Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? extends the argument of After Virtue by examining four rival traditions of moral inquiry — Aristotelian, Augustinian, Scottish Enlightenment (as represented by Hume), and liberal — and demonstrating that their conceptions of justice and rationality are mutually incompatible and cannot be adjudicated from any standpoint external to the traditions themselves. The book's central claim is that evaluative rationality is always tradition-constituted: it has content only within a particular tradition, and the attempt to evaluate from a tradition-independent standpoint — the characteristic aspiration of the Enlightenment — is both incoherent and concealing. The book's title question can be extended to AI: whose conception of excellence does the system encode? Whose standards of justice does it apply?