Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial IntelligenceCorporate author:UNESCO [11676]Document code:SHS/BIO/PI/2021/1Collation:43 pages : illustrationsLanguage:EnglishAlso available in:Français, Español, Português, 汉语, العربية, Lietuvių kalba, монгол хэл, O'zbekYear of publication:2022Licence type:CC BY-NC-SA [385]Type of document:programme and meeting document

ABSTRACTOne of the most common contemporary approaches for developing an ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) involves elaborating guiding principles. This essay explores the limitations of this approach, using the history of bioethics as a comparative case. The examples of bioethics and recent AI ethics suggest that principles are difficult to implement in everyday practice, fail to direct individual action, and can frequently result in a pure proceduralism. The essay encourages an additional attention to virtue, which forms the dispositions of actors, directs them to valued ends, and encourages right action in particular situation to complement principles. Practices and professions like medicine or warfighting that already have rich traditions of reflection on virtue ethics will be especially fruitful fields for developing an AI ethics of virtue.KEYWORDS: PrinciplismAI ethicsvirtuebioethicsDisclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In this essay, I use AI broadly to include technologies as diverse as machine learning and algorithmic decision support systems. I am not referring to what many call general AI, a conscious, superintelligent machine. Such an AI system seems distant from current technologies. Instead, I am discussing technologies that are already in place in many spheres of life.2 Of course, this is not a claim that a principles-based approach is the only approach for constructing AI ethics. Many other ethics paradigms are emerging, such as Value-Sensitive Design, Human-Centered AI, or Explainable AI. This article has focused narrowly on the relationship between principles and virtues because an AI principlism does seem to be a prominent approach and because of the useful comparative case of bioethics. At the same time, many of these other ethical paradigms also draw on high-level principles, like explainability or safety. Further, some of these other AI ethics paradigms may be congruent with a virtue approach.3 This difficulty of appealing decisions is especially harmful for the poor who frequently lack the social power to challenge institutions (Eubanks Citation2018). Many lists of principles will contain one that will allow for appeal, but these appeals processes can themselves be undermined by the automation bias described later.4 “Philosophers made a major contribution to the development of bioethics forty years ago, and we are now at a tipping point where a similar ethical intervention is needed to cope with the questions raised by the rise of AI” (Schwarzman Centre Citationn.d.). An overview of the principles of bioethics can be found in many basic bioethics textbooks (e.g., Beauchamp and Childress Citation2012).5 The literature on principlism is vast, and the argument found here draws on this literature. For an early overview of the different positions in the debate see DuBose et al. Citation1994. Beauchamp and Childress address many of these critiques throughout different editions of Principles of Biomedical Ethics.6 “Some patients were reportedly talking on their cell phones when doctors rushed in and told them they had to be intubated. The patients were in no great distress. Their monitors simply displayed numbers that panicked their caregivers” (Dworkin Citation2020).7 For related, although less well-developed criticisms of principles in medicine, see AI Research Group of the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See Citation2024, vol. 1, chap. 1; Scherz Citationforthcoming.8 For good accounts of bias and disparities imposed by algorithms, including in medical care see O’Neil Citation2016; Noble Citation2018; Benjamin Citation2019; Obermeyer et al. Citation2019.9 Unfortunately, many practitioners fear that this kind of ethical apprenticeship is disappearing with new modalities of training with shortened hours and more hand-offs between different trainees and attending physicians (Hadler Citation2016).10 For discussions of martial virtues, see Sherman Citation2005; “Virtue Ethics and Military Ethics” Citation2007; Chapa Citation2018.11 See note 8.12 Her analysis goes beyond this approach to look at specific practices and some of the other strands that I describe.

1 IntroductionCurrent AI ethics initiatives, especially when adopted in scientific institutes or companies, mostly embrace a principle-based approach (Mittelstadt, 2019). However, establishing principles alone does not suffice; they also must be convincingly put into practice. Most AI ethics guidelines do shy away from coming up with methods to accomplish this (Hagendorff, 2020). Nevertheless, recently more and more research papers appeared that describe steps on how to come “from what to how” (Eitel-Porter, 2020; Morley et al., 2020; Theodorou & Dignum, 2020; Vakkuri et al., 2019a). However, AI ethics still fails in certain regards. The reasons for that are manifold. This is why both in academia and public debates, many authors state that AI ethics has not permeated the AI industry yet, quite the contrary (Vakkuri et al., 2019b). Despite the mentioned reasons, this is due to current AI ethics discourses hardly taking considerations on moral psychology into account. They do not consider the limitations of the human mind, the many hidden psychological forces like powerful cognitive biases, blind spots and the like that can affect the likelihood of ethical or unethical behavior. In order to effectively improve moral decision making in the AI field and to live up to common ideals and expectations, AI ethics initiatives can seek inspiration from another ethical framework that is yet largely underrepresented in AI ethics, namely virtue ethics. Instead of focusing only on principles, AI ethics can put a stronger focus on virtues or, in other words, on character dispositions in AI practitioners in order to effectively put itself into practice. When using the term “AI practitioners” or “professionals”, this includes AI or machine learning researchers, research project supervisors, data scientists, industry engineers and developers, as well as managers and other domain experts.Moreover, to bridge the gap between existing AI ethics initiatives and the requirements for their successful implementation, one should consider insights from moral psychology because, up to now, most parts of the AI ethics discourse disregard the psychological processes that limit the goals and effectiveness of ethics programs. This paper aims to respond to this gap in research. AI ethics, in order to be truly successful, should not only repeat bullet points from the numerous ethics codes (Jobin et al., 2019). It should also discuss the right dispositions and character strengths in AI practitioners that can help not only to identify ethical issues and to engender the motivation to take action, but also—and this is even more important—to discover and circumvent one’s own vulnerability to psychological forces affecting moral behavior. The purpose of this paper is to state how this can be executed and how AI ethics can choose a virtue-based approach in order to effectively put itself into practice.2 AI Ethics—the Current Principled ApproachCurrent AI ethics programs often come with specific weaknesses and shortcomings. First and foremost, without being accompanied by binding legal norms, their normative principles lack reinforcement mechanisms (Rességuier & Rodrigues, 2020). Basically, deviations from codes of ethics have no or very minor consequences. Moreover, even when AI applications fulfill all ethical requirements stipulated, it does not necessarily mean that the application itself is “ethically approved” when used in the wrong contexts or when developed by organizations that follow unethical intentions (Hagendorff, 2021a; Lauer, 2020). In addition to that, ethics can be used for marketing purposes (Floridi, 2019; Wagner, 2018). Recent AI ethics initiatives of the private sector have faced a lot of criticism in this regard. In fact, industry efforts for ethical and fair AI are compared to past efforts of “Big Tobacco” to whitewash the image of smoking (Abdalla & Abdalla, 2020). “Big Tech”, so the argument, uses ethics initiatives and targeted research funds to avoid legislation or the creation of binding legal norms (Ochigame, 2019). Hence, avoiding or addressing criticism like that is paramount for trustworthy ethics initiatives.The latest progress in AI ethics research was configured by a “practical turn”, which was among other things inspired by the conclusion that principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI (Mittelstadt, 2019). To accomplish that, so the argument, principles must be put into practice. Recently, several frameworks were developed, describing the process “from what to how” (Hallensleben et al., 2020; Morley et al., 2020; Zicari, 2020). Basically, this implies considering the context dependency in the process of realizing codes of ethics, the different requirements for different stakeholders, as well as the demonstration of ways of dealing with conflicting principles or values, for instance in the case of fairness and accuracy (Whittlestone et al., 2019). Ultimately, however, the practical turn frameworks are often just more detailed codes of ethics that use more fine-grained concepts than the initial high-level guidelines. For instance, instead of just stressing the importance of privacy, like the first generation of comprehensive AI ethics guidelines did, they hint to the Privacy by Design or Privacy Impact Assessment toolkits (Cavoukian, 2011; Cavoukian et al., 2010; Oetzel & Spiekermann, 2014). Or instead of just stipulating principles for AI, they differentiate between stages of algorithmic development, namely business and use-case development; design phase, where the business or use case is translated into tangible requirements for AI practitioners; training and test data procurement; building of the AI application; testing the application; deployment of the application and monitoring of the application’s performance (Morley et al., 2020). Other frameworks (Dignum, 2018) are rougher and differentiate between ethics by design (integrating ethical decision routines in AI systems (Hagendorff, 2021c)), ethics in design (finding development methods that support the evaluation of ethical implications of AI systems (Floridi et al., 2018)) and ethics for design (ensuring integrity on the side of developers (Johnson, 2017)). But, as stated above, all frameworks still stick to the principled approach. The main transformation lies in the principles being far more nuanced and less abstract compared to the beginnings of AI ethics code initiatives (Future of Life Institute, 2017). Typologies for every stage of the AI development pipeline are available. Differentiating principles solves one problem, namely the problem of too much abstraction. At the same time, however, it leaves some other problems open. Speaking more broadly, current AI ethics disregards certain dimensions it should actually be having. In organizations of all kinds, the likelihood of unethical decisions or behavior can be controlled to a certain extent. Antecedents for unethical behavior are individual characteristics (gender, cognitive moral development, idealism, job satisfaction, etc.), moral issue characteristics (the concentration and probability of negative effects, the magnitude of consequences, the proximity of the issue, etc.) and organizational environment characteristics (a benevolent ethical climate, ethical culture, code existence, rule enforcement, etc.) (Kish-Gephart et al., 2010). With regard to AI ethics, these factors are only partially considered. Most parts of the discourse are focused on discussing organizational environment characteristics (codes of ethics) or moral issues characteristics (AI safety) (Brundage et al., 2018; Hagendorff, 2020, 2021b), but not individual characteristics (character dispositions) increasing the likelihood of ethical decision making in AI research and development.Therefore, a successful ethics strategy should focus on individual dispositions and organizational structures alike, whereas the overarching goal of every measure should be the prevention of harm. Or, in this case: prevent AI-based applications from inflicting direct or indirect harm. This rationale can be fulfilled by ensuring explainability of algorithmic decision making, by mitigating biases and promoting fairness in machine learning, by fostering AI robustness and the like. However, in addition to listing these issues is asking how AI practitioners can be taught to intuitively keep them in mind. This would mean to transition from a situation of an external “ethics assessment” of existing AI products with a “checkbox guideline” to an internal process of establishing “ethics for design”.Empirical research shows that having plain knowledge on ethical topics or moral dilemmas is likely to have no measurable influence on decision making. Even ethics professionals, meaning ethics professors and other scholars of ethics, typically do not act more ethically than non-ethicists (Schwitzgebel, 2009; Schwitzgebel & Rust, 2014). Correspondingly, in the AI field, empirical research shows that ethical principles have no significant influence on technology developer’s decision making routines (McNamara et al., 2018). Ultimately, ethical principles do not suffice to secure prosocial ways to develop and use new technologies (Mittelstadt, 2019). Normative principles are not worth much if they are not acknowledged and adhered to. In order to actually acknowledge the importance of ethical considerations, certain character dispositions or virtues are required, among others, virtues that encourage us to stick to moral ideals and values.3 Basic AI Virtues—the Foundation for Ethical Decision MakingWestern virtue ethics has its roots in moral theories of Greek philosophers. However, after deontology and utilitarianism became more mainstream in modern philosophy, virtue ethics recently experienced a “comeback”. Roughly speaking, this comeback of scholarly interest in virtue ethics was initiated by Anscombe’s essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) but found prominent supporters and continued to grow by MacIntyre (1981), Nussbaum (1993), Hursthouse (2001) and many more. Virtue ethics also has a rich tradition in East and Southeast philosophy, especially in Confucian and Buddhist ethical theories (Keown, 1992; Tiwald, 2010). Virtue-based ethical theories treat character as fundamental to ethics, whereas deontology, arguably the most prevalent ethical theory, focusses on principles. But what are the differences between principles and virtues? The former is based on normative rules that are universally valid, the latter addresses the question of what constitutes a good person or character. While ethical principles equal obligations, virtues are ideals that AI practitioners can aspire to. Deontology-inspired normative principles focus on the action rather than the actor. Thus, principlism defines action-guiding principles, whereas virtue ethics demands the development of specific positive character dispositions or character strengths.Why are these dispositions of importance for AI practitioners? One reason is that individuals, who display traits such as justice, honesty, empathy and the like, acquire (public) trust. Trust, in turn, makes it easier for people to cooperate and work together, it creates a sense of community and it makes social interactions more predictable (Schneier, 2012). Acquiring and maintaining the trust of other players in the AI field, but also the trust of the general public, can be a prerequisite for providing AI products and services. After all, intrinsically motivated actions are more trustworthy in comparison to those which are simply the product of extrinsically motivated rule following behavior (Meara et al., 1996).One has to admit that a lot of ongoing AI basic research or very specific, small AI applications have such weak ethical implications that virtues or ethical values have no relevance at all. But AI applications that involve personal data, that are part of human–computer interaction or that are used on a grand scale clearly have ethical implications that can be addressed by virtue ethics. In the theoretical process of transitioning from an “uncultivated” to a morally habituated state, “technomoral virtues” like civility, courage, humility, magnanimity and others can be fostered and acquired (Vallor, 2016; Harris 2008a; Kohen et al., 2019; Gambelin, 2020; Sison et al., 2017; Neubert, 2017; Harris 2008b; Ratti & Stapleford, 2021). In philosophy, virtue ethics traditionally comprises cardinal virtues, namely fortitude, justice, prudence and moderation. Further, a list of six broad virtues that can be distilled from religious texts, oaths and other virtue inventories was put together by Peterson and Seligman (2004), whereas the virtues are wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. Furthermore, in her famous book “Technology and the Virtues”, Vallor (2016, 2021) identified twelve technomoral virtues, namely honesty, self-control, humility, justice, courage, empathy, care, civility, flexibility, perspective, magnanimity and wisdom. The selection was criticized in secondary literature (Howard, 2018; Vallor, 2018) but remains arguably the most important virtue-based approach in ethics of technology. In the more specific context of AI applications, however, one has to sort out those virtues that are particularly important in the field of AI ethics. Here, existing literature and preliminary works are spare (Constantinescu et al., 2021; Neubert & Montañez, 2020).Based on patterns and regularities of the ongoing discussion on AI ethics, an ethics strategy that is based on virtues would constitute four basic AI virtues, where each virtue corresponds to a set of principles (see Table 1). The basic AI virtues are justice, honesty, responsibility and care. But how exactly can these virtues be derived from AI ethics principles? Why do exactly these four virtues suffice? When consulting meta-studies on AI ethics guidelines that stem from the sciences, industry, as well as governments (Fjeld et al., 2020; Hagendorff, 2020; Jobin et al., 2019), it becomes clear that AI ethics norms comprise a certain set of reoccurring principles. The mentioned meta-studies on AI ethics guidelines list these principles hierarchically, starting with the most frequently mentioned principles (fairness, transparency, accountability, etc.) and ending at principles that are mentioned rather seldom, but nevertheless repeatedly (sustainability, diversity, social cohesion etc.). When sifting through all these principles, one can, by using a reductionist approach and clustering them into groups, distill four basic virtues that cover all of them (see Fig. 1). The decisive question for the selection of the four basic AI virtues was: Does virtue A describe character dispositions that, when internalized by AI practitioners, will intrinsically motivate them to act in a way that “automatically” ensures or makes it more likely that the outcomes of their actions, among others, result in technological artefacts that meet the requirements that principle X specifies? Or, in short, does virtue A translate into behavior that is likely to result in an outcome that corresponds to the requirements of principle X? This question had to be applied for every principle that was derived from the meta-studies, testing by how many different virtues they can be covered. Ultimately, this process resulted in only four distinct virtues.Table 1 List of basic AI virtuesFull size tableFig. 