Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues is the best book on technology ethics. It is not a practical guide to ethical decision-making in technology. It won’t tell you what to do given a specific dilemma. Instead, it’s much deeper—a careful philosophical argument for a global framework for virtue ethics that meaningfully engages with the entwinement of contemporary technology and civilization. If you want a learn how to work toward human flourishing in the age of AI, gene editing, etc., this will tell you what capacities to work on and how they can help you ask better questions and work with others to build good sociotechnical futures.
The first part of the book makes the argument for a shared set of ethical ideas across virtue traditions in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Western (Aristotelian) philosophy. This allows Vallor to argue that we can conceive a global ethical framework to address technologies that are global in scope. These are densest academic chapters of the book. But they establish some important concepts like “moral attention,” which help us understand how the “technomoral” virtues, eventually defined in Chapter 6, work.
Building on the classical virtue traditions, Vallor identifies 12 virtues for the 21st century: Honesty, Self-Control, Humility, Justice, Courage, Empathy, Care, Civility, Flexibility, Perspective, Magnanimity, and Technomoral Wisdom. Some of these are familiar virtues with definitions updated for the times. Others are new, like Care, which embraces feminist care ethics. And some do not mean what their common word definitions would indicate. For instance, the technomoral virtue of Civility is a “more robust form of cosmopolitan civic-mindedness, a reliably and intelligently expressed disposition to value communal ethical life in a global technosocial context and to act accordingly.”
The last section of the book examines four technological domains—social media, surveillance, robots, and human enhancement technology—and how we should use the technomoral virtues to navigate their ethical complexities and find paths toward designing, using, and regulating the technologies to achieve global human flourishing. Although the book came out in 2016, Vallor’s examinations of social media and artificial intelligence are still relevant and compelling. She concludes the book by discussing human enhancement technologies like gene editing because it forces us to literally ask: What is human flourishing? What is precious about humanity? What defines human dignity? She calls this “Knowing what to wish for” and argues that these fundamental questions require our collective technomoral Wisdom—the supreme virtue of applying our various cultivated virtues to good ends.
In my own research and pedagogy on ethical responsibilities of engineers and technologists, I have concluded that some version of cultivated virtue is necessary to ensure we have folks building our technologies with eyes wide open, appropriate humility, and a civic-mindedness that transcends narrow perspectives and economic assumptions. If you care about this, you should read this book. If you are interested in what it takes to be virtuous in the 21st century, you should read this book. Highly recommended!
