Alasdair MacIntyre — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Alasdair MacIntyre — On AI. 24 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Ascending Friction
The Orange Pill's thesis that AI does not eliminate difficulty but relocates it to a higher cognitive floor — the engineer who no longer struggles with syntax struggles instead with architecture.
Emotivism
The doctrine — and, MacIntyre argues, the embedded cultural condition — that all evaluative judgments are nothing but expressions of preference. The reason AI ethics debates are interminable.
External Goods
Goods contingently attached to a practice but not constitutive of it — money, prestige, power, status — the goods that markets can measure and that AI systems can amplify.
Institutional Corruption
The structural pathology in which an institution's pursuit of external goods overwhelms its service to the practice it was designed to sustain — the permanent risk intensified by AI-efficient production.
Internal Goods
Goods recognizable only through participation in the practice that produces them — the elegance of a well-designed system, the diagnostic intuition of a physician, the taste that distinguishes excellence from mere competence.
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 v…
Narrative Unity of a Human Life
MacIntyre's thesis that a human life is intelligible as the unity of a narrative quest — the story within which actions acquire moral meaning by their place in a life pursuing particular goods.
Phronesis (Practical Wisdom)
Aristotle's term for the master virtue of situated judgment — the capacity to discern the right action in particular circumstances that cannot be fully specified by rule. The virtue AI most conspicuously lacks.
Practice (MacIntyre)
A coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which internal goods are realized — the conceptual pivot of MacIntyre's ethics and the unit of analysis for understanding what AI threatens.
Principlist AI Ethics
The dominant framework for contemporary AI ethics — fairness, accountability, transparency, explainability — which MacIntyre's framework diagnoses as empty because principles lack content apart from the traditions that specify them.
Software Engineering as a Practice
The claim — central to MacIntyre's application to AI — that software engineering meets the criteria of a genuine practice: internal goods, standards of excellence, and a tradition of argument about what good software is.
Techne and Phronesis
Aristotle's distinction between technical skill in making artifacts and practical wisdom in action — the conceptual instrument that specifies what AI can do (techne in abundance) and what it cannot do (phronesis).
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.
The Amplifier
The device that increases the magnitude of whatever passes through it without evaluating the content — Wiener's framework for understanding AI as a tool that carries human signal, or human noise, with equal power and no judgment.
The Benedict Option
MacIntyre's closing image in After Virtue — the call for small communities in which the practices and virtues can be sustained through a period of civilizational disruption, modeled on St. Benedict's monasticism.
The Fishbowl
The Orange Pill's image for the set of professional and cultural assumptions so familiar they have become invisible — the water one breathes, the glass that shapes what one sees. A modern rendering of Smith's worry about the narrowing effe…
The Hanian Diagnosis
Byung-Chul Han's critique of the aesthetics of the smooth as the pathology of contemporary production — a diagnosis MacIntyre's framework both confirms and specifies with greater precision.
The Luddite Response
The political and emotional reaction against transformative technology on behalf of the workers and ways of life it displaces — historically vilified, increasingly reconsidered, and directly relevant to the AI transition.
The Virtuous Administrator
MacIntyre's figure of the leader who understands that the institution she directs exists to serve a practice, and who exercises the virtues in defense of the practice against the institutional pressure to consume it.
Tradition (MacIntyre)
A historically extended, socially embodied argument about the goods that constitute a practice and the standards of excellence that govern it — the structure within which virtues are developed and internal goods are preserved across generat…
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.
Worthy of Amplification (Maslow Reading)
Maslow's reading of The Orange Pill's central question: worthiness is not a moral endowment but the developmental achievement of a person whose signal is shaped by B-values.
