Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues, A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford, England: Oxford Uni
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Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues, A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978‑0190905286, $42.95, Hbk Kevin P. Lee1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In Technology and the Virtues, Shannon Vallor develops an approach to the ethics of technology by comparing Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist theories of moral virtue. She argues that this is necessary 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.” (p. 2) She uses the neologism, technomoral, to refer to the consequences of technology on the potential for morally fulfilled lives. Understandings of this are urgently needed today since the emerging NBIC (nano, bio, information, and cognitive) technologies hold the potential to unleash existential crises and radically transformative social changes. They present complex moral dilemmas that quickly exhaust the resources of standard policy debates and contribute to an increasingly “disordered geopolitics and widening fractures in the public commons.” (p. 5) Deontological and utilitarian ethics, which view moral reasoning in terms of discursive calculations within a field of moral possibilities, are overwhelmed by the scale and scope of the challenges posed by these technologies. The standard approaches in public policy debates lack resources for responding to the state of persistent change, characteristic of technology today. She believes that virtue ethics theories are more capacious because they are focused on flexible means to achieve moral goals rather than ridged moral principles. But, the goals (tele) of virtue ethics have traditionally been controversial since they require some commitment to a comprehensive description of human nature, and these are highly contestable. To avoid this dilemma, Vallor looks to a comparative analysis of diverse traditions of virtue—Aristotelianism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. She accepts MacIntyre’s theory that virtues are understood and taught through particular practices and narratives of a tradition. Applying this theory, to Confucians, Buddhists, and Aristotelians, she finds that among them there are common goals of moral self-cultivation, moral attention, practical judgement, and extension of moral * Kevin P. Lee [email protected] 1
Campbell University, Norman Wiggins School of Law, Raleigh, NC, USA
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concern. She suggests these commonalities might provide the bases for an emerging global moral tradition, which she calls technomoral wisdom. (p. 154). She believes a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” exists among the traditions of moral reasoning that she is examining. She writes: This family resemblance can be articulated as a framework for the practice of moral self-cultivation, with seven core elements: moral habituation, relational understanding, reflective self-examination, intentional self-direction of moral development, moral attention, p
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