Vallor’s Technomoral Virtues: A Critical Update for Virtue Ethics

Review by Jolynn Dellinger, Visiting Lecturer and Kenan Senior Fellow, The Kenan Institute for Ethics

In Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, Shannon Vallor provides a critical, contemporary update to Aristotelian virtue ethics, deftly adapting that foundational ethical framework to the realities of our technological, data-driven era. Pursuing the question, “How can humans hope to live well in a world made increasingly more complex and unpredictable by emerging technologies?” Vallor draws on Western philosophical traditions, and Confucian and Buddhist ethics to offer a thought-provoking explication of twelve “technomoral” virtues: honesty, self-control, humility, justice, courage, empathy, care, civility, flexibility, perspective, magnanimity and technomoral wisdom. She then examines these virtues in specific modern contexts including social media, surveillance, and robots at war and at home, providing practical analyses to elucidate her theoretical and conceptual work.

Much of the conversation at the intersection of technology and ethics addresses the role emerging technologies play in our individual lives and in the evolution of society as a whole. This conversation, in turn, necessitates an understanding of the importance of our role as human beings in the creation, design, implementation, use, adoption and proliferation of these technologies. At every step of innovation, we have choices to make. Vallor’s book provides thoughtful, “technosocially”-informed insight as to the values and moral habits we need to cultivate to help guide those choices. I recommend this book as an enlightening read but also as a reference book and resource.

“Technologies are not stone tablets delivered from on high. They are malleable human creations that can be reshaped in the service of living well if our collective will demands it” (174). Reading this book can help us rise to this challenge — as individuals, as a society, and as citizens of a globally interdependent, connected world. So… what should we demand, together, to create the future we want?

Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to A Future Worth Wanting, Oxford University Press (2016)