Something I think humanity is going to have to grapple with soon is the ethics of self-modification / self-improvement, and the perils of value-shift due to rapid internal and external changes. How do we stay true to ourselves while changing fundamental aspects of what it means to be human?
Shannon Vallor is the first Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. She believes that we need to build and cultivate a new virtue ethics appropriate to our technological era. The following summarizes some of her arguments and observations:
Why Do We Need New Virtues?
Vallor believes that we need to discover and cultivate a new set of virtues that is appropriate to the onslaught of technological change that marks our era. This for several reasons, including:
Why Virtue Ethics?
Most historical ethical philosophers have considered the human condition to be roughly static and universal (perhaps with some allowance for cultural differences, divine revelation, or slow moral progress). The resulting philosophies are too brittle for our current situation. In particular, deontological/Kantian rules are too inflexible to keep up with technological change, and consequentialist/utilitarian calculation is nigh impossible as the future becomes increasingly difficult to predict.
However, Vallor believes the older tradition of “virtue ethics” is up to the challenge. This is in part because it is potentially more flexible and better able to cope with environmental change and uncertainty. It is a form of ethics that has been rediscovered and redesigned to fit specific cultural and historical niches in the past, and we can again rediscover and redesign it today to come up with “technomoral virtues” appropriate to our time.
In the opening chapters, Vallor reviews what virtue ethics is, and looks at three virtue ethics traditions in particular: Aristotle’s, Buddhism, and Confucian ethics (the ABCs). She hopes to find the commonalities in those traditions and then use them as a foundation for creating her new technomoral virtues.
A virtue ethic has the following characteristics:
Vallor believes we need new “technomoral” virtues because our new technologies bring along with them new better-or-worse ways of interacting with, using, and designing them. To be a human being today means to be in a technological context, so in order to human well, one must tech well.
So for example, the new potential for global communication that we have now is a new human phenomenon. There are worthwhile ends/goods achievable through this (for example, “global community, intercultural understanding, global justice, human security, and collective human wisdom”); and so we need to identify and cultivate the virtues that help us to achieve those ends/goods.
How to Cultivate the Virtues
How does one practice moral self-cultivation? After reviewing the ABCs, Vallor says these are the core elements of the process:
What Are the “Technomoral” Virtues?
Vallor then presents her proposed list of “twelve technomoral virtues” — as a starting point, not a dogma (she reminds us that whatever virtues we choose today need to be provisional, and we should remain flexible enough to adopt new virtues as our technological environment evolves new human excellences that demand them). For each of her proposed virtues, she consults the ABCs and also asks how this virtue looks in a specifically technological context. Here they are in a nutshell: