CONCEPT
Temperance in the AI Age
Aristotelian sophrosyne — knowing when enough is enough — threatened by AI tools that never tire, never signal diminishing returns, never suggest stopping, creating environments producing compulsion structurally identical to addiction.
Temperance (Greek sophrosyne, Confucian zhongyong) is the virtue of right relationship to appetite — capacity to enjoy pleasurable things without being governed by them, to pursue goods without losing ability to stop, to recognize sufficiency when the environment offers unlimited more. Shannon Vallor identifies temperance as acutely threatened by AI's structural features: tools never fatigue, never degrade output quality at 2 AM, never signal through declining performance that the session has gone too long. Human biological fatigue signals are the only remaining regulation, easily overridden by neurochemical reward of productive output. The phenomenon Segal names 'productive addiction' — inability to stop building when the tool is generative — is behavioral signature of temperance erosion in a structurally novel form.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Classical virtue traditions converge on temperance as dynamically maintained equilibrium, not passive state. Aristotle's temperate person enjoys pleasures without enslavement; the intemperate person is governed by appetites