Dependent Rational Animals

Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues is MacIntyre's extension of his earlier virtue ethics in a direction he later acknowledged had been underdeveloped in After Virtue. The book's central thesis is that human beings are rational animals — and the emphasis falls on both words. We are not disembodied reasoners who happen to inhabit bodies. We are animals whose rationality is expressed through, and conditioned by, biological vulnerability, embodied existence, and dependency on other animals of our kind. The virtues are cultivated in and through this embodied, dependent condition. For the AI moment, this means that whatever "intelligence" the machine has, it is not the intelligence of a dependent rational animal — and the attempt to understand AI without attending to this difference inevitably distorts both machine and human.