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Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

Print publication date: 2016

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Print ISBN-13: 9780190498511
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190498511.001.0001
Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190498511.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords
Starting with an overview of virtue ethics in the philosophical tradition of the West, beginning with Aristotle, I discuss the contemporary revival of virtue ethics in the West (and its critics). In reviewing virtue ethics’ advantages over other traditional ethical approaches, especially consequentialism (such as utilitarianism) and deontology (such as Kantian ethics), I note that virtue ethics is ideally suited for managing complex, novel, and unpredictable moral landscapes, just the kind of landscape that today’s emerging technologies present. Yet I also note that an exclusively Western approach to virtue would be inadequate and provincial; moreover, emerging technologies present global problems requiring collective action across cultural and political lines. Finally, I review the various ways in which contemporary philosophers of technology have addressed the ethical dimensions of technology, the limits of those previous approaches, and the potential of a global technosocial virtue ethic to go beyond them.
Keywords: virtue ethics, Aristotle, philosophy of technology, , utilitarianism, deontology, emerging technologies
TO SOME, THE title of this chapter may seem faintly anachronistic. In popular moral discourse, the term ‘virtue’ often retains lingering connotations of Victorian sexual mores, or other historical associations with religious conceptions of morality that focus narrowly on ideals of piety, obedience, and chastity. Outside of the moral context, contemporary use of the term ‘virtue’ expresses something roughly synonymous with ‘advantage’ (e.g., “the virtue of
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Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
this engineering approach is that it more effectively limits cost overruns”). Neither use captures the special meaning of ‘virtue’ in the context of philosophical ethics. So what does virtue mean in this context? How does it relate to cultivating moral character? And why should virtue, a concept rooted in philosophical theories of the good life dating back to the 5th century BCE, occupy the central place in a book about how 21st century humans can seek to live well with emerging technologies?
The term ‘virtue’ has its etymological roots in the Latin virtus, itself linked to the ancient Greek term arête, meaning ‘excellence.’ In its broadest sense, the Greek concept of virtue refers to any stable trait that allows its possessor to excel in fulfilling its distinctive function: for example, a primary virtue of a knife would be the sharpness that enables it to cut well. Yet philosophical discussions of ethics by Plato and Aristotle in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE reveal a growing theoretical concern with distinctly human forms of arête, and here the concept acquires an explicitly moral sense entailing excellence of character.1 A distinct but related term de (德) appears in classical Chinese ethics from approximately the same period. De originally meant a characteristic ‘power’ or influence, but in Confucian thought it acquired the sense of a distinctly ethical power of the exemplary person, one that fosters ‘uprightness’ or ‘right-seeing.’2 Buddhist ethics makes use of a comparable concept, śīla, implying character that coordinates and (p.18) upholds right conduct.3 The perfection of moral character (śīla pāramitā) in Buddhism expresses a sense of cultivated personal excellence akin to other ethical conceptions of virtue. Thus the concept of ‘virtue’ as a descriptor of moral excellence has for millennia occupied a central place in various normative theories of human action—that is, theories that aim to prescribe certain kinds of human action as right or good.
In the Western philosophical tradition, the most influential account of virtue is Aristotle’s, articulated most fully in his Nicomachean Ethics (~350 BCE). Other notable accounts of virtue in the West include those of the Stoics, St. , , , and . Yet Aristotle remains the dominant influence on the conceptual profile of virtue most commonly engaged by contemporary ethicists, and this profile will be our starting point. While cultural and philosophical limitations of the Aristotelian model will lead us to extend and modify this profile in subsequent chapters, its basic practical commitments will remain largely intact.
Moral virtues are understood by Aristotle to be states of a person’s character: stable dispositions such as honesty, courage, moderation, and patience that promote their possessor’s reliable performance of right or excellent actions. Such actions, when the result of genuine virtue, are not only praiseworthy in themselves but imply the praiseworthiness of the person performing them. In human beings, genuine virtues of character are not gifts of birth or passive circumstance, nor can they be taught in any simple sense. They are states that
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Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
the person must cultivate in herself, and that once cultivated, lead to deliberate, effective, and reasoned choices of the good.4 The virtuous state emerges gradually from habitual and committed practice and study of right actions. Thus one builds the virtue of courage only by repeatedly performing courageous acts; first by patterning one’s behavior after exemplary social models of human courage, and later by activating one’s acquired ability to see for oneself what courage calls for in a given situation. Virtue implies an alignment of the agent’s feelings, beliefs, desires, and perceptions in ways that are appropriate to the varied practical arenas and circumstances in which the person is called to act.5 Moral virtues are conceived as personal excellences in their own right; their value is therefore not exhausted in the good actions or consequences they promote. When properly integrated, individual virtues contribute to a person’s character writ large; that is, they motivate us to describe such a person as virtuous, rather than merely noting their embodiment of a particular virtue such as courage, honesty, or justice. States of character contrary to virtue are vices, and a person whose character is dominated by these traits is therefore vicious— broadly incapable of living well.