1Full size imageUsing meta-studies on AI ethics guidelines as sources to distill four basic AI virtuesTo name some examples: The principle of algorithmic fairness corresponds to the virtue of justice. A just person will “automatically” be motivated to contribute to machine outputs that do not discriminate against groups of people, independently of external factors and guideline rules. The principle of transparency, as a second example, corresponds to the virtue of honesty, because an honest person will “automatically” be inclined to be open about mistakes, to not hide technical shortcomings, to make research outcomes accessible and explainable. The principle of safe AI would be a third example. Here, the virtue of care will move professionals to act in a manner that they do not only acknowledge the importance of safety and harm avoidance, but also act accordingly. Ultimately, the transition happens between deontological rules, principles or universal norms on the one hand and virtues, intrinsic motives or character dispositions on the other hand. Nevertheless, both fields are connected by the same objective, namely to come up with trustworthy, human-centered, beneficial AI applications. Just the means to reach this objective are different.As said before, the four basic AI virtues cover all common principles of AI ethics as described in prior discourses (Fjeld et al., 2020; Floridi et al., 2018; Hagendorff, 2020; Jobin et al., 2019; Morley et al., 2020). They are the precondition for putting principles into practice by representing different motivational settings for steering decision making processes in AI research and development in the right direction. But stipulating those four basic AI virtues is not enough. Tackling ethics problems in practice also needs second-order virtues that enable professionals to deal with “bounded ethicality”.4 Second-Order AI Virtues—a Response to Bounded EthicalityWhen using a simple ethical theory, one can assume that individuals go through three phases. First, individuals perceive that they are confronted with a moral decision they have to make. Secondly, they reflect on ethical principles and come up with a moral judgment. And finally, they act accordingly to these judgments and therefore act morally. But individuals do not actually behave this way. In fact, moral judgments are in most cases not influenced by moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001). Moral judgments are done intuitively, and moral reasoning is used in hindsight to justify one’s initial reaction. In short, typically, moral action precedes moral judgment. This leads to consequences for AI ethics. It shows that parts of current ethics initiatives can be reduced to plain “justifications” for the status quo of technology development—or at least they are adopted to it. For instance, the most commonly stressed AI ethics principles are fairness, accountability, explainability, transparency, privacy and safety (Hagendorff, 2020). However, these are issues for which a lot of technical solutions already exist and where a lot of research is done anyhow. Hence, AI ethics initiatives are simply reaffirming existing practices. On a macro level, this stands in correspondence with the aforementioned fact that moral judgments do not determine, but rather follow or explain prior decision making processes.Although explicit ethics training may improve AI practitioners’ intellectual understanding of ethics itself, there are many limitations restricting ethical decision making in practice, no matter how comprehensive one’s knowledge on ethical theories is. Many reasons for unethical behavior are resulting from environmental influences on human behavior and limitations through bounded rationality or, to be more precise, “bounded ethicality” (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011; Tenbrunsel & Messick, 2004). Bounded ethicality is an umbrella term that is used in moral psychology to name environmental as well as intrapersonal factors that can thwart ethical decision making in practice. Hence, in order to address bounded ethicality, AI ethics programs are in need of specific virtues, namely virtues that help to “debias” ethical decision making in order to overcome bounded ethicality.The first step to successively dissolve bounded ethicality is to inform AI practitioners not about the importance of machine biases, but psychological biases as well as situational forces. Here, two second-order virtues come into play, namely prudence and fortitude (see Table 2). In Aristotelian virtue ethics, prudence (or phrónēsis) guides the enactment of individual virtues in unique moral situations, meaning that a person can intelligently express virtuous behavior (Aristotle et al., 2012). As a unifying intellectual virtue, prudence also gains center stage in modern virtue-based approaches to engineering ethics (Frigo et al., 2021). In this paper, prudence plays a similar role and is used in combination with another virtue, namely fortitude. While both virtues may help to overcome bounded ethicality, they are at the same time enablers for living up to the basic virtues. Individual psychological biases as well as situational forces can get in the way of acting justly, honestly, responsibly or caringly. Prudence and fortitude are the answers to the many forces that may restrict basic AI virtues, where prudence is aiming primarily at individual factors, while fortitude addresses supra-individual issues that can impair ethical decision making in AI research and development.Table 2 List of second-order AI virtuesFull size tableIn the following, a selection of some of the major factors of bounded ethicality that can be tackled by prudence shall be described. This selection is neither exhaustive nor does it go into much detail. However, it is meant to be a practical overview that can set the scene for more in-depth subsequent analyses.Clearly, the most obvious factors of bounded ethicality are psychological biases (Cain & Detsky, 2008). It is common that people’s first and often only reaction to moral problems is emotional. Or, in other words, taking up dual-process theory, their reaction follows system 1 thinking (Kahneman, 2012; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), meaning an intuitive, implicit, effortless, automatic mode of mental information processing. System 1 thinking predominates everyday decisions. System 2, on the other hand, is a conscious, logical, less error-prone, but slow and effortful mode of thinking. Although many decision making routines would require system 2 thinking, individuals often lack the energy to switch from system 1 to system 2. Ethical decision making needs cognitive energy (Mead et al., 2009). This is why prudence is such an important virtue, since it helps AI practitioners to transition from system 1 to system 2 thinking in ethical problems. This is not to say that the dual-process theory is without criticism. Recently, cognitive scientists have challenged its validity (Grayot, 2020), even though they did not abandon it in toto. It still remains a scientifically sound heuristic in moral psychology. Thus, system 2 thinking remains strikingly close to critical ethical thinking, although it does obviously not necessarily result in it (Bonnefon, 2018).The transition from system 1 to system 2 thinking in ethical problems can also be useful for mitigating another powerful psychological force, namely implicit biases (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013), that can impair at least two basic AI virtues, namely justice and care. Individuals have implicit associations, also called “ordinary prejudices”, that lead them to classify, categorize and perceive their social surroundings with accordance to prejudices and stereotypes. This effect is so strong that even individuals who are absolutely sure to not be hostile towards minority groups actually are exactly that. The reason for that lies in the fact that people succumb to subconscious biases that reflect culturally established stereotypes or discrimination patterns. Hence, unintentional discrimination cannot be unlearned without changing culture, the media, the extent of exposure to people from minorities and the like. Evidently, this task cannot be fulfilled by the AI sector. Nevertheless, implicit biases can be tackled by increasing workforce diversity in AI firms and by using prudence as a virtue to accept the irrefutable existence and problematic nature of implicit biases as well as their influence on justice in the first place.Another important bias that can compromise basic AI virtues and that can at the same time be overcome by prudence is in-group favoritism (Efferson et al., 2008). This bias causes people to sympathize with others who share their culture, organization, gender, skin color, etc. For AI practitioners, this means that AI applications which have negative side-effects on outgroups, for instance the livelihoods of clickworkers in South-east Asia (Graham et al., 2017), are rated less ethically problematic than AI applications that would have similar consequences for in-groups. Moreover, the current gender imbalance in the AI field might be prolonged by in-group favoritism in human resource management. In-group favoritism mainly stifles character dispositions like justice and care. Prudence, on the other hand, is apt to work against in-group favoritism by recognizing artificial group constructions as well as definitions of who counts as “we” and who as “others”, bolstering not only fair decision making, but also abilities to empathize with “distant” individuals.One further and important effect of bounded ethicality that can impair the realization of the basic AI virtues is self-serving biases. These biases cause revisionist impulses in humans, helping to downplay or deny past unethical actions while memorizing ethical ones, resulting in a self-concept that depicts oneself as ethical. When one asks individuals to rate how ethical they think they are on a scale of 0 to 100 related to other individuals, the majority of them will give themselves a score of more than 50 (Epley & Dunning, 2000). The same holds true when people are asked to assess the organization they are a part of in relation to other organizations. Average scores are higher than 50, although actually the average score would have to be 50. What one can learn from this is that generally speaking, people overestimate their ethicality. Moreover, self-serving biases cause people to blame other people when things go wrong, but to view successes as being one’s own achievement. Others are to blame for ethical problems, depicting the problems as being outside of one’s own control. In the AI sector, self-serving biases can come into play when attributing errors or inaccuracies in applications as being the result of others, when reacting dismissive to critical feedback or feelings of concern, etc. Moreover, not overcoming self-serving biases by prudence can mean to act unjustly and dishonestly, further compromising basic AI virtues.Value-action gaps are another effect of bounded ethicality revealed by empirical studies in moral psychology (Godin et al., 2005; Jansen & Glinow, 1985). Value-action gaps occur in the discrepancy between people’s self-concepts or moral values and their actual behavior. In short, the gaps mark the distance between what people say and what people do. Prudence, on the other hand, can help to identify that distance. In the AI field, value-action gaps can occur on an organizational level, for instance by using lots of ethics-related terms in corporate reports and press releases while actually being involved in unethical businesses practices, lawsuits, fraud, etc. (Loughran et al., 2009). Especially the AI sector is often accused of ethics-washing, hence of talking much about ethics, but not acting accordingly (Hao, 2019). Likewise, value-action gaps can occur on an individual level, for instance by holding AI safety or data security issues in high esteem while actually accepting improper quality assurance or rushed development and therefore provoking technical vulnerabilities in machine learning models. Akin to value-action gaps are behavioral forecasting errors (Diekmann et al., 2003). Here, people tend to believe that they will act ethically in a given situation X, while when situation X actually occurs, they do not behave accordingly (Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001). They underestimate the extent to which they will indeed stick to their ideals and intentions. All these effects can interfere negatively with basic AI virtues, mostly with care, honesty and justice. This is why prudence with regard to value-action gaps is of great importance.The concept of moral disengagement is another important factor in bounded ethical decision making (Bandura, 1999). Techniques of moral disengagement allow individuals to selectively turn their moral concerns on and off. In many day-to-day decisions, people act contrary to their own ethical standards, but without feeling bad about it or having a guilty conscience. The main techniques in moral disengagement processes comprise justifications, where wrongdoing is justified as means to a higher end; changes in one’s definition about what is ethical; euphemistic labels, where individuals detach themselves from problematic action contexts by using linguistic distancing mechanisms; denial of being personally responsible for particular outcomes, where responsibility is attributed to a larger group of people; the use of comparisons, where own wrongdoings are relativized by pointing at other contexts of wrongdoings or the avoidance of certain information that refers to negative consequences of one’s own behavior. Again, prudence can help to identify cases of moral disengagement in the AI field and act as a response to it. Addressing moral disengagement with prudence can be a requirement to live up to all basic AI virtues.In the following, a selection of some of the major factors of bounded ethicality that can be tackled by fortitude shall be described. Here, supra-individual issues that can impair ethical decision making in AI research and development are addressed. Certainly, one of the most relevant factors one has to discuss in this context are situational forces. Numerous empirical studies in moral psychology have shown that situational forces can have a massive impact on moral behavior (Isen & Levin, 1972; Latané & Darley, 1968; Williams & Bargh, 2008). Situational forces can range from specific influences like the noise of a lawnmower that significantly affects helping behavior (Mathews & Canon, 1975) to more relevant factors like competitive orientations, time constraints, tiredness, stress, etc., which are likely to alter or overwrite ethical concerns (Cave & ÓhÉigeartaigh, 2018; Darley & Batson, 1973; Kouchaki & Smith, 2014). Especially financial incentives have a significant influence on ethical behavior. In environments that are structured by economic imperatives, decisions that clearly have an ethical dimension can be reframed as pure business decisions. All in all, money has manifold detrimental consequences for decision making since it leads to decisions that are proven to be less social, less ethical or less cooperative (Gino & Mogilner, 2014; Gino & Pierce, 2009; Kouchaki et al., 2013; Palazzo et al., 2012; Vohs et al., 2006). Ultimately, various finance law obligations or monetary factual constraints that a company’s management has to comply to can conflict with or overwrite AI virtues. Especially in contexts like this, virtue ethics can significantly be pushed into the background, although the perceived constraints lead to immoral outcomes. In short, situational forces can have negative impacts on unfolding all four basic AI virtues, namely justice, honesty, responsibility and care. In general, critics of virtue ethics have pointed out that moral behavior is not determined by character traits, but social contexts and concrete situations (Kupperman, 2001). However, situationist accounts are in fact entirely compatible with virtue ethics since it provides particular virtues like fortitude that are intended to counteract situational forces (and that can explain why some individuals deviate from expected behavior in classical psychological experiments like the Milgram experiment (Milgram, 1963)). Fortitude is supposed to help to counteract situational pressure, allowing the mentioned basic virtues to flourish.Similar to and often not clearly distinguishable from situational forces are peer influences (Asch, 1951, 1956). Individuals want to follow the crowd, adapt their behavior to that of their peers and act similarly to them. This is also called conformity bias. Conformity biases can become a problem for two reasons: First, group norms can possess unethical traits, leading for instance to a collective acceptance of harm. Second, the reliance on group norms and the associated effects of conformity bias induces a suppression of own ethical judgments. In other words, if one individual starts to misbehave, for instance by cheating, others follow suit (Gino et al., 2009). A similar problem occurs with authorities (Milgram, 1963). Humans have an internal tendency for being obedient to authorities. This willingness to please authorities can have positive consequences when executives act ethically themselves. If this is not the case, the opposite becomes true. For AI ethics, this means that social norms that tacitly emerge from AI practitioner’s behavioral routines as well as managerial decisions can both bolster ethical as well as unethical working cultures. In the case of the latter, the decisive factor is the way individuals respond to inner normative conflicts with their surroundings. Do they act in conformity and obedience even if it means to violate basic AI virtues? Or do they stick to their dispositions and deviate from detrimental social norms or orders? Fortitude, one of the two second-order virtues, can ensure the appropriate mental strength to stick to the right intentions and behavior, be it in cases where everyone disobeys a certain law but oneself does not want to join in, where managerial orders instruct to bring a risky product to the market as fast as possible but oneself insists on piloting it before release or where under extreme time pressure one insists on devoting time to understand and analyze training data sets.5 Ethics Training—AI Virtues Come into BeingIn traditional virtue ethics concepts, virtues emerge from habitual, repeated and gradually refined practice of right and prudent actions (Aristotle et al., 2012). At first, specific virtues are encouraged and practiced by performing acts that are inspired by “noble” human role-models and that resemble other patterns, narratives or social models of the virtue in question. Later, virtues are refined by taking the particularity of given situations into account. Regarding AI virtues, the proceeding is not much different (Bezuidenhout & Ratti, 2021). However, cultivating basic and second-order AI virtues means achieving virtuous practice embedded in a specific organizational and cultural context. A virtuous practice requires some sort of moral self-cultivation that encompasses the acquirement of motivations or the will to take action, knowledge on ethical issues, skills to identify them and moral reasoning to make the right moral decisions (Johnson, 2017). One could reckon that especially aforementioned skills or motivations are either innate or the result of childhood education. But ethical dispositions can be changed by education in all stages of life, for instance by powerful experiences, virtuous leaders or a certain work atmosphere in organizations. To put it in a nutshell, virtues can be trained and taught in order to foster ethical decision making and to overcome bounded ethicality. Most importantly, if ethics training imparts only explicit knowledge (or ethical principles), this will very likely have no effect on behavior. Ethics training must also impart tacit knowledge, meaning skills of social perception and emotion that cause individuals to automatically feel and want the right thing in a given situation (Haidt, 2006, p. 160).The simplest form of ethics programs comprise ethics training sessions combined with incentive schemes for members of a given organization that reward the abidance of ethical principles and punish their violation. These ethics programs have numerous disadvantages. First, individuals that are part of them are likely to only seek to perform well on behavior covered by exactly these programs. Areas that are not covered are neglected. That way, ethics programs can even increase unethical behavior by actually well-intended sanctioning systems (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). For instance, in case a fine is put on a specific unethical behavior, individuals who benefit from this behavior might simply weigh the advantage of the unethical behavior against the disadvantage of the fine. If the former outweighs the latter, the unethical behavior might even increase if a sanctioning system is in place. Ethical decisions would simply be reframed as monetary decisions. In addition to that, individuals can become inclined to trick incentive schemes and reward systems. Moreover, those programs solely focus on extrinsic motivators and do not change intrinsic dispositions and moral attitudes. All in all, ethics programs that comprise simple reward and sanctioning systems—as well as corresponding surveillance and monitoring mechanisms—are very likely to fail.A further risk of ethics programs or ethics training are reactance phenomena. Reactance occurs when individuals protest against constraints of their personal freedoms. As soon as ethical principles restrict the freedom of AI practitioners doing their work, they might react to this restriction by trying to reclaim that very freedom by all means (Dillard & Shen, 2005; Dowd et al., 1991; Hong, 1992). People want to escape restrictions, thus the moment when such restrictions are put in place—no matter whether they are justified from an ethical perspective or not—people might start striving to break free from them. Ultimately, “forcing” ethics programs on members of an organization is not a good idea. Ethics programs should not be decoupled from the inner mechanisms and routines of an organization. Hence, in order to avoid reactance and to fit ethics programs into actual structures and routines of an organization, it makes sense to carefully craft specific, unique compliance measures that take particular decision processes of AI practitioners and managers into account. In addition to that, ethics programs can be implemented in organizations with delay. This has the effect of a “future lock-in” (Rogers & Bazerman, 2008), meaning that policies achieve more support, since the time delay allows for an elimination of the immediate costs of implementation, for individuals to prepare for the respective measures and for a recognition of their advantages.Considering all of that, what measures can actually support AI practitioners and AI companies’ managers to strengthen AI virtues? Here, again, insights from moral psychology as well as behavioral ethics research can be used (Hines et al., 1987; Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002; Treviño et al., 2006, 2014) to catalogue measures that bolster ethical decision making as well as virtue acquisition (see Tables 3 and 4). The measures can be vaguely divided into those that tend to affect single individuals and those that bring about or relate to structural changes in organizations. The following Table 3 lists measures that relate to AI professionals on an individual level.

