Governing Technology: A MacIntyrean Approach to the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

In our current technological context, the virtues needed to live an ethically good life must be acquired in the context of practices in which technologies, particularly artificial intelligence systems, play an increasingly central role. To be good practitioners, humans must now be competent users of such technologies. MacIntyre’s virtue theory offers a way of looking at practices and other social structures as enablers of (or barriers to) moral agency. However, MacIntyre has not developed an account of the impact of technologies on practices, nor the way in which virtues can be developed in technology-mediated practices. This chapter aims to address this gap by discussing, first, how so called intelligent technologies are intertwined with human agency within practices; and then, how virtues can be developed in such “sociomaterial” practices. Thus, the chapter aims to help extend MacIntyrean virtue ethics, on the one hand, to the study of the moral impact of intelligent technologies on human action and, on the other hand, to the identification of the virtues necessary to seize the opportunities and overcome the harms, dangers, temptations, and distractions which smart technologies pose on human flourishing.