CONCEPT
Technomoral Virtues
Shannon Vallor's extension of the Aristotelian virtues tradition to specify the dispositions of character required for flourishing in a world saturated by powerful technologies.
In Technology and the Virtues (2016), Shannon Vallor identifies twelve technomoral virtues — humility, justice, courage, empathy, care, civility, flexibility, perspective, magnanimity, honesty, self-control, and technomoral wisdom — that are specifically required for living well in a world mediated by powerful technologies. These are not entirely new virtues but classical virtues whose specific character is shaped by the conditions of technological mediation. Technomoral wisdom, the master technomoral virtue, is phronesis applied to technology-saturated life — the practical wisdom to discern when to use a technology, when to resist it, and how to preserve the conditions for human flourishing in circumstances that classical virtue ethics could not anticipate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Vallor's project extends MacIntyre's virtue ethics in a direction that addresses the specific challenges of the twenty-first century. Classical virtue ethics was developed for a world in which the conditions for human flourishing were relatively stable across generations — the practices, communities, and institutions within which virtues were cultivated changed slowly, and the virtues themselves