Social Networking and EthicsFirst published Fri Aug 3, 2012; substantive revision Mon Aug 30, 2021 In the 21st century, new media technologies for social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube began to transform the social, political and informational practices of individuals and institutions across the globe, inviting philosophical responses from the community of applied ethicists and philosophers of technology. While scholarly responses to social media continue to be challenged by the rapidly evolving nature of these technologies, the urgent need for attention to the social networking phenomenon is underscored by the fact that it has profoundly reshaped how many human beings initiate and/or maintain virtually every type of ethically significant social bond or role: friend-to-friend, parent-to-child, co-worker-to co-worker, employer-to-employee, teacher-to-student, neighbor-to-neighbor, seller-to-buyer, doctor-to-patient, and voter-to-voter, to offer just a partial list. Nor are the ethical implications of these technologies strictly interpersonal, as it has become evident that social networking services (hereafter referred to as SNS) and other new digital media have profound implications for democracy, public institutions and the rule of law. The complex web of interactions between SNS developers and users, and their online and offline communities, corporations and governments—along with the diverse and sometimes conflicting motives and interests of these various stakeholders—will continue to require rigorous ethical analysis for decades to come. Section 1 of the entry outlines the history and working definition of social networking services. Section 2 identifies the early philosophical foundations of reflection on the ethics of online social networks, leading up to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards (supporting user interactions) and full-fledged SNS. Section 3 reviews the primary ethical topic areas around which philosophical reflections on SNS have, to date, converged: privacy; identity and community; friendship, virtue and the good life; democracy, free speech, misinformation/disinformation and the public sphere; and cybercrime. Finally, Section 4 reviews some of the metaethical issues potentially impacted by the emergence of SNS. 1. History and Definitions of Social Networking Services 1.1 Online Social Networks and the Emergence of ‘Web 2.0’ 1.2 Early Scholarly Engagement with Social Networking Services 2. Early Philosophical Concerns about Online Social Networks 2.1 Borgmann’s Critique of Social Hyperreality 2.2 Hubert Dreyfus on Internet Sociality: Anonymity versus Commitment 2.3 Contemporary Reassessment of Early Phenomenological Critiques of SNS 2.3.1 Borgmann, Dreyfus and the ‘Cancel Culture’ Debates 2.3.2 The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality 3. Contemporary Ethical Concerns about Social Networking Services 3.1 Social Networking Services and Privacy 3.2 The Ethics of Identity and Community on Social Networking Services 3.3 Friendship, Virtue and the Good Life on Social Networking Services 3.4 Democracy, Freedom and Social Networking Services in the Public Sphere 3.5 Social Networking Services and Cybercrime 4. Social Networking Services and Metaethical Issues Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. History and Definitions of Social Networking Services ‘Social networking’ is an inherently ambiguous term requiring some clarification. Human beings have been socially ‘networked’ in one manner or another for as long as we have been on the planet, and we have historically availed ourselves of many successive techniques and instruments for facilitating and maintaining such networks. These include structured social affiliations and institutions such as private and public clubs, lodges and churches as well as communications technologies such as postal and courier systems, telegraphs and telephones. When philosophers speak today, however, of ‘Social Networking and Ethics’, they usually refer more narrowly to the ethical impact of an evolving and loosely defined group of information technologies, most based on or inspired by the ‘Web 2.0’ software standards that emerged in the first decade of the 21st century. While the most widely used social networking services are free, they operate on large platforms that offer a range of related products and services that underpin their business models, from targeted advertising and data licensing to cloud storage and enterprise software. Ethical impacts of social networking services are loosely clustered into three categories – direct impacts of social networking activity itself, indirect impacts associated with the underlying business models that are enabled by such activity, and structural implications of SNS as novel sociopolitical and cultural forces. 1.1 Online Social Networks and the Emergence of ‘Web 2.0’ Prior to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards, the computer had already served for decades as a medium for various forms of social networking, beginning in the 1970s with social uses of the U.S. military’s ARPANET and evolving to facilitate thousands of Internet newsgroups and electronic mailing lists, BBS (bulletin board systems), MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and chat rooms dedicated to an eclectic range of topics and social identities (Barnes 2001; Turkle 1995). These early computer social networks were systems that grew up organically, typically as ways of exploiting commercial, academic or other institutional software for more broadly social purposes. In contrast, Web 2.0 technologies evolved specifically to facilitate user-generated, collaborative and shared Internet content, and while the initial aims of Web 2.0 software developers were still largely commercial and institutional, the new standards were designed explicitly to harness the already-evident potential of the Internet for social networking. Most notably, Web 2.0 social interfaces redefined the social topography of the Internet by enabling users to build increasingly seamless connections between their online social presence and their existing social networks offline—a trend that shifted the Internet away from its earlier function as a haven for largely anonymous or pseudonymous identities forming sui generis social networks (Ess 2011). Starting in the first decade of the 21st century, among the first websites to employ the new standards explicitly for general social networking purposes were Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Habbo and Facebook. Subsequent trends in online social networking include the rise of sites dedicated to media and news sharing (YouTube, Reddit, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, TikTok), microblogging (Tumblr, Twitter, Weibo), location-based networking (Foursquare, Loopt, Yelp, YikYak), messaging and VoIP (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat), social gaming (Steam, Twitch) and interest-sharing (Pinterest). 1.2 Early Scholarly Engagement with Social Networking Services Study of the ethical implications of SNS was initially seen as a subpart of Computer and Information Ethics (Bynum 2018). While Computer and Information Ethics certainly accommodates an interdisciplinary approach, its direction and problems were initially largely defined by philosophically-trained scholars such as James Moor (1985) and Deborah G. Johnson (1985). Yet this has not been the early pattern for the ethics of social networking. Partly due to the coincidence of the social networking phenomenon with the emerging interdisciplinary social science field of ‘Internet Studies’ (Consalvo and Ess, 2011), the ethical implications of social networking technologies were initially targeted for inquiry by a loose coalition of sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, law and media scholars and political scientists (see, for example, Giles 2006; Boyd 2007; Ellison et al. 2007; Ito 2009). Consequently, philosophers who have turned their attention to social networking and ethics have had to decide whether to pursue their inquiries independently, drawing primarily from traditional philosophical resources in applied computer ethics and the philosophy of technology, or to develop their views in consultation with the growing body of empirical data and conclusions already being generated by other disciplines. While this entry will primarily confine itself to reviewing existing philosophical research on social networking ethics, links between those researches and studies in other disciplinary contexts remain vital. Indeed, recent academic and popular debates about the harms and benefits of large social media platforms have been driven far more visibly by scholars in sociology (Benjamin 2019), information studies (Roberts 2019), psychology (Zuboff 2019) and other social sciences than by philosophers, who remain comparatively disengaged. In turn, rather than engage with philosophical ethics, social science researchers in this field typically anchor normative dimensions of their analyses in broader political frameworks of justice and human rights, or psychological accounts of wellbeing. This has led to a growing debate about whether philosophical ‘ethics’ remains the right lens through which to subject social networking services or other emerging technologies to normative critique (Green 2021, Other Internet Resources). This debate is driven by several concerns. First is the growing professionalization of applied ethics (Stark and Hoffmann 2019) and its perceived detachment from social critique. A second concern is the trend of insincere corporate appropriation of the language of ethics for marketing, crisis management and public relations purposes, known as ‘ethicswashing’ (Bietti 2020). Finally, there is the question of whether philosophical theories of ethics, which have traditionally focused on individual actions, are sufficiently responsive to the structural conditions of social injustice that drive many SNS-associated harms. 2. Early Philosophical Concerns about Online Social Networks Among the first philosophers to take an interest in the ethical significance of social uses of the Internet were phenomenological philosophers of technology Albert Borgmann and Hubert Dreyfus. These thinkers were heavily influenced by Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) view of technology as a monolithic force with a distinctive vector of influence, one that tends to constrain or impoverish the human experience of reality in specific ways. While Borgmann and Dreyfus were primarily responding to the immediate precursors of Web 2.0 social networks (e.g., chat rooms, newsgroups, online gaming and email), their conclusions, which aim at online sociality broadly construed, are directly relevant to SNS. 2.1 Borgmann’s Critique of Social Hyperreality Borgmann’s early critique (1984) of modern technology addressed what he called the device paradigm, a technologically-driven tendency to conform our interactions with the world to a model of easy consumption. By 1992’s Crossing the Postmodern Divide, however, Borgmann had become more narrowly focused on the ethical and social impact of information technologies, employing the concept of hyperreality to critique (among other aspects of information technology) the way in which online social networks may subvert or displace organic social realities by allowing people to “offer one another stylized versions of themselves for amorous or convivial entertainment” (1992, 92) rather than allowing the fullness and complexity of their real identities to be engaged. While Borgmann admits that in itself a social hyperreality seems “morally inert” (1992, 94), he insists that the ethical danger of hyperrealities lies in their tendency to leave us “resentful and defeated” when we are forced to return from their “insubstantial and disconnected glamour” to the organic reality which “with all its poverty inescapably asserts its claims on us” by providing “the tasks and blessings that call forth patience and vigor in people.” (1992, 96) There might be an inherent ambiguity in Borgmann’s analysis, however. On the one hand he tells us that it is the competition with our organic and embodied social presence that makes online social environments designed for convenience, pleasure and ease ethically problematic, since the latter will inevitably be judged more satisfying than the ‘real’ social environment. But he goes on to claim that online social environments are themselves ethically deficient: Those who become present via a communication link have a diminished presence, since we can always make them vanish if their presence becomes burdensome. Moreover, we can protect ourselves from unwelcome persons altogether by using screening devices….The extended network of hyperintelligence also disconnects us from the people we would meet incidentally at concerts, plays and political gatherings. As it is, we are always and already linked to the music and entertainment we desire and to sources of political information. This immobile attachment to the web of communication works a twofold deprivation in our lives. It cuts us off from the pleasure of seeing people in the round and from the instruction of being seen and judged by them. It robs us of the social resonance that invigorates our concentration and acumen when we listen to music or watch a play.…Again it seems that by having our hyperintelligent eyes and ears everywhere, we can attain world citizenship of unequaled scope and subtlety. But the world that is hyperintelligently spread out before us has lost its force and resistance. (1992, 105–6) Critics of Borgmann saw him as adopting Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) substantivist, monolithic model of technology as a singular, deterministic force in human affairs (Feenberg 1999; Verbeek 2005). This model, known as technological determinism, represents technology as an independent driver of social and cultural change, shaping human institutions, practices and values in a manner largely beyond our control. Whether or not this is ultimately Borgmann’s view (or Heidegger’s), his critics saw it in remarks of the following sort: “[Social hyperreality] has already begun to transform the social fabric…At length it will lead to a disconnected, disembodied, and disoriented sort of life…It is obviously growing and thickening, suffocating reality and rendering humanity less mindful and intelligent.” (Borgmann 1992, 108–9) Critics asserted that Borgmann’s analysis suffered from his lack of attention to the substantive differences between particular social networking technologies and their varied contexts of use, as well as the different motivations and patterns of activity displayed by individual users in those contexts. For example, Borgmann neglected the fact that physical reality does not always enable or facilitate connection, nor does it do so equally for all persons. For example, those who live in remote rural areas, neurodivergent persons, disabled persons and members of socially marginalized groups are often not well served by the affordances of physical social spaces. As a consequence, Andrew Feenberg (1999) claims that Borgmann overlooked how online social networks can supply sites of democratic resistance for those who are physically or politically disempowered by many ‘real-world’ networks. 2.2 Hubert Dreyfus on Internet Sociality: Anonymity versus Commitment Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (2001) shared Borgmann’s early critical suspicion of the ethical possibilities of the Internet; like Borgmann, Dreyfus’s reflections on the ethical dimension of online sociality conveyed a view of such networks as an impoverished substitute for the real thing. Like Borgmann, Dreyfus’s suspicion was informed by his phenomenological roots, which led him to focus his critical attention on the Internet’s suspension of fully embodied presence. Yet rather than draw upon Heidegger’s metaphysical framework, Dreyfus (2004) reached back to Kierkegaard in forming his criticisms of life online. Dreyfus asserts that what online engagements intrinsically lack is exposure to risk, and without risk, Dreyfus tells us, there can be no true meaning or commitment found in the electronic domain. Instead, we are drawn to online social environments precisely because they allow us to play with notions of identity, commitment and meaning, without risking the irrevocable consequences that ground real identities and relationships. As Dreyfus put it: …the Net frees people to develop new and exciting selves. The person living in the aesthetic sphere of existence would surely agree, but according to Kierkegaard, “As a result of knowing and being everything possible, one is in contradiction with oneself” (Present Age, 68). When he is speaking from the point of view of the next higher sphere of existence, Kierkegaard tells us that the self requires not “variableness and brilliancy,” but “firmness, balance, and steadiness” (Dreyfus 2004, 75) While Dreyfus acknowledges that unconditional commitment and acceptance of risk are not excluded in principle by online sociality, he insists that “anyone using the Net who was led to risk his or her real identity in the real world would have to act against the grain of what attracted him or her to the Net in the first place” (2004, 78). 2.3 Contemporary Reassessment of Early Phenomenological Critiques of SNS While Borgmann and Dreyfus’s views continue to inform the philosophical conversation about social networking and ethics, both of these early philosophical engagements with the phenomenon manifest certain predictive failures (as is perhaps unavoidable when reflecting on new and rapidly evolving technological systems). Dreyfus did not foresee the way in which popular SNS such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter would shift away from the earlier online norms of anonymity and identity play, instead giving real-world identities an online presence which in some ways is less ephemeral than bodily presence (as those who have struggled to erase online traces of past tweets or to delete Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones can attest). Likewise, Borgmann’s critiques of “immobile attachment” to the online datastream did not anticipate the rise of mobile social networking applications which not only encourage us to physically seek out and join our friends at those same concerts, plays and political events that he envisioned us passively digesting from an electronic feed, but also enable spontaneous physical gatherings in ways never before possible. That said, such short-term predictive failures may not, in the long view, turn out to be fatal to their legacies. After all, some of the most enthusiastic champions of the Internet’s liberating social possibilities to be challenged by Dreyfus (2004, 75), such as Sherry Turkle, have since articulated far more pessimistic views of the trajectory of new social technologies. Turkle’s concerns about social media in particular (2011, 2015), namely that they foster a peculiar alienation in connectedness that leaves us feeling “alone together,” resonate well with Borgmann’s earlier warnings about electronic networks. 2.3.1 Borgmann, Dreyfus and the ‘Cancel Culture’ Debates The SNS phenomenon continues to be ambiguous with respect to confirming Borgmann and Dreyfus’ early predictions. One of their most unfounded worries was that online social media would lead to a culture in which personal beliefs and actions are stripped of enduring consequence, cut adrift from real-world identities as persons accountable to one another. Today, no regular user of Twitter or Reddit is cut off from “the instruction of being seen and judged” (Borgmann 1992). And contra Dreyfus, it is primarily through the power of social media that people’s identities in the real world are now exposed to greater risk than before – from doxing to loss of employment to being physically endangered by ‘swatting.’ If anything, contemporary debates about social media’s alleged propagation of a stifling ‘cancel culture,’ which bend back upon the philosophical community itself (Weinberg 2020, Other Internet Resources), reflect growing anxieties among many that social networking environments primarily lack affordances for forgiveness and mercy, not judgment and personal accountability. Yet others see the emergent phenomenon of online collective judgment as performing a vital function of moral and political levelling, one in which social media enable the natural ethical consequences of an agent’s speech and acts to at last be imposed upon the powerful, not merely the vulnerable and marginalized. 2.3.2. The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality One aspect of Borgmann’s (1992) account has recently rebounded in plausibility; namely, his prediction of a dire decline in civic virtues among those fully submerged in the distorted political reality created by the disembodied and disorienting ‘hyperintelligence’ of online social media. In the wake of the 2016 UK and US voter manipulation by foreign armies of social media bots, sock puppets, and astroturf accounts, the world has seen a rapid global expansion and acceleration of political disinformation and conspiracy theories through online social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp. The profound harms of the ‘weaponization’ of social media disinformation go well beyond voter manipulation. In 2020, disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impeded public health authorities by clouding the public’s perception of the severity and transmissibility of the virus as well as the utility of prophylactics such as mask-wearing. Meanwhile, the increasing global influence of ever-mutating conspiracy theories borne on social media platforms by the anonymous group QAnon suggests that Borgmann’s warning of the dangers of our rising culture of ‘hyperreality,’ long derided as technophobic ‘moral panic,’ was dismissed far too hastily. While the notorious ‘Pizzagate’ episode of 2016 (Miller 2021) was the first visible link between QAnon conspiracies and real-world violence, the alarming uptake in 2020 of QAnon conspiracies by violent right-wing militias in the United States led Facebook and Twitter to abandon their prior tolerance of the movement and ban or limit access to hundreds of thousands of QAnon-associated accounts. Such moves came too late to stabilize the epistemic and political rift in a shared reality. By late 2020, QAnon had boosted a widely successful effort by supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump to create a (manifestly false) counter-narrative around the 2020 election purporting that he had actually won, leading to a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Borgmann’s warnings on ‘hyperreality’ seem less like moral panic and more like prescience when one considers the existence of a wide swath of American voters who remain convinced that Donald Trump remains legitimately in office, directing actions against his enemies. Such counter-narratives are not merely ‘underground’ belief systems; they compete directly with reality itself. On June 17, 2021, the mainstream national newspaper USA Today found it necessary to publish a piece titled “Fact Check: Hilary Clinton was not hanged at Guantanamo Bay” (Wagner 2021) in response to a video being widely shared on the social media platforms TikTok and Instagram, which describes in fine detail the (very much alive) Clinton’s last meal. Borgmann’s long-neglected work on social hyperreality thus merits reevaluation in light of the growing fractures and incoherencies that now splinter and twist our digitally mediated experience of what remains, underneath it all, a common world. The COVID-19 pandemic and increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change testify to humanity’s vital need to remain anchored in and intelligently responsive to a shared physical reality. Yet both the spread of social media-driven disinformation and the rise of online moral policing reveal an unresolved philosophical tension that Borgmann’s own work did not explicitly confront. This is the Concept of Toleration and its Paradoxes, which continue to bedevil modern political thought. Social networking services have transformed this festering concern of political philosophy into something verging on an existential crisis. When malice and madness can be amplified on a global scale at lightspeed, in a manner affordable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone or wifi connection, what is too injurious and too irremediable, to be said, or shared (Marin 2021)? Social media continue to drive a range of new philosophical investigations in the domains of social epistemology and ethics, including ‘vice epistemology’ (Kidd, Battaly, Cassam 2020). Such investigations raise urgent questions about the relationship between online disinformation/misinformation, individual moral and epistemic responsibility, and the responsibility of social media platforms themselves. On this point, Regina Rini (2017) has argued that the problem of online disinformation/misinformation is not properly conceived in terms of individual epistemic vice, but rather must be seen as a “tragedy of the epistemic commons” that will require institutional and structural solutions. 3. Contemporary Ethical Concerns about Social Networking Services While early SNS scholarship in the social and natural sciences tended to focus on SNS impact on users’ psychosocial markers of happiness, well-being, psychosocial adjustment, social capital, or feelings of life satisfaction, philosophical concerns about social networking and ethics have generally centered on topics less amenable to empirical measurement (e.g., privacy, identity, friendship, the good life and democratic freedom). More so than ‘social capital’ or feelings of ‘life satisfaction,’ these topics are closely tied to traditional concerns of ethical theory (e.g., virtues, rights, duties, motivations and consequences). These topics are also tightly linked to the novel features and distinctive functionalities of SNS, more so than some other issues of interest in computer and information ethics that relate to more general Internet functionalities (for example, issues of copyright and intellectual property). Despite the methodological challenges of applying philosophical theory to rapidly shifting empirical patterns of SNS influence, philosophical explorations of the ethics of SNS have continued in recent years to move away from Borgmann and Dreyfus’ transcendental-existential concerns about the Internet, to the empirically-driven space of applied technology ethics. Research in this space explores three interlinked and loosely overlapping kinds of ethical phenomena: direct ethical impacts of social networking activity itself (just or unjust, harmful or beneficial) on participants as well as third parties and institutions; indirect ethical impacts on society of social networking activity, caused by the aggregate behavior of users, platform providers and/or their agents in complex interactions between these and other social actors and forces; structural impacts of SNS on the ethical shape of society, especially those driven by the dominant surveillant and extractivist value orientations that sustain social networking platforms and culture. Most research in the field, however, remains topic- and domain-driven—exploring a given potential harm or domain-specific ethical dilemma that arises from direct, indirect, or structural effects of SNS, or more often, in combination. Sections 3.1–3.5 outline the most widely discussed of contemporary SNS’ ethical challenges. 3.1 Social Networking Services and Privacy Fundamental practices of concern for direct ethical impacts on privacy include: the transfer of users’ data to third parties for intrusive purposes, especially marketing, data mining, and surveillance; the use of SNS data to train facial-recognition systems or other algorithmic tools that identify, track and profile people without their free consent; the ability of third-party applications to collect and publish user data without their permission or awareness; the dominant reliance by SNS on opaque or inadequate privacy settings; the use of ‘cookies’ to track online user activities after they have left a SNS; the abuse of social networking tools or data for stalking or harassment; widespread scraping of social media data by academic researchers for a variety of unconsented purposes; undisclosed sharing of user information or patterns of activity with government entities; and, last but not least, the tendency of SNS to foster imprudent, ill-informed or unethical information sharing practices by users, either with respect to their own personal data or data related to other persons and entities. Facebook has been a particular lightning-rod for criticism of its privacy practices (Spinello 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018), but it is just the most visible member of a far broader and more complex network of SNS actors with access to unprecedented quantities of sensitive personal data. Indirectly, the incentives of social media environments create particular problems with respect to privacy norms. For example, since it is the ability to access information freely shared by others that makes SNS uniquely attractive and useful, and since platforms are generally designed to reward disclosure, it turns out that contrary to traditional views of information privacy, giving users greater control over their information-sharing practices can actually lead to decreased privacy for themselves and others in their network. Indeed, advertisers, insurance companies and employers are increasingly less interested in knowing the private facts of individual users’ lives, and more interested in using their data to train algorithms that can predict the behavior of people very much like that user. Thus the real privacy risk of our social media practices is often not to ourselves but to other people; if a person is comfortable with the personal risk of their data sharing habits, it does not follow that these habits are ethically benign. Moreover, users are still caught in the tension between their personal motivations for using SNS and the profit-driven motivations of the corporations that possess their data (Baym 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018). Jared Lanier frames the point cynically when he states that: “The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable” (Lanier 2010). Scholars also note the way in which SNS architectures are often structurally insensitive to the granularity of human sociality (Hull, Lipford & Latulipe 2011). That is, such architectures tend to treat human relations as if they are all of a kind, ignoring the profound differences among types of social relation (familial, professional, collegial, commercial, civic, etc.). As a consequence, the privacy controls of such architectures often flatten the variability of privacy norms within different but overlapping social spheres. Among philosophical accounts of privacy, Nissenbaum’s (2010) view of contextual integrity has seemed to many to be particularly well suited to explaining the diversity and complexity of privacy expectations generated by new social media (see for example Grodzinsky and Tavani 2010; Capurro 2011). Contextual integrity demands that our information practices respect context-sensitive privacy norms, where ‘context’ refers not to the overly coarse distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public,’ but to a far richer array of social settings characterized by distinctive roles, norms and values. For example, the same piece of information made ‘public’ in the context of a status update to family and friends on Facebook may nevertheless be considered by the same discloser to be ‘private’ in other contexts; that is, she may not expect that same information to be provided to strangers Googling her name, or to bank employees examining her credit history. On the design side, such complexity means that attempts to produce more ‘user-friendly’ privacy controls face an uphill challenge—they must balance the need for simplicity and ease of use with the need to better represent the rich and complex structures of our social universes. A key design question, then, is how SNS privacy interfaces can be made more accessible and more socially intuitive for users. Hull et al. (2011) also take note of the apparent plasticity of user attitudes about privacy in SNS contexts, as evidenced by the pattern of widespread outrage over changed or newly disclosed privacy practices of SNS providers being followed by a period of accommodation to and acceptance of the new practices (Boyd and Hargittai 2010). In their 2018 book Re-Engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger argue that SNS contribute to a slippery slope of “techno-social engineering creep” that produces a gradual normalization of increasingly pervasive and intrusive digital surveillance. A related concern is the “privacy paradox,” in which users’ voluntary sharing of data online belies their own stated values concerning privacy. However, recent data from Apple’s introduction in iOS 14.5 of opt-in for ad tracking, which the vast majority of iOS users have declined to allow, suggests that most people continue to value and act to protect their privacy, when given a straightforward choice that does not inhibit their access to services (Axon 2021). Working from the late writings of Foucault, Hull (2015) has explored the way in which the ‘self-management’ model of online privacy protection embodied in standard ‘notice and consent’ practices only reinforces a narrow neoliberal conception of privacy, and of ourselves, as commodities for sale and exchange. The debate continues about whether privacy violations can be usefully addressed by users making wiser privacy-preserving choices (Véliz 2021), or whether the responsibilization of individuals only obscures the urgent need for radical structural reforms of SNS business models (Vaidhyanathan 2018). In an early study of online communities, Bakardjieva and Feenberg (2000) suggested that the rise of communities predicated on the open exchange of information may in fact require us to relocate our focus in information ethics from privacy concerns to concerns about alienation; that is, the exploitation of information for purposes not intended by the relevant community. Such considerations give rise to the possibility of users deploying “guerrilla tactics” of misinformation, for example, by providing SNS hosts with false names, addresses, birthdates, hometowns or employment information. Such tactics would aim to subvert the emergence of a new “digital totalitarianism” that uses the power of information rather than physical force as a political control (Capurro 2011). Finally, privacy issues with SNS highlight a broader philosophical and structural problem involving the intercultural dimensions of information ethics and the challenges for ethical pluralism in global digital spaces (Ess 2021). Pak Hang Wong (2013) has argued for the need for privacy norms to be contextualized in ways that do not impose a culturally hegemonic Western understanding of why privacy matters; for example, in the Confucian context, it is familial privacy rather than individual privacy that is of greatest moral concern. Rafael Capurro (2005) has also noted the way in which narrowly Western conceptions of privacy occlude other legitimate ethical concerns regarding new media practices. For example, he notes that in addition to Western worries about protecting the private domain from public exposure, we must also take care to protect the public sphere from the excessive intrusion of the private. Though he illustrates the point with a comment about intrusive uses of cell phones in public spaces (2005, 47), the rise of mobile social networking has amplified this concern by several factors. When one must compete with Facebook or Twitter for the attention of not only one’s dinner companions and family members, but also one’s fellow drivers, pedestrians, students, moviegoers, patients and audience members, the integrity of the public sphere comes to look as fragile as that of the private. 3.2 The Ethics of Identity and Community on Social Networking Services Social networking technologies open up a new type of ethical space in which personal identities and communities, both ‘real’ and virtual, are constructed, presented, negotiated, managed and performed. Accordingly, philosophers have analyzed SNS both in terms of their uses as Foucaultian “technologies of the self” (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2012) that facilitate the construction and performance of personal identity, and in terms of the distinctive kinds of communal norms and moral practices generated by SNS (Parsell 2008). The ethical and metaphysical issues generated by the formation of virtual identities and communities have attracted much philosophical interest (see Introna 2011 and Rodogno 2012). Yet as noted by Patrick Stokes (2012), unlike earlier forms of online community in which anonymity and the construction of alter-egos were typical, SNS such as Facebook increasingly anchor member identities and connections to real, embodied selves and offline ‘real-world’ networks. Yet SNS still enable users to directly manage their self-presentation and their social networks in ways that offline social spaces at home, school or work often do not permit. The result, then, is an identity grounded in the person’s material reality and embodiment but more explicitly “reflective and aspirational” (Stokes 2012, 365) in its presentation, a phenomenon encapsulated in social media platforms such as Instagram. This raises a number of ethical questions: first, from what source of normative guidance or value does the aspirational content of an SNS user’s identity primarily derive? Do identity performances on SNS generally represent the same aspirations and reflect the same value profiles as users’ offline identity performances? Do they display any notable differences from the aspirational identities of non-SNS users? Are the values and aspirations made explicit in SNS contexts more or less heteronomous in origin than those expressed in non-SNS contexts? Do the more explicitly aspirational identity performances on SNS encourage users to take steps to actually embody those aspirations offline, or do they tend to weaken the motivation to do so? A further SNS phenomenon of relevance here is the persistence and communal memorialization of Facebook profiles after the user’s death; not only does this reinvigorate a number of classical ethical questions about our ethical duties to honor and remember the dead, it also renews questions about whether our moral identities can persist after our embodied identities expire, and whether the dead have ongoing interests in their social presence or reputation (Stokes 2012). Mitch Parsell (2008) raised early concerns about the unique temptations of ‘narrowcast’ social networking communities that are “composed of those just like yourself, whatever your opinion, personality or prejudices.” (41) Such worries about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have only become more acute as political polarization continues to dominate online culture. Among the structural affordances of SNS is a tendency to constrict our identities to a closed set of communal norms that perpetuate increased polarization, prejudice and insularity. Parsells admitted that in theory the many-to-many or one-to-many relations enabled by SNS allow for exposure to a greater variety of opinions and attitudes, but in practice they often have the opposite effect. Building from de Laat (2006), who suggests that members of virtual communities embrace a distinctly hyperactive style of communication to compensate for diminished informational cues, Parsell claimed that in the absence of the full range of personal identifiers evident through face-to-face contact, SNS may also indirectly promote the deindividuation of personal identity by exaggerating and reinforcing the significance of singular shared traits (liberal, conservative, gay, Catholic, etc.) that lead us to see ourselves and our SNS contacts more as representatives of a group than as unique persons (2008, 46). Parsell also noted the existence of inherently pernicious identities and communities that may be enabled or enhanced by SNS tools—he cites the example of apotemnophiliacs, or would-be amputees, who use such resources to create mutually supportive networks in which their self-destructive desires receive validation (2008, 48). Related concerns have been raised about “Pro-ANA” sites that provide mutually supportive networks for anorexics seeking information and tools to allow them to perpetuate disordered and self-harming identities (Giles 2006; Manders-Huits 2010). Restraint of such affordances necessarily comes at some cost to user autonomy—a value that in other circumstances is critical to respecting the ethical demands of identity, as noted by Noemi Manders-Huits (2010). Manders-Huits explores the tension between the way in which SNS treat users as profiled and forensically reidentifiable “objects of (algorithmic) computation” (2010, 52) while at the same time offering those users an attractive space for ongoing identity construction. She argues that SNS developers have a duty to protect and promote the interests of their users in autonomously constructing and managing their own moral and practical identities. This autonomy exists in some tension with widespread but still crude practices of automated SNS content moderation that seek on the one hand, to preserve a ’safe’ space for expression, yet may disproportionately suppress marginalized identities (Gillespie 2020). The ethical concern about SNS constraints on user autonomy is also voiced by Bakardjieva and Gaden (2012) who note that whether they wish their identities to be formed and used in this manner or not, the online selves of SNS users are constituted by the categories established by SNS developers, and ranked and evaluated according to the currency which primarily drives the narrow “moral economy” of SNS communities: popularity (2012, 410). They note, however, that users are not rendered wholly powerless by this schema; users retain, and many exercise, “the liberty to make informed choices and negotiate the terms of their self-constitution and interaction with others,” (2012, 411) whether by employing means to resist the “commercial imperatives” of SNS sites (ibid.) or by deliberately restricting the scope and extent of their personal SNS practices. SNS can also enable authenticity in important ways. While a ‘Timeline’ feature that displays my entire online personal history for all my friends to see can