Most understandings of virtue ethics make room for something like what Aristotle called phronēsis, variously translated as prudence, prudential reason,
(p.19) or practical wisdom.6 This virtue directs, modulates, and integrates the enactment of a person’s individual moral virtues, adjusting their habitual expression to the unique moral demands of each situation. A fully virtuous person, then, is never blindly or reactively courageous or benevolent—rather, her virtues are expressed intelligently, in a manner that is both harmonious with her overall character and appropriate to the concrete situation with which she is confronted.7 Virtues enable their possessor to strike the mean between an excessive and a deficient response, which varies by circumstance. The honest person is not the one who mindlessly spills everyone’s secrets, but the one who knows how much truth it is right to tell, and when and where to tell it, to whom, and in what manner.8 Reasoning is therefore central to virtue ethics. Yet unlike theories of morality that hinge on rationality alone, such as Kant’s, here reason must work with rather than against or independently of the agent’s habits, emotions, and desires. The virtuous person not only tends to think and act rightly, but also to feel and want rightly.9
A virtuous person is not merely conceived as good, they are also understood to be moving toward the accomplishment of a good life; that is, they are living well. In most cases, they enjoy a life of the sort that others recognize as admirable, desirable, and worthy of being chosen. Of course not every life that appears desirable or admirable is, in fact, so. Conversely, a virtuous person with the misfortune to live among the vicious is unlikely to be widely admired, although this does nothing to diminish the fact of their living well. The active flourishing of the virtuous person is not a subjective appearance; virtue just is the activity of living well. This means that while virtue ethics can allow for many different
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Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
types of flourishing lives, it is incompatible with moral relativism. There are certain biological, psychological, and social facts about human persons that constrain what it can mean for us to flourish, just as a nutrient-starved, drought- parched lawn fails to flourish whether or not anyone notices its poor condition. While the cultivation of virtue is not egoistic, since it does not aim at securing the agent’s own good independently of the good of others, a virtuous character is conceptually inseparable from the possibility of a good life for the agent.10 This is why Aristotle describes the virtuous person as objectively happy; even in misfortune they will retain more of their happiness than the vicious would.11 Although it is widely recognized that the Greek term eudaimonia, which we translate as ‘happiness,’ is far richer than the modern, psychological sense of that term (an issue to which we will return later in this book), it will serve our preliminary analysis well to note that the classical virtue ethical tradition regards virtue as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for living well and happily.12
If thinkers in this tradition are correct, then just as in every previous human era, living well in the 21st century will demand the successful cultivation of moral
(p.20) virtue. Yet given what was noted at the beginning of this chapter— namely, that the popular understanding of virtue is largely divorced from the philosophical teachings of virtue traditions—we have to ask: how can we possibly reconnect popular ideas about living well with technology to a robust discourse about the moral virtues actually needed to achieve that end? While a satisfactory answer to this question cannot be given until later in this book, it may be helpful to briefly examine the circumstances that have led to the revival of contemporary philosophical discourse about the moral virtues and their role in the good life.
