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Technology and the Virtues: A philosophical guide to a future worth wanting Shannon Vallor New York, NY, USA, Oxford University Press, 2016, 328 pp. ISBN 9780190498511
Shannon Vallor is the Regis and Dianne McKenna Philosophy Professor at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley and an AI ethicist and visiting researcher at Google. Vallors research focuses on the impact of emerging science and technology on our character - the moral and intellectual virtues of human beings. In 2016, she published Technology and the Virtues: A philosophical guide to a future worth wanting from Oxford press. Vallors book is a comprehensive text that provides a substantial introduction to virtue ethics and current technological challenges to general readers and scholars alike. Her work is part of a contemporary renewal of virtue ethics among Western philosophers including Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre. Vallor asks us to consider the following inquiry: how can human beings hope to flourish in a world of increasing complexity and unpredictability due to emerging technologies? Her solution is to cultivate a kind of moral character that expresses technomoral virtues so that we can live the good life as human beings. The good life in the 21st century requires envisioning our technosocial future - a future in which technological powers become embedded in co-evolving social practices, values, and institutions (2016, p. 5). However, Vallor characterizes our current condition as one of acute technosocial opacity" (2016, p. 6), in which we find it difficult to identify, seek, and secure a vision of a life lived well. Thus, the challenge we face is to figure out what we will do with new technologies and what they will do to us.
Virtue Ethics as a Global Strategy
Vallors book outlines a global ethical framework drawing from the Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist virtue traditions. She contends that these classical virtue traditions offer us an ethical strategy for cultivating the right type of moral character that can aid us in coping, and even flourishing, under such challenging conditions (2016, 10). The solution to our technosocial ills is not newer technologies, but the adoption of technological practices that reinforce our moral self-cultivation and help us acquire the moral discernment to live well. For Vallor, the good life for human beings is attainable...