Virtue, Technology, Moral Cultivation

Some argue that we ought to take an optimistic approach to the possibilities technology offer for moral progress and cultivation. More recent developments in AI in particular hold out promises of moral enhancement of our natural capacities for moral reasoning. We contend that, before any positive application of technology can be envisaged, a thoroughgoing critique of the limits of technological enhancement is necessary. First, we will highlight a few salient points Kant makes on practical rationality that stress the importance of free rationality in both making decisions, but also in forming character. Secondly, we will argue that technology poses significant challenges in terms of the ordinary way our rationality is expressed in the everyday. Two arguments are offered to show that introducing technology in fact undermines moral development in undermining the virtues that are supposed to be perfected in moral cultivation. First, technology undermines the development of the virtues by exerting an alien, coercive force on the moral agent. Secondly, introducing technology may promote certain vices, rather than enhance the capacities that proponents wish to improve. Finally, a few points of comparison with contemporary perfectionist ethics will be offered to buttress the overall argument. First, it will show that, on a perfectionist conception of the good life, aritifial intelligence poses very particular obstacles towards developing, or even perfecting, virtues necessary for the good life.