Technomoral Virtues

In the AI Story

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 could be specified with some stability. Twenty-first-century technology introduces such rapid and radical changes in these conditions that the virtues required for flourishing must themselves be rethought — not abandoned but developed in ways that respond to the new circumstances.

The twelve technomoral virtues are not a checklist. They are an interconnected set of dispositions whose exercise requires the master virtue of technomoral wisdom. Consider humility: the disposition to recognize the limits of one's own judgment, which in a technology-saturated context requires the specific discernment to know when to defer to a machine's superior capability and when to insist on human judgment. This is humility shaped by the specific circumstances of AI-mediated work; it is not classical humility applied unchanged.

The technomoral virtues can be cultivated, Vallor argues, only through specific practices — practices that must be deliberately designed or preserved in a world where market forces push toward the atrophy of virtue-cultivating conditions. The moral deskilling Vallor identifies is the shadow of technomoral virtue cultivation: where virtues are not actively cultivated, they atrophy, and the practitioner loses dispositions that had seemed so settled they could be taken for granted.

For the AI moment specifically, the technomoral virtues provide a framework for asking what virtues the responsible use of AI requires. The discernment to distinguish between AI output that sounds right and output that is genuinely insightful. The intellectual honesty to reject plausible but hollow prose that the machine produces. The courage to pursue a question beyond the machine's first response. The humility to recognize when one's own judgment has been corrupted by reliance on the machine. These virtues are not specified by any of the machine's capabilities; they are the human contribution that makes the machine's capabilities beneficial rather than corrosive.

Origin

Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016). Vallor develops the framework through engagement with the Aristotelian, Buddhist, and Confucian virtue traditions, arguing that all three provide resources for a technomoral ethics.

Key Ideas

Twelve virtues. Humility, justice, courage, empathy, care, civility, flexibility, perspective, magnanimity, honesty, self-control, and technomoral wisdom.

Master virtue. Technomoral wisdom — phronesis applied to technology-saturated life — governs the exercise of the others.

Not new, but reshaped. These are classical virtues whose specific character responds to technological mediation.

Practice-cultivated. Technomoral virtues require practices for their cultivation, just as classical virtues do.

Essential for AI use. The responsible use of AI requires technomoral virtues that the machine cannot itself possess.

Debates & Critiques

Whether the technomoral framework adds substantively to classical virtue ethics or merely relabels classical virtues with technological vocabulary. Vallor's defense is that the framework clarifies what classical virtues require in new circumstances and specifies new practices for their cultivation.