prompt me to ‘edit’ my past, it can also prompt me to face up to and assimilate into my self-conception thoughts and actions that might otherwise be conveniently forgotten. The messy collision of my family, friends and coworkers on Facebook can be managed with various tools offered by the site, allowing me to direct posts only to specific sub-networks that I define. But the far simpler and less time-consuming strategy is to come to terms with the collision—allowing each network member to get a glimpse of who I am to others, while at the same time asking myself whether these expanded presentations project a person that is more multidimensional and interesting, or one that is manifestly insincere. As Tamara Wandel and Anthony Beavers put it: I am thus no longer radically free to engage in creating a completely fictive self, I must become someone real, not who I really am pregiven from the start, but who I am allowed to be and what I am able to negotiate in the careful dynamic between who I want to be and who my friends from these multiple constituencies perceive me, allow me, and need me to be. (2011, 93) Even so, Dean Cocking (2008) has argued that many online social environments, by amplifying active aspects of self-presentation under our direct control, compromise the important function of passive modes of embodied self-presentation beyond our conscious control, such as body language, facial expression, and spontaneous displays of emotion (130). He regards these as important indicators of character that play a critical role in how others see us, and by extension, how we come to understand ourselves through others’ perceptions and reactions. If Cocking’s view is correct, then SNS that privilege text-based and asynchronous communications may hamper our ability to cultivate and express authentic identities. The subsequent rise in popularity of video and livestream SNS services such as YouTube, TikTok, Stream and Twitch might therefore be seen as enabling of greater authenticity in self-presentation. Yet in reality, the algorithmic and profit incentives of these platforms have been seen to reward distorted patterns of expression: compulsive, ‘always performing’ norms that are reported to contribute to burnout and breakdown by content creators (Parkin 2018). Ethical preoccupations with the impact of SNS on our authentic self-constitution and representation may be assuming a false dichotomy between online and offline identities; the informational theory of personal identity offered by Luciano Floridi (2011) problematizes this distinction. Soraj Hongladarom (2011) employs such an informational metaphysic to deny that any clear boundary can be drawn between our offline selves and our selves as cultivated through SNS. Instead, our personal identities online and off are taken as externally constituted by our informational relations to other selves, events and objects. Likewise, Charles Ess makes a link between relational models of the self found in Aristotle, Confucius and many contemporary feminist thinkers and emerging notions of the networked individual as a “smeared-out self” (2010, 111) constituted by a shifting web of embodied and informational relations. Ess points out that by undermining the atomic and dualistic model of the self upon which Western liberal democracies are founded, this new conception of the self forces us to reassess traditional philosophical approaches to ethical concerns about privacy and autonomy—and may even promote the emergence of a much-needed “global information ethics” (2010, 112). Yet he worries that our ‘smeared-out selves’ may lose coherence as the relations that constitute us are increasingly multiplied and scattered among a vast and expanding web of networked channels. Can such selves retain the capacities of critical rationality required for the exercise of liberal democracy, or will our networked selves increasingly be characterized by political and intellectual passivity, hampered in self-governance by “shorter attention spans and less capacity to engage with critical argument” (2010, 114)? Ess suggests that we hope for, and work to enable the emergence of, ‘hybrid selves’ that cultivate the individual moral and practical virtues needed to flourish within our networked and embodied relations (2010, 116). 3.3 Friendship, Virtue and the Good Life on Social Networking Services SNS can facilitate many types of relational connections: LinkedIn encourages social relations organized around our professional lives, Twitter is useful for creating lines of communication between ordinary individuals and figures of public interest, MySpace was for a time a popular way for musicians to promote themselves and communicate with their fans, and Facebook, which began as a way to link university cohorts and now connects people across the globe, also hosts business profiles aimed at establishing links to existing and future customers. Yet the overarching relational concept in the SNS universe has been, and continues to be, the ‘friend,’ as underscored by the now-common use of this term as a verb to refer to acts of instigating or confirming relationships on SNS. This appropriation and expansion of the concept ‘friend’ by SNS has provoked a great deal of scholarly interest from philosophers and social scientists, more so than any other ethical concern except perhaps privacy. Early concerns about SNS friendship centered on the expectation that such sites would be used primarily to build ‘virtual’ friendships between physically separated individuals lacking a ‘real-world’ or ‘face-to-face’ connection. This perception was an understandable extrapolation from earlier patterns of Internet sociality, patterns that had prompted philosophical worries about whether online friendships could ever be ‘as good as the real thing’ or were doomed to be pale substitutes for embodied ‘face to face’ connections (Cocking and Matthews 2000). This view was robustly opposed by Adam Briggle (2008), who claimed that online friendships might enjoy certain unique advantages. For example, Briggle asserted that friendships formed online might be more candid than offline ones, thanks to the sense of security provided by physical distance (2008, 75). He also noted the way in which asynchronous written communications can promote more deliberate and thoughtful exchanges (2008, 77). These sorts of questions about how online friendships measure up to offline ones, along with questions about whether or to what extent online friendships encroach upon users’ commitments to embodied, ‘real-world’ relations with friends, family members and communities, defined the ethical problem-space of online friendship as SNS began to emerge. But it did not take long for empirical studies of actual SNS usage trends to force a profound rethinking of this problem-space. Within five years of Facebook’s launch, it was evident that a significant majority of SNS users were relying on these sites primarily to maintain and enhance relationships with those with whom they also had a strong offline connection—including close family members, high-school and college friends and co-workers (Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe 2007; Ito et al. 2009; Smith 2011). Nor are SNS used to facilitate purely online exchanges—many SNS users today rely on the sites’ functionalities to organize everything from cocktail parties to movie nights, outings to athletic or cultural events, family reunions and community meetings. Mobile SNS applications amplify this type of functionality further, by enabling friends to locate one another in their community in real-time, enabling spontaneous meetings at restaurants, bars and shops that would otherwise happen only by coincidence. Yet lingering ethical concerns remain about the way in which SNS can distract users from the needs of those in their immediate physical surroundings (consider the widely lamented trend of users obsessively checking their social media feeds during family dinners, business meetings, romantic dates and symphony performances). Such phenomena, which scholars like Sherry Turkle (2011, 2015) continue to worry are indicative of a growing cultural tolerance for being ‘alone together,’ bring a new complexity to earlier philosophical concerns about the emergence of a zero-sum game between offline relationships and their virtual SNS competitors. They have also prompted a shift of ethical focus away from the question of whether online relationships are “real” friendships (Cocking and Matthews 2000), to how well the real friendships we bring to SNS are being served there (Vallor 2012). The debate over the value and quality of online friendships continues (Sharp 2012; Froding and Peterson 2012; Elder 2014; Turp 2020; Kristjánsson 2021); in large part because the typical pattern of those friendships, like most social networking phenomena, continues to evolve. Such concerns intersect with broader philosophical questions about whether and how the classical ethical ideal of ‘the good life’ can be engaged in the 21st century. Pak-Hang Wong claims that this question requires us to broaden the standard approach to information ethics from a narrow focus on the “right/the just” (2010, 29) that defines ethical action negatively (e.g., in terms of violations of privacy, copyright, etc.) to a framework that conceives of a positive ethical trajectory for our technological choices; for example, the ethical opportunity to foster compassionate and caring communities, or to create an environmentally sustainable economic order. Edward Spence (2011) further suggests that to adequately address the significance of SNS and related information and communication technologies for the good life, we must also expand the scope of philosophical inquiry beyond its present concern with narrowly interpersonal ethics to the more universal ethical question of prudential wisdom. Do SNS and related technologies help us to cultivate the broader intellectual virtue of knowing what it is to live well, and how to best pursue it? Or do they tend to impede its development? This concern about prudential wisdom and the good life is part of a growing philosophical interest in using the resources of classical and contemporary virtue ethics to evaluate the impact of SNS and related technologies (Vallor 2016, 2010; Wong 2012; Ess 2008). This program of research promotes inquiry into the impact of SNS not merely on the cultivation of prudential virtue, but on the development of a host of other moral and communicative virtues, such as honesty, patience, justice, loyalty, benevolence and empathy. 3.4 Democracy, Freedom and Social Networking Services in the Public Sphere As is the case with privacy, identity, community and friendship on SNS, ethical debates about the impact of SNS on civil discourse, freedom and democracy in the public sphere must be seen as extensions of a broader discussion about the political implications of the Internet, one that predates Web 2.0 standards. Much of the literature on this subject focuses on the question of whether the Internet encourages or hampers the free exercise of deliberative public reason, in a manner informed by Jürgen Habermas’s (1992/1998) account of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy in the public sphere (Ess 1996 and 2005b; Dahlberg 2001; Bohman 2008). A related topic of concern is SNS fragmentation of the public sphere by encouraging the formation of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’: informational silos for like-minded individuals who deliberately shield themselves from exposure to alternative views. Early worries that such insularity would promote extremism and the reinforcement of ill-founded opinions, while also preventing citizens of a democracy from recognizing their shared interests and experiences (Sunstein 2008), have unfortunately proven to be well-founded (as noted in section 2.3.2). Early optimism that SNS would facilitate popular revolutions resulting in the overthrow of authoritarian regimes (Marturano 2011; Frick and Oberprantacher 2011) have likewise given way to the darker reality that SNS are perhaps even more easily used as tools to popularize authoritarian and totalitarian movements, or foster genocidal impulses, as in the use of Facebook to drive violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar (BBC 2018). When SNS in particular are considered in light of these questions, some distinctive considerations arise. First, sites like Facebook and Twitter (as opposed to narrower SNS utilities such as LinkedIn) facilitate the sharing of, and exposure to, an extremely diverse range of types of discourse. On any given day on Facebook a user may encounter in her NewsFeed a link to an article in a respected political magazine followed by a video of a cat in a silly costume, followed by a link to a new scientific study, followed by a lengthy status update someone has posted about their lunch, followed by a photo of a popular political figure overlaid with a clever and subversive caption. Vacation photos are mixed in with political rants, invitations to cultural events, birthday reminders and data-driven graphs created to undermine common political, moral or economic beliefs. Thus while a user has a tremendous amount of liberty to choose which forms of discourse to pay closer attention to, and tools with which to hide or prioritize the posts of certain members of her network, the sheer diversity of the private and public concerns of her fellows would seem to offer at least some measure of protection against the extreme insularity and fragmentation of discourse that is incompatible with the public sphere. Yet in practice, the function of hidden platform algorithms can defeat this diversity. Trained on user behavior to optimize for engagement and other metrics that advertisers and platform companies associate with their profit, these algorithms can ensure that I experience only a pale shadow of the true diversity of my social network, seeing at the top of my feed only those posts that I am most likely to find subjectively rewarding to engage with. If, for example, I support the Black Lives Matter movement, and tend to close the app in frustration and disappointment whenever I see BLM denigrated by someone I consider a friend, the platform algorithm can easily learn this association and optimize my experience for one that is more conducive to retaining my presence. It is important to note, however, that in this case the effect is an interaction between the algorithm and my own behavior. How much responsibility for echo chambers and resulting polarization or insularity falls upon users, and how much on the designers of algorithms that track and amplify our expressed preferences? Philosophers of technology often speak of the affordances or gradients of particular technologies in given contexts (Vallor 2010) insofar as they make certain patterns of use more attractive or convenient for users (while not rendering alternative patterns impossible). Thus while I can certainly seek out posts that will cause me discomfort or anxiety, the platform gradient will not be designed to facilitate such experiences. Yet it is not obvious if or when it should be designed to do so. As Alexis Elder notes (2020), civic discourse on social media can be furthered rather than inhibited by prudent use of tools enabling disconnection. Additionally, a platform affordance that makes a violent white supremacist feel accepted, valued, safe and respected in their social milieu (precisely for their expressed attitudes and beliefs in white supremacist violence) facilitates harm to others, in a way that a platform affordance that makes an autistic person or a transgender woman feel accepted, valued, safe and respected for who they are, does not. Fairness and equity in SNS platform design do not entail neutrality. Ethics explicitly demands non-neutrality between harm and nonharm, between justice and injustice. But ethics also requires epistemic anchoring in reality. Thus even if my own attitudes and beliefs harm no one, I may still have a normative epistemic duty to avoid the comfort of a filter bubble. Do SNS platforms have a duty to keep their algorithms from helping me into one? In truth, those whose identities are historically marginalized will rarely have the luxury of the filter bubble option; online and offline worlds consistently offer stark reminders of their marginalization. So how do SNS designers, users, and regulators mitigate the deleterious political and epistemic effects of filter bubble phenomena without making platforms more inhospitable to vulnerable groups than they already are? One must also ask whether SNS can skirt the dangers of a plebiscite model of democratic discourse, in which minority voices are dispersed and drowned out by the many. Certainly, compared to the ‘one-to-many’ channels of communication favored by traditional media, SNS facilitate a ‘many-to-many’ model of communication that appears to lower the barriers to participation in civic discourse for everyone, including the marginalized. However, SNS lack the institutional structures necessary to ensure that minoritized voices enjoy not only free, but substantively equal access to the deliberative function of the public sphere. We must also consider the quality of informational exchanges on SNS and the extent to which they promote a genuinely dialogical and deliberative public sphere marked by the exercise of critical rationality. SNS norms tend to privilege brevity and immediate impact over substance and depth in communication; Vallor (2012) suggests that this bodes poorly for the cultivation of those communicative virtues essential to a flourishing public sphere. This worry is only reinforced by empirical data suggesting that SNS perpetuate the ‘Spiral of Silence’ phenomenon that results in the passive suppression of divergent views on matters of important political or civic concern (Hampton et. al. 2014). In a related critique, Frick and Oberprantacher (2011) claim that the ability of SNS to facilitate public ‘sharing’ can obscure the deep ambiguity between sharing as “a promising, active participatory process” and “interpassive, disjointed acts of having trivia shared.” (2011, 22) There remains a notable gap online between the prevalence of democratic discourse and debate—which require only the open voicing of opinions and reasons, respectively—and the relative absence of democratic deliberation, which requires the joint exercise of collective intentions, cooperation and compromise as well as a shared sense of reality on which to act. The greatest moral challenges of our time—responding to the climate change crisis, developing sustainable patterns of economic and social life, managing global threats to public health—aren’t going to be solved by ideological warfare but by deliberative, coordinated exercise of public wisdom. Today’s social media platforms are great for cultivating the former; for the latter, not so much. Another vital issue for online democracy relates to the contentious debate emerging on social media platforms about the extent to which controversial or unpopular speech ought to be tolerated or punished by private actors, especially when the consequences manifest in traditional offline contexts and spaces such as the university. For example, the norms of academic freedom in the U.S. were greatly destabilized by the ‘Salaita Affair’ (in which a tenured job offer by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Steven Salaita was withdrawn on the basis of his tweets criticizing Israel) and several other cases in which academics were censured or otherwise punished by their institutions as a result of their controversial social media posts (Protevi 2018). Yet how should we treat a post by a professor that expresses a desire to sleep with their students, or that expresses their doubts about the intelligence of women, or the integrity of students of a particular nationality? It remains to be seen what equilibrium can be found between moral accountability and free expression in communities increasingly mediated by SNS communications. A related debate concerns the ethical and social value of the kind of social media acts of moral policing frequently derided as insincere or performative ‘virtue signaling.’ To what extent are social media platforms a viable stage for moral performances, and are such performances merely performative? Are they inherently ‘grandstanding’ abuses of moral discourse (Tosi and Warmke 2020), or can they in fact be positive forces for social progress and reform (Levy 2020, Westra 2021)? It also remains to be seen to what extent civic discourse and activism on SNS will continue to be manipulated or compromised by the commercial interests that currently own and manage the technical infrastructure. This concern is driven by the growing economic and political influence of companies in the technology sector, what Luciano Floridi (2015b) calls ‘grey power,’ and the potentially disenfranchising and disempowering effects of an economic model in which most users play a passive role (Floridi 2015a). Indeed, the relationship between social media users and service providers has become increasingly contentious, as users struggle to demand more privacy, better data security and more effective protections from online harassment in an economic context where they have little or no direct bargaining power (Zuboff 2019). This imbalance was powerfully illustrated by the revelation in 2014 that Facebook researchers had quietly conducted psychological experiments on users without their knowledge, manipulating their moods by altering the balance of positive or negative items in their News Feeds (Goel 2014). The study added yet another dimension to existing concerns about the ethics and validity of social science research that relies on SNS-generated data (Buchanan and Zimmer 2012), concerns that drive an increasingly vital and contested area of research ethics (Woodfield 2018, franzke et al. 2020). Ironically, in the power struggle between users and SNS providers, social networking platforms themselves have become the primary battlefield, where users vent their collective outrage in an attempt to force service providers into responding to their demands. The results are sometimes positive, as when Twitter users, after years of complaining, finally shamed the company in 2015 into providing better reporting tools for online harassment. Yet by its nature the process is chaotic and often controversial, as when later that year, Reddit users successfully demanded the ouster of CEO Ellen Pao, under whose leadership Reddit had banned some of its more repugnant ‘subreddit’ forums (such as “Fat People Hate”). The only clear consensus emerging from the considerations outlined here is that if SNS are going to facilitate any enhancement of a Habermasian public sphere, or the civic virtues and praxes of reasoned discourse that any functioning public sphere must presuppose, then users will have to actively mobilize themselves to exploit such an opportunity (Frick and Oberprantacher 2011). Such mobilization may depend upon resisting the “false sense of activity and accomplishment” (Bar-Tura, 2010, 239) that may come from merely clicking ‘Like’ in response to acts of meaningful political speech, forwarding calls to sign petitions, or simply ‘following’ an outspoken social critic on Twitter whose ‘tweeted’ calls to action are drowned in a tide of corporate announcements, celebrity product endorsements and personal commentaries. Some argue that it will also require the cultivation of new norms and virtues of online civic-mindedness, without which online ‘democracies’ will continue to be subject to the self-destructive and irrational tyrannies of mob behavior (Ess 2010). 3.5 Social Networking Services and Cybercrime SNS are hosts for a broad spectrum of ‘cybercrimes’ and related direct harms, including but not limited to: cyberbullying/cyberharassment, cyberstalking, child exploitation, cyberextortion, cyberfraud, illegal surveillance, identity theft, intellectual property/copyright violations, cyberespionage, cybersabotage and cyberterrorism. Each of these forms of criminal or antisocial behavior has a history that well pre-dates Web 2.0 standards, and philosophers have tended to leave the specific correlations between cybercrime and SNS as an empirical matter for social scientists, law enforcement and Internet security firms to investigate. Nevertheless, cybercrime is an enduring topic of philosophical interest for the broader field of computer ethics, and the migration to and evolution of such crime on SNS platforms raises new and distinctive ethical issues. Among those of great ethical importance is the question of how SNS providers ought to respond to government demands for user data for investigative or counterterrorism purposes. SNS providers are caught between the public interest in crime prevention and their need to preserve the trust and loyalty of their users, many of whom view governments as overreaching in their attempts to secure records of online activity. Many companies have opted to favor user security by employing end-to-end encryption of SNS exchanges, much to the chagrin of government agencies who insist upon ‘backdoor’ access to user data in the interests of public safety and national security. A related feature of SNS abuse and cybercrime is the associated skyrocketing need for content moderation at scale by these platforms. Because automated tools for content moderation remain crude and easily gamed, social media platforms rely on large human workforces working for low wages, who must manually screen countless images of horrific violence and abuse, often suffering grave and lasting psychological harm as a result (Roberts 2019). It is unclear how such harms to the content moderating workforce can be morally justified, even if they help to prevent the spread of such harm to others. The arrangement has uncomfortable echoes of Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas; so should platform users be the ones walking away? Or do platforms have an ethical duty to find a morally permissible solution, even if it endangers their business model? Another emerging ethical concern is the increasingly political character of cyberharassment and cyberstalking. In the U.S., women who spoke out about the lack of diversity in the tech and videogame industries were early targets during online controversies such as 2014’s ‘Gamergate’ (Salter 2017), during which some victims were forced to cancel speaking appearances or leave their homes due to physical threats after their addresses and other personal info were posted on social media (a practice known as ‘doxing’ or ‘doxxing’). More recently, journalists have been doxed and subjected to violent threats, sometimes following accusations that their reporting itself constituted doxing (Wilson 2018). Doxing presents complex ethical challenges (Douglas 2016). For victims of doxing and associated cyberthreats, traditional law enforcement bodies offer scant protection, as these agencies are often ill-equipped to police the blurry boundary between online and physical harms. But moreover, it’s not always clear what distinguishes immoral doxing from justified social opprobrium. If someone records a woman spitting racial epithets in a passerby’s face, or a man denying a disabled person service in a restaurant, and the victim or an observer posts the video online in a manner that allows the perpetrator to be identified by others in their social network, is that unethical shaming or just deserts? What’s the difference between posting someone’s home address, allowing them and their family to be terrorized by a mob, and posting someone’s workplace so that their employer can consider their conduct? Cases such as these get adjudicated by ad hoc social media juries weekly. Sometimes legal consequences do follow, as in the case of the notorious Amy Cooper, who in 2020 was charged with filing a false police report after being filmed by a Black man who she falsely accused of threatening her in Central Park. Are doxing and other modes of social media shaming legitimate tools of justice? Or are they indications of the dangers of unregulated moral policing? And if the answer is ‘both,’ or ‘it depends,’ then what are the key moral distinctions that allow us to respond appropriately to this new practice? 4. Social Networking Services and Metaethical Issues A host of metaethical questions are raised by the rapid emergence of SNS. For example, SNS lend new data to an earlier philosophical debate (Tavani 2005; Moor 2008) about whether classical ethical traditions such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics or virtue ethics possess sufficient resources for illuminating the implications of emerging information technology for moral values, or whether we require a new ethical framework to handle such phenomena. Charles Ess (2006, 2021) has suggested that a new, pluralistic “global information ethics” may be the appropriate context from which to view novel information technologies. Other scholars have suggested that technologies such as SNS invite renewed attention to existing ethical approaches such as pragmatism (van den Eede 2010), virtue ethics (Vallor 2016) feminist or care ethics (Hamington 2010; Puotinen 2011) that have often been neglected by applied ethicists in favor of conventional utilitarian and deontological resources. A related metaethical project relevant to SNS is the development of an explicitly intercultural information ethics (Ess 2005a; Capurro 2008; Honglaradom and Britz 2010). SNS and other emerging information technologies do not reliably confine themselves to national or cultural boundaries, and this creates a particular challenge for applied ethicists. For example, SNS practices in different countries must be analyzed against a conceptual background that recognizes and accommodates complex differences in moral norms and practices (Capurro 2005; Hongladarom 2007, Wong 2013). SNS phenomena that one might expect to benefit from intercultural analysis include: varied cultural patterns and preference/tolerance for affective display, argument and debate, personal exposure, expressions of political, interfamilial or cultural criticism, religious expression and sharing of intellectual property. Alternatively, the very possibility of a coherent information ethics may come under challenge, for example, from a constructivist view that emerging socio-technological practices like SNS continually redefine ethical norms—such that our analyses of SNS and related technologies are not only doomed to operate from shifting ground, but from ground that is being shifted by the intended object of our ethical analysis. Finally, there are pressing practical concerns about whether and how philosophers can actually have an impact on the ethical profile of emerging technologies such as SNS. If philosophers direct their ethical analyses only to other philosophers, then such analyses may function simply as ethical postmortems of human-technology relations, with no opportunity to actually pre-empt, reform or redirect unethical technological practices. But to whom else can, or should, these ethical concerns be directed: SNS users? Regulatory bodies and political institutions? SNS software developers? How can the theoretical content and practical import of these analyses be made accessible to these varied audiences? What motivating force are they likely to have? These questions have become particularly acute of late with the controversy over alleged corporate capture by technology companies of the language of ethics, and associated charges of ‘ethics-washing’ (Green 2021 [Other Internet Resources], Bietti 2020). Some argue that ethics is the wrong tool to fight the harms of emerging technologies and large technology platforms (Hao 2021); yet alternative proposals to focus on justice, rights, harms, equity or the legitimate use of power unwittingly fall right back within the normative scope of ethics. Unless we resort to a cynical frame of ‘might makes right,’ there is no escaping the need to use ethics to distinguish the relationships with sociotechnical phenomena and powers that we regard as permissible, good, or right, from those that should be resisted and dismantled. The profound urgency of this task becomes apparent once we recognize that unlike those ‘life or death’ ethical dilemmas with which many applied ethicists are understandably often preoccupied (e.g., abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment), emerging information technologies such as SNS have in a very short time worked themselves into the daily moral fabric of virtually all of our lives, transforming the social landscape and the moral habits and practices with which we navigate it. The ethical concerns illuminated here are, in a very real sense, anything but ‘academic,’ and neither philosophers nor the broader human community can afford the luxury of treating them as such.

Ethical Issues and Challenges in Social Media: A Current Scenario Dr. Bharat Dhiman* Assistant Professor, Department of Communication & Media Technology, J.C. Bose University of Science and Technology, YMCA, Faridabad, Haryana *Corresponding Author: Dr. Bharat Dhiman Assistant Professor, Department of Communication & Media Technology, J.C. Bose University of Science and Technology, YMCA, Faridabad, Haryana E-mail: biddy88@gmail.com Received: 03-April-2023, Manuscript No. Gmj-23-94315; Editor assigned: 05-April-2023, PreQc No. 94315; Reviewed: 19-April-2023, QC No. Q-94315; Revised: 24-April-2023, Manuscript No. Gmj-23-94315 (R); Published: 29-April-2023, DOI: 10.36648/1550- 7521.21.62.368 Citation: Dhiman B (2023) Ethical Issues and Challenges in Social Media: A Current Scenario. Global Media Journal, 21:62. Visit for more related articles at Global Media Journal Abstract Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate and interact with each other. While it has brought many benefits, it has also presented many ethical challenges. Social media platforms have access to an enormous amount of personal data, and there are concerns about how this data is being stored, collected, and used. Users often need to fully understand the risks of sharing sensitive information. Social media platforms have made it easy for fake news to spread rapidly, which can be dangerous and have serious consequences. Misinformation and propaganda can influence people's decisions and beliefs. In this paper, we will analyze the issues and challenges that may arise, and it will be necessary for individuals and society to address these challenges ethically and responsibly. Keywords Ethics; Social media; Facebook; Instagram; Snap chat; Personal information Introduction Social media refers to websites and online platforms allowing users to create, share content and interact with others. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snap chat, TikTok, etc. [1]. Social media has become a crucial part of modern society, with billions worldwide using these platforms to communicate, share information, and develop connection. Social media has many benefits, such as enabling people to stay updated and connected with friends and family, allowing businesses to communicate with customers, and facilitating exchanging of ideas, thoughts and information [1]. However, social media also has its downsides. One major issue is the spread of misinformation and fake news, which can have serious consequences, from undermining democratic processes to endangering public health. Another issue is cyberbullyingvi, which can lead to mental health problems and even suicide. In addition, social media can be addictive and negatively impact mental health, particularly for those who spend excessive amounts of time on these platforms [1, 2]. Social media companies are responsible for addressing these issues and designing their platforms in a way that prioritizes user well-being. Some companies have taken steps to combat misinformation and cyberbullyingvi, for example, by implementing fact-checking systems or warning labels on content deemed misleading. Other companies have changed their platforms' design to reduce addictive features. Ultimately, it is up to individuals to use social media responsibly and be aware of the risks and ethical considerations involved. By using social media thoughtfully and responsibly, we can all help to create a safer and more positive online environment [1, 2, 3]. Ethical Implications of Social Media Users Social media has become ubiquitous in modern life, and its widespread use has brought about a range of ethical implications for its users. Privacy is one of the most pressing ethical issues in social media. Social media platforms often require users to share personal information to create a profile. This data is then used to personalize the user's experience on the platform and target them with advertising. However, this practice has raised concerns about the misuse of personal data and the potential for data breaches. Social media users must be aware of the risks involved in sharing their personal information online and should take steps to protect their privacy [1, 3]. Another ethical consideration is the potential for online harassment and cyber bullying. Social media platforms provide a platform for users to communicate with each other, but this can also lead to online harassment and bullying. This can have serious consequences for the victim, including mental health issues and suicide. Social media users must be aware of their words and actions impact on others and should strive to use these platforms respectfully and responsibly [1, 2, 3]. The spread of misinformation and fake news is another major ethical consideration for social media users. False information can have serious consequences, from undermining democratic processes to endangering public health. Social media users should be aware of the importance of fact-checking and should strive to share accurate and reliable information [1]. Finally, there is the issue of addiction to social media. Research has shown that excessive use of social media can negatively impact mental health, including depression, anxiety, and addiction. Social media users must be aware of their usage habits and strive to use these platforms balanced and healthy [4, 5]. Social media has brought about many ethical considerations for its users. Privacy, cyber bullying, misinformation, and addiction are just a few issues that users must be aware of when using these platforms. Ethics of Large-Scale Data Collection through Social Media Large-scale data collection through social media has become common among many companies and organizations. While this practice has the potential to provide valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences, it also raises a range of ethical concerns. One of the primary ethical concerns of large-scale data collection through social media is the issue of consent. Users of social media platforms often need to fully understand the extent to which their data is being collected and used. This lack of understanding can lead to a situation where users unknowingly consent to manage their data. Companies and organizations that engage in large- scale data collection must ensure that they are obtaining informed consent from users and that users understand how their data will be used [6]. Another ethical concern is the issue of privacy. Large-scale data collection often involves collecting sensitive personal information, such as location data, browsing history, and purchasing habits. This information can be used to create detailed profiles of individuals, which can then be used for targeted advertising or other purposes. Companies and organizations that engage in large- scale data collection must ensure that they are protecting individuals' privacy and not sharing or selling this information without the individual's consent [7]. A related ethical concern is the issue of transparency. Companies and organizations that engage in large-scale data collection must be transparent about their data collection practices and how they use the data they collect. Users must understand what information is being collected, how it is being used, and who it is being shared with [7, 8]. Finally, there is the issue of data security. Large-scale data collection can result in vast data being stored in databases. These databases can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and the loss or theft of this data can have serious consequences for individuals. Companies and organizations that engage in large-scale data collection must ensure that they are implementing robust security measures to protect the data they collect [9]. Large-scale data collection through social media raises various ethical concerns, including consent, privacy, transparency, and data security. Companies and organizations that engage in this practice must ensure that they are acting ethically and responsibly and protecting the privacy and security of individuals [10]. Some Ethical Issues and Challenges in Social Media Privacy Social media platforms have access to an enormous amount of personal data, and there are concerns about how this data is collected, stored, and used. Users often need to understand the risks of sharing sensitive information fully. Privacy is a significant concern regarding social media, as these platforms often require users to share personal information to create a profile and engage with others. One of the most important privacy considerations is the sharing of personal information. Social media platforms often require users to share personal information, such as their name, email address, and location, to create a profile. The platform can use this information to personalize the user's experience and target them with advertising. However, it can also be used for more nefarious purposes, such as identity theft or stalking. Users must be aware of the risks involved in sharing their personal information online and should take steps to protect their privacy [11, 12]. Another privacy consideration is the collection of data by social media platforms. These platforms collect vast amounts of user data, including browsing history, search queries, and interactions with other users. This data can be used to create detailed profiles of individuals and to target them with advertising. Users must be aware of the extent to which their data is being collected and used and should take steps to limit the data being collected about them [1, 2, 3]. A related privacy consideration is the sharing of data by social media platforms. These platforms often share user data with third-party advertisers and other companies. Users must be aware of who their data is being shared with and should be able to control how it is shared. Finally, there is the is3sue of data breaches. Social