CONCEPT
Virtues (Aristotelian)
Dispositions of character cultivated through sustained engagement with practices — not skills, not capabilities, but the settled habits of excellent action that partly constitute a flourishing human life.
In the Aristotelian tradition MacIntyre recovers, a virtue is not a skill and not a capability. It is a disposition — a settled habit of character — to act well in situations where acting well cannot be fully specified in advance and requires the exercise of judgment. Courage, honesty, justice, and practical wisdom are paradigm virtues. They are cultivated through the sustained engagement with practices that demand their exercise, and they are constitutive of human flourishing rather than merely instrumental to it. The Aristotelian distinction between virtues and capabilities is the conceptual pivot that allows MacIntyre to diagnose what AI threatens: machines possess capabilities but not virtues, and the cultivation of virtues requires conditions that AI-mediated work may not preserve.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: episteme (scientific knowledge of necessary truths), techne (technical skill in making artifacts), and phronesis (practical wisdom in action). The virtues are developed in and through the exercise of phronesis,