Technomoral virtues for a sustainable life

Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A philosophical guide to a future worth living

How can we hope to live well in a world made increasingly more complex and unpredictable by emerging technologies? This is the question Shannon Vallor, a Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, explores in her wonderful and thought-provoking book about technology and virtue ethics (2018).

Vallor traverses the question of virtues within the philosophy of ethics by integrating views from both western and eastern perspectives. The book is a comparative study of Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist views. Vallor explores these traditions, searching for how the notion of ‘technomoral’ relationship with technologies might inform what we do with technologies, how we live with them, and with others who engage with them.

Technologies invite actions and obscure others

Vallor begins from the viewpoint that even the earliest technologies have shaped our behaviour and consequently fall under the realm of ethical considerations — i.e. how we treat others:

Ethics and technology are connected because technologies invite or afford specific patterns of thought, behavior, and valuing; they open up new possibilities for human action and foreclose or obscure others. For example, the invention of the bow and arrow afforded us the possibility of killing an animal from a safe distance—or doing the same to a human rival, a new affordance that changed the social and moral landscape. — p. 147.

We have arrived at a point where our efforts to develop technology do not restrict themselves to how they affect other humans, but the environment we all inhabit. Technologies have begun to “reshape the very planetary conditions that make life possible”, as Vallor puts it.

In the context of the creative design disciplines (product, interaction, service, user experience design), similar observations have fuelled suggestions about a shift from human-centred design — that might privilege convenience instead of sustainability — to humanity-centred and planet-centric approaches. The idea is that planet-centricity acknowledges more holistically the environmental consequences of our actions. It’s difficult to think about the premises for planet-centric design today without including the notion of degrowth, for example.

Yet, we have whole industries that manufacture convenience, from entertainment to luxury retail, with the help of advanced technologies that mine planetary resources. Consuming them, as I do myself, obscures actions that often would be better for the planet and my well-being — virtuous acts.

The essence of virtues as moral excellence

Virtue can be understood as a descriptor of moral excellence, and it is a central concept in theories about ethics; theories that prescribe in normative fashion which of our actions are right or good and how that reflects to ourselves as persons. Typically, virtue ethics has attempted to define what it takes for one to be an ethical person, while deontological ethics has attempted to define the rules to follow for ethical outcomes, i.e. ethical actions.

Hence, virtues are states of our character, such as honesty, patience, sense of justice, and moderation. Such states, when cultivated with habitual and committed practice, help us in making deliberate and effective choices towards good. Virtues align our feelings and beliefs to appropriate actions in various life circumstances. This involves reasoning on when, for example, it is appropriate to demonstrate complete honesty — such as not spilling another person’s personal secrets to anyone.

Vices, in contrast, are traits opposite to the virtuous ones. They dominate the person’s actions in ways that are incompatible with living well. Vallor notes it is important that virtue ethics acknowledges “human moral judgments as imperfect and contextually variable”. Hence, it underlines the need for a continuous and committed practice and reflection about unconscious biases.

The key question for Vallor and for anyone reading this newsletter — and us who work in technology in particular — is how does our work in technology align with moral excellence and enable human flourishing in 21st century, global, and often techno-solutionist contexts where our first port of call to resolve any problem is to reach for technology?

The reach of moral acts via technology

Similar to 20th century philosopher Hans Jonas, Vallor points out how the scope of ethics has transformed from local instances to global contexts, typically due to technologies that connect us, and therefore also to the consequences of our actions, across distances. Such explosion of ethical boundaries is not just the domain of information and communication technologies but also one of military technologies, for example — think unmanned drones. These boundary crossings ask for a constant reconsideration of ethical boundaries:

a contemporary theory of ethics—that is, a theory of what counts as a good life for human beings—must include an explicit conception of how to live well with technologies, especially those which are still emerging and have yet to become settled, seamlessly embedded features of the human environment. — p. 164.

It’s not just that the reach of ethical questions has expanded, but the validity of moral principles, based on ethical outlook, have become less stable. With emerging technologies, such as the various tools in the AI toolbox, biomedical enhancements etc., we are faced with renewed ethical dilemmas with increasing pace. And not only with pace but complexity. It is a complexity, the consequences of which are more challenging to anticipate, even if they are approached with responsibility and reflection.