1.1 The Contemporary Renewal of Virtue Ethics
Ethical theories in which the concept of virtue plays an essential and central role are collectively known as theories of virtue ethics. Such theories treat virtue and character as more fundamental to ethics than moral rules or principles. Advocates of other types of ethical theory generally see virtues as playing a lesser and more derivative role in morality; these include the two approaches that previously dominated philosophical ethics in the modern West: consequentialist ethics (for example, and Mill’s utilitarianism) and deontological or rule-based ethics (such as ’s categorical imperative).13
Compared with these alternatives, virtue ethics stood in general disfavor in the West for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Reasons for the relative neglect of virtue ethics in this period include its historical roots in tightly knit, premodern societies, which appeared to make the approach incompatible with Enlightenment ideals of modern cosmopolitanism. Thanks to the medieval philosopher St. ’s use of Aristotelian ideas throughout his
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Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
writings, virtue ethics had also acquired strong associations with the Thomistic moral theology of the Catholic Church. This made it an even less obvious candidate for a universal and secular ethic. Virtue ethics was seen as incompatible with evolutionary science, which denied what Aristotle and many other virtue ethicists had assumed—that human lives are naturally guided toward a telos, a single fixed goal or final purpose. Virtue ethics’ emphasis on habit and emotion was also seen as undermining rationality and moral objectivity; its focus on moral persons rather than moral acts was often conflated with egoism. Finally, virtue ethics’ eschewing of universal and fixed moral rules was thought by some to render it incapable of issuing reliable moral guidance.14
The contemporary reversal of the fortunes of virtue ethics began with the publication of G.E.M. Anscombe’s 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in which she sharply criticized modern deontological and utilitarian frameworks for their narrow preoccupations with law, duty, obligation, and right to the exclusion
(p.21) of considerations of character, human flourishing, and the good. Anscombe also claimed that modern moral theories of right and wrong, having detached themselves from their conceptual origins in religious law, were now crippled by vacuity or incoherence, supplying poor foundations for secular ethics. Her proposal that moral philosophers abandon such theories and revisit the conceptual foundations of virtue was the guiding inspiration for a new generation of thinkers, whose diverse works have restored the philosophical reputation of virtue ethics as a serious competitor to Kantianism, utilitarianism, and other rule- or principle-based theories of morality.15 Among Western philosophers, scholarly interest in virtue ethics continues to grow today thanks to the prominent work of neo-Aristotelian thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Dowell, , Rosalind Hursthouse, and , to name just a few.
Yet Anscombe was clear that Aristotelian virtue theory was not a satisfactory modern ethic. Even contemporary virtue ethicists who identify as neo- Aristotelian typically disavow one or more of Aristotle’s theoretical commitments, such as his view of human nature as having a natural telos or purpose, or his claims about the biological and moral inferiority of women and non-Greeks. No contemporary virtue ethicist can deny that there are significant problems, ambiguities and lacunae in Aristotle’s account; whether these can be amended, clarified, and filled in without destroying the integrity or contemporary value of his framework is a matter of ongoing discussion. As a consequence, contemporary Western virtue ethics represents not a single theoretical framework but a diverse range of approaches. Many remain neo- Aristotelian, while others are Thomistic, Stoic, Nietzschean, or Humean in inspiration, and some offer radically new theoretical foundations for moral virtue.16
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Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing
In addition to internal disagreements, the contemporary renewal of virtue ethics has met with external resistance from critics who challenge the moral psychology of character upon which virtue theories rely. Using evidence from familiar studies such as the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, along with more recent variations, these critics argue that moral behavior is determined not by stable character traits of individuals, but by the concrete situations in which moral agents find themselves.17 Fortunately, virtue ethicists have been able to respond to this ‘situationist’ challenge. First, the impact of unconscious situational influences, blind spots, and cognitive biases on moral behavior is entirely compatible with virtue ethics, which already regards human moral judgments as imperfect and contextually variable. Moreover, unconscious biases can, once discovered, be mitigated by a range of compensating moral and social techniques.18 Perhaps the most powerful response to the situationists is that robust moral virtue is by definition exemplary rather than typical; indeed, the experiments most often used as evidence against the existence of virtue consistently (p.22) reveal substantial minorities of subjects who respond with exemplary moral resistance to situational pressure—exactly what virtue ethics predicts.19 Thus despite its critics, the contemporary renewal of virtue ethics as a compelling alternative to principle- and rule-based ethics shows no sign of losing steam; if anything, intensified critical scrutiny is a healthy indicator of virtue ethics’ returning philosophical strength.
While a survey of contemporary virtue ethics in the West might stop here, it would be dangerously provincial and chauvinistic to ignore the equally rich virtue ethical traditions of East and Southeast Asia, especially Confucian and Buddhist virtue ethics. While there is important contemporary work being done in this area, relatively few Anglo-American virtue ethicists have acknowledged or attempted to engage this work.20 This is a substantial loss. To ignore the content of active and longstanding virtue traditions with related, but very distinct, conceptions of human flourishing is to forgo an opportunity to gain a deeper critical perspective on the admittedly narrow preoccupations of Aristotelian virtue theory.21
As we move beyond the realm of theory and into the domain of applied virtue ethics, Western provincialism becomes entirely unsustainable; for applied ethics —which tackles real-world moral problems through the lens of philosophy—is increasingly confronted with problems of global and collective action. Environmental ethics offers the starkest selection of practical problems demanding global cooperation and coordinated human responses that reach across national, philosophical, and ethnic lines, but this is hardly an isolated case. The expansion of global markets for new technologies is having profound and systemic moral impacts on the entire human community—primarily by strengthening the shared economic, cultural, and physical networks upon which our existence and flourishing increasingly depend. If we look at the spread of global information and communications systems, unmanned weapons systems,
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