Adopting Martha Nussbaum's view provides grounds for recognizing those bursts of anger or delight and the responses to them that alter the course of development of engineering projects. Her case supports the view that our emotions offer authentic thoughts about authentic situations, and by ignoring emotions engineering judgments are liable to be deficient. At worst, without reflection an emotion hides an influential unarticulated and mistaken belief. But at best an emotion can be taken to be an indicator of relevant components of ethical arguments supporting an engineering project and the significance attributed to them.
So we might expect virtuous engineers to be aware of their emotions, of ways in which they exploit the emotions of others, to reflect on those emotions and to use the knowledge gained in their judgments. To be effective within this emotional soup they will have to be self-aware, articulate,persuasive and above all empathetic