media platforms store vast amounts of personal data, and this data can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Data breaches can result in the loss or theft of personal information, seriously affecting individuals. Users must be aware of the risks involved in storing their data online and should take steps to protect their data [11]. Privacy is a significant concern regarding social media. Users must be aware of the risks involved in sharing their personal information online and should take steps to protect their privacy. This includes limiting the amount of shared personal information, being aware of how their data is being collected and used, and taking steps to protect their data from cyber-attacks [12]. Cyber bullying Social media platforms have become a breeding ground for cyberbullyingvi, which can have devastating consequences for victims. It can also lead to social exclusion and mental health issues. Cyberbullying is a form of bullying that occurs through electronic means, such as social media platforms, messaging apps, and online forums. It is a serious issue that can significantly impact the mental health and well-being of those who experience it. In this essay, I will discuss the impact of cyber bullying on social media and some of the measures that can be taken to address it [13]. One of the primary impacts of cyber bullying on social media is the spread of hurtful or harmful messages. Cyberbullies can use social media platforms to post mean comments, spread rumors, or share embarrassing photos or videos of their victims. These messages can be seen by a wide audience and quickly go viral, causing significant emotional distress for the victim [14]. Another impact of cyber bullying on social media is the anonymity that it provides. Cyberbullies can hide behind fake usernames or profiles, making it difficult for their victims to identify them or take action against them. This anonymity can embolden cyberbullies to engage in more extreme forms of bullying, making it difficult for victims to feel safe online [15]. A related impact of cyber bullying on social media is the 24/7 nature of social media platforms. Victims of cyber bullying can be subjected to hurtful messages and comments at any time of the day or night, making it difficult for them to escape from the bullying. This can lead to feelings of isolation, depression, and anxiety [16]. To address cyber bullying on social media, several measures can be taken. One approach is to educate young people about the impact of cyber bullying and the importance of treating others with respect online. Schools, parents, and other organizations can provide resources and support to help young people navigate the online world safely and respectfully. Another approach is implementing policies and guidelines for social media platforms to prevent cyber bullying. These policies could include banning hate speech, harassment, and threats and providing tools for users to report bullying behavior. Social media companies can also invest in technology to detect and remove bullying content before it can cause harm. It is crucial to support victims of cyber bullying and provide them with resources and tools to cope with the emotional impact of bullying. This could include counseling services, support groups, and online resources that provide information and advice on how to deal with cyber bullying. Cyber bullying is a serious issue that can significantly impact those who experience it. Social media platforms have provided a new avenue for cyber bullying, but some measures can be taken to address it. By educating young people about the impact of cyber bullying, implementing policies to prevent bullying on social media, and providing support and resources for victims, we can work to create a safer and more respectful online environment. Fake News Social media platforms have made it easy for fake news to spread rapidly, which can be dangerous and have serious consequences. Misinformation and propaganda can influence people's decisions and beliefs. Fake news refers to false or misleading information presented as factual news. Social media platforms are often used to spread fake news due to their massive reach and easy accessibility. Social media algorithms are designed to show users content that aligns with their interests and preferences, which can create filter bubbles and echo chambers, where users only see content that confirms their existing beliefs and biases. This can make it easier for fake news to spread rapidly and widely, as users are more likely to share and engage with content that aligns with their worldview, even if it is false [16]. In addition, social media allows for the rapid spread of information without fact-checking or editorial oversight, which can lead to the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. These can have serious consequences, such as when false information about the COVID-19 vaccine leads people to avoid getting vaccinated, increasing the risk of infection and transmission [17-19]. Social media companies have taken steps to combat the spread of fake news on their platforms, such as fact-checking and labeling false information and reducing the reach of content that violates their policies. However, the problem persists, and it is vital for individuals to critically evaluate the information they see online and seek out reliable sources. Addiction Social media can be addictive, and people may spend excessive time on social media platforms. This can negatively impact productivity, relationships, and mental health. Social media addiction refers to the compulsive and excessive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and snap chat. People addicted to social media often spend hours a day scrolling through their feeds, checking notifications, and responding to messages, even at the expense of other important activities. There are several reasons why people become addicted to social media. For one, social media platforms are designed to be addictive. The platforms use algorithms and notifications to keep users engaged and coming back for more. Social media provides constant stimulation, validation, and connection with others. Social media addiction can negatively affect a person's mental health, relationships, and productivity. It can lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Additionally, social Media addiction can interfere with a person's ability to focus on important tasks and negatively impact their academic or professional performance. To reduce the risk of developing social media addiction, it is important to be mindful of your social media use and to set limits on your screen time. This can include scheduling social media breaks throughout the day, turning off notifications, and avoiding using social media before bed. Seeking support from friends and family, or seeking professional help if necessary, can also be beneficial. Online Harassment Social media platforms can be used to harass and intimidate individuals, which can lead to significant emotional distress and even physical harm. Online harassment can take many forms, such as threats, stalking, doxxing (publishing someone's private information online), spreading rumors or lies, and making derogatory or offensive comments. It can target individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other characteristics [12, 13]. Social media platforms have unique features that can make online harassment more pervasive and damaging. For example, the ability to create anonymous accounts or pseudonyms can make it difficult to hold perpetrators accountable. The speed and reach of social media can also amplify the impact of harassment, with messages or comments quickly spreading to large audiences [14, 15]. Online harassment can have serious consequences for victims, including mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, social isolation, and even physical harm in some cases. It can also negatively impact a person's professional or academic life. To combat online harassment, social media platforms need to take steps to prevent and respond to abusive behavior. This can include implementing policies and guidelines to prohibit harassment, providing reporting mechanisms for users to report abusive behavior, and taking swift action to remove or block accounts that engage in harassment. It is also important for users to be aware of the risks of online harassment and to take steps to protect themselves, such as setting privacy settings and avoiding engaging in harassing comments or messages. Discrimination Social media platforms have been accused of facilitating discrimination, particularly gender, race, and ethnicity. This can be hate speech, trolling, and targeted attacks. Discrimination on social media refers to the unfair treatment or prejudice against individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other personal characteristics. Discrimination can take many forms on social media, including hate speech, offensive comments or images, and exclusionary behavior. Social media platforms have become a forum for people to express their opinions and beliefs, and unfortunately, this can sometimes result in discriminatory behavior. Discrimination on social media can have serious consequences, such as damaging a person's mental health, creating social divisions, and contributing to a culture of hate and intolerance [17]. Social media platforms have a responsibility to prevent discrimination on their platforms. This can include implementing policies and guidelines to prohibit discriminatory behavior, educating and training users about appropriate online behavior, and taking swift action to remove or block accounts that engage in discrimination. Social media companies must create an inclusive and safe environment for all users [18]. Individual users also have a responsibility to prevent discrimination on social media. This can include speaking out against discriminatory behavior, reporting incidents of discrimination to the platform, and promoting positive and inclusive online interactions. It is important for users to recognize the impact their online behavior can have on others and to strive to create a positive and respectful online community [20]. Content Moderation Social media platforms face the difficult task of moderating content, and there are concerns about censorship, freedom of speech, and bias. Content moderation is important for maintaining a safe and respectful environment on social media platforms. It can help prevent harmful or offensive content from being shared with a large audience, protect users from harassment and discrimination, and prevent the spread of misinformation or false information. Social media platforms use automated tools and human moderators to moderate content. Automated tools such as algorithms detect and remove content that violates community standards or policies, such as hate speech, violent or graphic content, or spam. Human moderators are responsible for reviewing content that is flagged by automated tools, as well as reviewing appeals from users whose content has been removed. Content moderation on social media platforms is a complex and challenging task. It involves balancing the need to protect users and maintain community standards while respecting users' freedom of speech and expression. Some content may be offensive or harmful but may not necessarily violate community standards or policies and, therefore, may not be removed. Social media platforms have been criticized for their content moderation practices, with some users feeling that their content has been unfairly removed or restricted [21, 22]. To address these concerns, social media platforms are continuously refining their content moderation policies and procedures and providing greater transparency and accountability around their moderation practices. Conclusion Social media has brought many benefits to our lives, such as increasing connectivity, access to information, and opportunities for self-expression. However, it has also brought many ethical issues and challenges that must be addressed. These issues include privacy concerns, the spread of misinformation, addiction and social media, online harassment, discrimination, and content moderation. Addressing these ethical issues and challenges requires a collective effort from social media companies, governments, and individuals. Social media companies must prioritize the privacy and security of their users, take steps to prevent the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and develop effective content moderation policies and procedures. Governments can play a role in regulating social media platforms to protect the interests of their citizens, while individuals must take responsibility for their online behavior and strive to create a positive and respectful online community. As social media continues to evolve and become an increasingly integral part of our lives, it is important that we continue to address these ethical issues and challenges to ensure that social media remains a force for good in our world.

Aristotle’s EthicsFirst published Tue May 1, 2001; substantive revision Sat Jul 2, 2022 Aristotle conceives of ethical theory as a field distinct from the theoretical sciences. Its methodology must match its subject matter—good action—and must respect the fact that in this field many generalizations hold only for the most part. We study ethics in order to improve our lives, and therefore its principal concern is the nature of human well-being. Aristotle follows Socrates and Plato in taking the virtues to be central to a well-lived life. Like Plato, he regards the ethical virtues (justice, courage, temperance and so on) as complex rational, emotional and social skills. But he rejects Plato’s idea that to be completely virtuous one must acquire, through a training in the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, an understanding of what goodness is. What we need, in order to live well, is a proper appreciation of the way in which such goods as friendship, pleasure, virtue, honor and wealth fit together as a whole. In order to apply that general understanding to particular cases, we must acquire, through proper upbringing and habits, the ability to see, on each occasion, which course of action is best supported by reasons. Therefore practical wisdom, as he conceives it, cannot be acquired solely by learning general rules. We must also acquire, through practice, those deliberative, emotional, and social skills that enable us to put our general understanding of well-being into practice in ways that are suitable to each occasion. 1. Preliminaries 2. The Human Good and the Function Argument 3. Methodology 3.1 Traditional Virtues and the Skeptic 3.2 Differences from and Affinities to Plato 4. Virtues and Deficiencies, Continence and Incontinence 5. The Doctrine of the Mean 5.1 Ethical Virtue as Disposition 5.2 Ethical Theory Does Not Offer a Decision Procedure 5.3 The Starting Point for Practical Reasoning 6. Intellectual Virtues 7. Akrasia 8. Pleasure 9. Friendship 10. Three Lives Compared Glossary Further Reading A. Single-Authored Overviews B. Anthologies C. Studies of Particular Topics C.1 The Chronological Order of Aristotle’s Ethical Treatises C.2 The Methodology and Metaphysics of Ethical Theory C.3 The Human Good and the Human Function C.4 The Nature of Virtue and Accounts of Particular Virtues C.5 Practical Reasoning, Moral Psychology, and Action C.6 Pleasure C.7 Friendship C.8 Feminism and Aristotle C.9 Aristotle and Contemporary Ethics D. Bibliographies Bibliography Primary Literature Secondary Literature Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. Preliminaries Aristotle wrote two ethical treatises: the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. He does not himself use either of these titles, although in the Politics (1295a36) he refers back to one of them—probably the Eudemian Ethics—as “ta êthika”—his writings about character. The words “Eudemian” and “Nicomachean” were added later, perhaps because the former was edited by his friend, Eudemus, and the latter by his son, Nicomachus. In any case, these two works cover more or less the same ground: they begin with a discussion of eudaimonia (“happiness”, “flourishing”), and turn to an examination of the nature of aretê (“virtue”, “excellence”) and the character traits that human beings need in order to live life at its best. Both treatises examine the conditions in which praise or blame are appropriate, and the nature of pleasure and friendship; near the end of each work, we find a brief discussion of the proper relationship between human beings and the divine. Though the general point of view expressed in each work is the same, there are many subtle differences in organization and content as well. Clearly, one is a re-working of the other, and although no single piece of evidence shows conclusively what their order is, it is widely assumed that the Nicomachean Ethics is a later and improved version of the Eudemian Ethics. (Not all of the Eudemian Ethics was revised: its Books IV, V, and VI re-appear as V, VI, VII of the Nicomachean Ethics.) Perhaps the most telling indication of this ordering is that in several instances the Nicomachean Ethics develops a theme about which its Eudemian cousin is silent. Only the Nicomachean Ethics discusses the close relationship between ethical inquiry and politics; only the Nicomachean Ethics critically examines Solon’s paradoxical dictum that no man should be counted happy until he is dead; and only the Nicomachean Ethics gives a series of arguments for the superiority of the philosophical life to the political life. The remainder of this article will therefore focus on this work. [Note: Page and line numbers shall henceforth refer to this treatise.] A third treatise, called the Magna Moralia (the “Big Ethics”) is included in complete editions of Aristotle’s works, but its authorship is disputed by scholars. It ranges over topics discussed more fully in the other two works and its point of view is similar to theirs. (Why, being briefer, is it named the Magna Moralia? Because each of the two papyrus rolls into which it is divided is unusually long. Just as a big mouse can be a small animal, two big chapters can make a small book. This work was evidently named “big” with reference to its parts, not the whole.) A few authors in antiquity refer to a work with this name and attribute it to Aristotle, but it is not mentioned by several authorities, such as Cicero and Diogenes Laertius, whom we would expect to have known of it. Some scholars hold that it is Aristotle’s earliest course on ethics—perhaps his own lecture notes or those of a student; others regard it as a post-Aristotelian compilation or adaption of one or both of his genuine ethical treatises. Although Aristotle is deeply indebted to Plato’s moral philosophy, particularly Plato’s central insight that moral thinking must be integrated with our emotions and appetites, and that the preparation for such unity of character should begin with childhood education, the systematic character of Aristotle’s discussion of these themes was a remarkable innovation. No one had written ethical treatises before Aristotle. Plato’s Republic, for example, does not treat ethics as a distinct subject matter; nor does it offer a systematic examination of the nature of happiness, virtue, voluntariness, pleasure, or friendship. To be sure, we can find in Plato’s works important discussions of these phenomena, but they are not brought together and unified as they are in Aristotle’s ethical writings. 2. The Human Good and the Function Argument The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement. He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a fuller understanding of what it is to flourish. In raising this question—what is the good?