CONCEPT
Moral Deskilling
Shannon Vallor's concept for the atrophy of moral capacities through technological mediation — what happens when the conditions for cultivating specific virtues are eroded by tools that produce the practice's outputs without requiring the virtues' exercise.
Moral deskilling is the specific pathology the AI moment produces: the atrophy of moral capacities in practitioners whose tools now perform the activities through which those capacities were previously cultivated. Shannon Vallor developed the concept in Technology and the Virtues (2016) as an extension of MacIntyre's framework, arguing that virtues are not merely preserved or destroyed as wholes but can be selectively weakened as the conditions for their exercise are removed. The physician who delegates diagnosis to AI may maintain her clinical efficiency — an external good — while losing the diagnostic intuition that constitutes her distinctive excellence. The deskilling is moral, not merely technical, because the lost disposition is not merely a skill but a virtue.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept extends MacIntyre's theory of practices in a direction that responds specifically to the AI moment. Where MacIntyre's framework identifies the conditions under which virtues are cultivated (participation in practices with internal