virtue ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to answer the question of what kind of person one should be. It was originally proposed by Aristotle who argued that all things have a purpose in this world,
A cardinal virtue for biomedical engineers is respect for patient’s rights. When one is involved in the medical field, they must not only try to design products to address the health of the patient but design them in a way that doesn’t compromise the autonomy of the patient. In the medical field, patient confidentiality and privacy are important aspects for the patient that you promise to uphold while trying to help them. Another virtue that is necessary in this field is being trustworthy. When designing devices that are used in a clinical setting you are targeting a market that is usually in a situation of emotion stress. They depend on the devices they use to create dependable data that reflects the physiological state of the individual who may or may not be dying in that instance. The patient and physician are placing an implicit trust in your equipment to create an honest representation of their health. These two “virtues” are something that cannot be learned in an educational setting but must be experience in the field and learned over the course of a career in biomedical