The problem of discerning which course of action promises the greatest overall happiness or the least harm—among all the novel paths of biomedical, mechanical, and computational development open to us—is simply incalculable. The technological potentials are too opaque, and too many, to assign reliable probabilities of specific outcomes. — p. 267.

In this light, the notion of ‘responsible innovation’ becomes an oxymoron in many sectors that do not directly contribute to human flourishing — even morally excellent intentions behind medical technologies can become obscured by corrupt commercial motives. Furthermore, the impacts from innovation at the forefront of technological development are unpredictable, to an extent that begs the question about how can success be measured within the efforts of doing innovation responsibly? Questions like this take us to the concern of universality.

From singular moral principles to technomoral virtues

Single moral principles, such as Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative from the 18th century, are difficult to apply universally across topics and the diversity of today’s global cultures. One reason for this is the varying degrees of technological adoption, e.g. in the global north in comparison to the global south. Often us who are building technology in the global north are blind to this, but Vallor shows how there is another kind of blindness that is accelerating in parallel:

Our growing technosocial blindness, a condition that I will call acute technosocial opacity, makes it increasingly difficult to identify, seek, and secure the ultimate goal of ethics—a life worth choosing; a life lived well. — p. 229.

Vallor suggests that the complexity of the situation, our current ‘technosocial life’, in the 21st century calls for a novel approach: adapting the classic notions of virtues across Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist thought to the present day and beyond:

The technomoral virtues, cultivated through the practices and habits of moral self-cultivation that we can learn from the classical virtue traditions examined in this book, are humanity’s best chance to cope and even thrive in the midst of the great uncertainties and vicissitudes of technosocial life that lie ahead. — p. 336.

The challenge is that alongside the virtues, we carry technomoral vices and other biases and limitations. Vallor underlines that those vices impede us from grasping the gravity of the situation. Developing more technologies from the same premises as before will not work because they will be created using the same thinking that created the global crises we are facing — thinking that lacks in ‘technomoral wisdom’ in Vallor’s words. This observation echoes the critique of the metacrisis by thinkers such Daniel Schmachtenberger, i.e. that we cannot get out of the multiple crises we are facing with the same thinking that produced them.

Virtue ethics promotes practical wisdom that understands the current context and can adapt — hence, acting according to technomoral virtues needs to produce significant changes into how we build, consume, and relate to technology.

The uncomfortable questions

As Vallor also emphasises, becoming aware of technomoral issues does not mean being anti-technology because that would equate with being anti-human and anti-science. It’s just that the needs, values, and desires with which we build technology need a reset. For Vallor, it comes down to a set of meaningful questions:

which technologies shall we create, with what knowledge and designs, affording what, shared with whom, for whose benefit, and to what greater ends? - p. 386.

Technology is often built to surpass our physical limitations. What if we directed our attention to building technologies that surpass our moral limitations? What would such technologies, in the meaning of ‘technology’ as applied science, be? This is a question I want to explore in future posts.

I will hope to adapt Vallor’s thinking in future posts to practical examples, with the aim of considering what that ‘technological reset’ might mean. If we pose the question to the philosophers of our time, they might say that we are at the end of our current civilisation, and the reset means the emergence of a new civilisation built on different principles.

if Aristotle had even some success in fostering the cultivation of civic virtues, if Buddhism has encouraged any more compassion and tolerance, or Confucianism more filial care and loyalty, what is to prevent a new tradition from emerging around the technomoral virtues needed for human flourishing today? As Ess notes, what we need is something like a renewed account of the German notion of Bildung; that is, a guide to the personal and social cultivation of those virtues conducive to a more humane and enlightened technological society. - p. 298.

This argument has evidence, if we look at the typical temporal cycle of civilisations of the past centuries and millennia. Daniel Schmachtenberger, Iain McGilchrist and other thinkers have observed that toward the end of their era, civilisations tend to overextend their reach before they fall. In their arrogance, civilisations build an empire that is bound to crumble because the powers that be of the civilisation think what they created is invincible. They do not understand the limitations of what they’ve built, nor do they see any alternatives.

I’m afraid we are very much living in such times.

Might this be true of technology as well? We do not understand the limits of the technology-building mindset? How do we cope with such an intimidating idea? How might we see the limits better? Let’s start discussing that.

Thank you for reading.

With love and kindness,

Aki