—Aristotle is not looking for a list of items that are good. He assumes that such a list can be compiled rather easily; most would agree, for example, that it is good to have friends, to experience pleasure, to be healthy, to be honored, and to have such virtues as courage at least to some degree. The difficult and controversial question arises when we ask whether certain of these goods are more desirable than others. Aristotle’s search for the good is a search for the highest good, and he assumes that the highest good, whatever it turns out to be, has three characteristics: it is desirable for itself, it is not desirable for the sake of some other good, and all other goods are desirable for its sake. Aristotle thinks everyone will agree that the terms “eudaimonia” (“happiness”) and “eu zên” (“living well”) designate such an end. The Greek term “eudaimon” is composed of two parts: “eu” means “well” and “daimon” means “divinity” or “spirit”. To be eudaimon is therefore to be living in a way that is well-favored by a god. But Aristotle never calls attention to this etymology in his ethical writings, and it seems to have little influence on his thinking. He regards “eudaimon” as a mere substitute for eu zên (“living well”). These terms play an evaluative role, and are not simply descriptions of someone’s state of mind. No one tries to live well for the sake of some further goal; rather, being eudaimon is the highest end, and all subordinate goals—health, wealth, and other such resources—are sought because they promote well-being, not because they are what well-being consists in. But unless we can determine which good or goods happiness consists in, it is of little use to acknowledge that it is the highest end. To resolve this issue, Aristotle asks what the ergon (“function”, “task”, “work”) of a human being is, and argues that it consists in activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue (1097b22–1098a20). One important component of this argument is expressed in terms of distinctions he makes in his psychological and biological works. The soul is analyzed into a connected series of capacities: the nutritive soul is responsible for growth and reproduction, the locomotive soul for motion, the perceptive soul for perception, and so on. The biological fact Aristotle makes use of is that human beings are the only species that has not only these lower capacities but a rational soul as well. The good of a human being must have something to do with being human; and what sets humanity off from other species, giving us the potential to live a better life, is our capacity to guide ourselves by using reason. If we use reason well, we live well as human beings; or, to be more precise, using reason well over the course of a full life is what happiness consists in. Doing anything well requires virtue or excellence, and therefore living well consists in activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence. Aristotle’s conclusion about the nature of happiness is in a sense uniquely his own. No other writer or thinker had said precisely what he says about what it is to live well. But at the same time his view is not too distant from a common idea. As he himself points out, one traditional conception of happiness identifies it with virtue (1098b30–1). Aristotle’s theory should be construed as a refinement of this position. He says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of the soul. At the same time, Aristotle makes it clear that in order to be happy one must possess others goods as well—such goods as friends, wealth, and power. And one’s happiness is endangered if one is severely lacking in certain advantages—if, for example, one is extremely ugly, or has lost children or good friends through death (1099a31–b6). But why so? If one’s ultimate end should simply be virtuous activity, then why should it make any difference to one’s happiness whether one has or lacks these other types of good? Aristotle’s reply is that one’s virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of other goods (1153b17–19). Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit. To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness. Nonetheless, Aristotle insists, the highest good, virtuous activity, is not something that comes to us by chance. Although we must be fortunate enough to have parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous, we ourselves share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues. 3. Methodology 3.1 Traditional Virtues and the Skeptic A common complaint about Aristotle’s attempt to defend his conception of happiness is that his argument is too general to show that it is in one’s interest to possess any of the particular virtues as they are traditionally conceived. Suppose we grant, at least for the sake of argument, that doing anything well, including living well, consists in exercising certain skills; and let us call these skills, whatever they turn out to be, virtues. Even so, that point does not by itself allow us to infer that such qualities as temperance, justice, courage, as they are normally understood, are virtues. They should be counted as virtues only if it can be shown that actualizing precisely these skills is what happiness consists in. What Aristotle owes us, then, is an account of these traditional qualities that explains why they must play a central role in any well-lived life. But perhaps Aristotle disagrees, and refuses to accept this argumentative burden. In one of several important methodological remarks he makes near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, he says that in order to profit from the sort of study he is undertaking, one must already have been brought up in good habits (1095b4–6). The audience he is addressing, in other words, consists of people who are already just, courageous, and generous; or, at any rate, they are well on their way to possessing these virtues. Why such a restricted audience? Why does he not address those who have serious doubts about the value of these traditional qualities, and who therefore have not yet decided to cultivate and embrace them? Addressing the moral skeptic, after all, is the project Plato undertook in the Republic: in Book I he rehearses an argument to show that justice is not really a virtue, and the remainder of this work is an attempt to rebut this thesis. Aristotle’s project seems, at least on the surface, to be quite different. He does not appear to be addressing someone who has genuine doubts about the value of justice or kindred qualities. Perhaps, then, he realizes how little can be accomplished, in the study of ethics, to provide it with a rational foundation. Perhaps he thinks that no reason can be given for being just, generous, and courageous. These are qualities one learns to love when one is a child, and having been properly habituated, one no longer looks for or needs a reason to exercise them. One can show, as a general point, that happiness consists in exercising some skills or other, but that the moral skills of a virtuous person are what one needs is not a proposition that can be established on the basis of argument. This is not the only way of reading the Ethics, however. For surely we cannot expect Aristotle to show what it is about the traditional virtues that makes them so worthwhile until he has fully discussed the nature of those virtues. He himself warns us that his initial statement of what happiness is should be treated as a rough outline whose details are to be filled in later (1098a20–22). His intention in Book I of the Ethics is to indicate in a general way why the virtues are important; why particular virtues—courage, justice, and the like—are components of happiness is something we should be able to better understand only at a later point. In any case, Aristotle’s assertion that his audience must already have begun to cultivate the virtues need not be taken to mean that no reasons can be found for being courageous, just, and generous. His point, rather, may be that in ethics, as in any other study, we cannot make progress towards understanding why things are as they are unless we begin with certain assumptions about what is the case. Neither theoretical nor practical inquiry starts from scratch. Someone who has made no observations of astronomical or biological phenomena is not yet equipped with sufficient data to develop an understanding of these sciences. The parallel point in ethics is that to make progress in this sphere we must already have come to enjoy doing what is just, courageous, generous and the like. We must experience these activities not as burdensome constraints, but as noble, worthwhile, and enjoyable in themselves. Then, when we engage in ethical inquiry, we can ask what it is about these activities that makes them worthwhile. We can also compare these goods with other things that are desirable in themselves—pleasure, friendship, honor, and so on—and ask whether any of them is more desirable than the others. We approach ethical theory with a disorganized bundle of likes and dislikes based on habit and experience; such disorder is an inevitable feature of childhood. But what is not inevitable is that our early experience will be rich enough to provide an adequate basis for worthwhile ethical reflection; that is why we need to have been brought up well. Yet such an upbringing can take us only so far. We seek a deeper understanding of the objects of our childhood enthusiasms, and we must systematize our goals so that as adults we have a coherent plan of life. We need to engage in ethical theory, and to reason well in this field, if we are to move beyond the low-grade form of virtue we acquired as children. 3.2 Differences from and Affinities to Plato Read in this way, Aristotle is engaged in a project similar in some respects to the one Plato carried out in the Republic. One of Plato’s central points is that it is a great advantage to establish a hierarchical ordering of the elements in one’s soul; and he shows how the traditional virtues can be interpreted to foster or express the proper relation between reason and less rational elements of the psyche. Aristotle’s approach is similar: his “function argument” shows in a general way that our good lies in the dominance of reason, and the detailed studies of the particular virtues reveal how each of them involves the right kind of ordering of the soul. Aristotle’s goal is to arrive at conclusions like Plato’s, but without relying on the Platonic metaphysics that plays a central role in the argument of the Republic. He rejects the existence of Plato’s forms in general and the form of the good in particular; and he rejects the idea that in order to become fully virtuous one must study mathematics and the sciences, and see all branches of knowledge as a unified whole. Even though Aristotle’s ethical theory sometimes relies on philosophical distinctions that are more fully developed in his other works, he never proposes that students of ethics need to engage in a specialized study of the natural world, or mathematics, or eternal and changing objects. His project is to make ethics an autonomous field, and to show why a full understanding of what is good does not require expertise in any other field. There is another contrast with Plato that should be emphasized: In Book II of the Republic, we are told that the best type of good is one that is desirable both in itself and for the sake of its results (357d–358a). Plato argues that justice should be placed in this category, but since it is generally agreed that it is desirable for its consequences, he devotes most of his time to establishing his more controversial point—that justice is to be sought for its own sake. By contrast, Aristotle assumes that if A is desirable for the sake of B, then B is better than A (1094a14–16); therefore, the highest kind of good must be one that is not desirable for the sake of anything else. To show that A deserves to be our ultimate end, one must show that all other goods are best thought of as instruments that promote A in some way or other. Accordingly, it would not serve Aristotle’s purpose to consider virtuous activity in isolation from all other goods. He needs to discuss honor, wealth, pleasure, and friendship in order to show how these goods, properly understood, can be seen as resources that serve the higher goal of virtuous activity. He vindicates the centrality of virtue in a well-lived life by showing that in the normal course of things a virtuous person will not live a life devoid of friends, honor, wealth, pleasure, and the like. Virtuous activity makes a life happy not by guaranteeing happiness in all circumstances, but by serving as the goal for the sake of which lesser goods are to be pursued. Aristotle’s methodology in ethics therefore pays more attention than does Plato’s to the connections that normally obtain between virtue and other goods. That is why he stresses that in this sort of study one must be satisfied with conclusions that hold only for the most part (1094b11–22). Poverty, isolation, and dishonor are normally impediments to the exercise of virtue and therefore to happiness, although there may be special circumstances in which they are not. The possibility of exceptions does not undermine the point that, as a rule, to live well is to have sufficient resources for the pursuit of virtue over the course of a lifetime. 4. Virtues and Deficiencies, Continence and Incontinence Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of virtue (1103a1–10): those that pertain to the part of the soul that engages in reasoning (virtues of mind or intellect), and those that pertain to the part of the soul that cannot itself reason but is nonetheless capable of following reason (ethical virtues, virtues of character). Intellectual virtues are in turn divided into two sorts: those that pertain to theoretical reasoning, and those that pertain to practical thinking (1139a3–8). He organizes his material by first studying ethical virtue in general, then moving to a discussion of particular ethical virtues (temperance, courage, and so on), and finally completing his survey by considering the intellectual virtues (practical wisdom, theoretical wisdom, etc.). All free males are born with the potential to become ethically virtuous and practically wise, but to achieve these goals they must go through two stages: during their childhood, they must develop the proper habits; and then, when their reason is fully developed, they must acquire practical wisdom (phronêsis). This does not mean that first we fully acquire the ethical virtues, and then, at a later stage, add on practical wisdom. Ethical virtue is fully developed only when it is combined with practical wisdom (1144b14–17). A low-grade form of ethical virtue emerges in us during childhood as we are repeatedly placed in situations that call for appropriate actions and emotions; but as we rely less on others and become capable of doing more of our own thinking, we learn to develop a larger picture of human life, our deliberative skills improve, and our emotional responses are perfected. Like anyone who has developed a skill in performing a complex and difficult activity, the virtuous person takes pleasure in exercising his intellectual skills. Furthermore, when he has decided what to do, he does not have to contend with internal pressures to act otherwise. He does not long to do something that he regards as shameful; and he is not greatly distressed at having to give up a pleasure that he realizes he should forego. Aristotle places those who suffer from such internal disorders into one of three categories: (A) Some agents, having reached a decision about what to do on a particular occasion, experience some counter-pressure brought on by an appetite for pleasure, or anger, or some other emotion; and this countervailing influence is not completely under the control of reason. (1) Within this category, some are typically better able to resist these counter-rational pressures than is the average person. Such people are not virtuous, although they generally do what a virtuous person does. Aristotle calls them “continent” (enkratês). But (2) others are less successful than the average person in resisting these counter-pressures. They are “incontinent” (akratês). (The explanation of akrasia is a topic to which we will return in section 7.) In addition, (B) there is a type of agent who refuses even to try to do what an ethically virtuous agent would do, because he has become convinced that justice, temperance, generosity and the like are of little or no value. Such people Aristotle calls evil (kakos, phaulos). He assumes that evil people are driven by desires for domination and luxury, and although they are single-minded in their pursuit of these goals, he portrays them as deeply divided, because their pleonexia—their desire for more and more—leaves them dissatisfied and full of self-hatred. It should be noticed that all three of these deficiencies—continence, incontinence, vice—involve some lack of internal harmony. (Here Aristotle’s debt to Plato is particularly evident, for one of the central ideas of the Republic is that the life of a good person is harmonious, and all other lives deviate to some degree from this ideal.) The evil person may wholeheartedly endorse some evil plan of action at a particular moment, but over the course of time, Aristotle supposes, he will regret his decision, because whatever he does will prove inadequate for the achievement of his goals (1166b5–29). Aristotle assumes that when someone systematically makes bad decisions about how to live his life, his failures are caused by psychological forces that are less than fully rational. His desires for pleasure, power or some other external goal have become so strong that they make him care too little or not at all about acting ethically. To keep such destructive inner forces at bay, we need to develop the proper habits and emotional responses when we are children, and to reflect intelligently on our aims when we are adults. But some vulnerability to these disruptive forces is present even in more-or-less virtuous people; that is why even a good political community needs laws and the threat of punishment. Clear thinking about the best goals of human life and the proper way to put them into practice is a rare achievement, because the human psyche is not a hospitable environment for the development of these insights. 5. The Doctrine of the Mean 5.1 Ethical Virtue as Disposition Aristotle describes ethical virtue as a “hexis” (“state” “condition” “disposition”)—a tendency or disposition, induced by our habits, to have appropriate feelings (1105b25–6). Defective states of character are hexeis (plural of hexis) as well, but they are tendencies to have inappropriate feelings. The significance of Aristotle’s characterization of these states as hexeis is his decisive rejection of the thesis, found throughout Plato’s early dialogues, that virtue is nothing but a kind of knowledge and vice nothing but a lack of knowledge. Although Aristotle frequently draws analogies between the crafts and the virtues (and similarly between physical health and eudaimonia), he insists that the virtues differ from the crafts and all branches of knowledge in that the former involve appropriate emotional responses and are not purely intellectual conditions. Furthermore, every ethical virtue is a condition intermediate (a “golden mean” as it is popularly known) between two other states, one involving excess, and the other deficiency (1106a26–b28). In this respect, Aristotle says, the virtues are no different from technical skills: every skilled worker knows how to avoid excess and deficiency, and is in a condition intermediate between two extremes. The courageous person, for example, judges that some dangers are worth facing and others not, and experiences fear to a degree that is appropriate to his circumstances. He lies between the coward, who flees every danger and experiences excessive fear, and the rash person, who judges every danger worth facing and experiences little or no fear. Aristotle holds that this same topography applies to every ethical virtue: all are located on a map that places the virtues between states of excess and deficiency. He is careful to add, however, that the mean is to be determined in a way that takes into account the particular circumstances of the individual (1106a36–b7). The arithmetic mean between 10 and 2 is 6, and this is so invariably, whatever is being counted. But the intermediate point that is chosen by an expert in any of the crafts will vary from one situation to another. There is no universal rule, for example, about how much food an athlete should eat, and it would be absurd to infer from the fact that 10 lbs. is too much and 2 lbs. too little for me that I should eat 6 lbs. Finding the mean in any given situation is not a mechanical or thoughtless procedure, but requires a full and detailed acquaintance with the circumstances. It should be evident that Aristotle’s treatment of virtues as mean states endorses the idea that we should sometimes have strong feelings—when such feelings are called for by our situation. Sometimes only a small degree of anger is appropriate; but at other times, circumstances call for great anger. The right amount is not some quantity between zero and the highest possible level, but rather the amount, whatever it happens to be, that is proportionate to the seriousness of the situation. Of course, Aristotle is committed to saying that anger should never reach the point at which it undermines reason; and this means that our passion should always fall short of the extreme point at which we would lose control. But it is possible to be very angry without going to this extreme, and Aristotle does not intend to deny this. The theory of the mean is open to several objections, but before considering them, we should recognize that in fact there are two distinct theses each of which might be called a doctrine of the mean. First, there is the thesis that every virtue is a state that lies between two vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency. Second, there is the idea that whenever a virtuous person chooses to perform a virtuous act, he can be described as aiming at an act that is in some way or other intermediate between alternatives that he rejects. It is this second thesis that is most likely to be found objectionable. A critic might concede that in some cases virtuous acts can be described in Aristotle’s terms. If, for example, one is trying to decide how much to spend on a wedding present, one is looking for an amount that is neither excessive nor deficient. But surely many other problems that confront a virtuous agent are not susceptible to this quantitative analysis. If one must decide whether to attend a wedding or respect a competing obligation instead, it would not be illuminating to describe this as a search for a mean between extremes—unless “aiming at the mean” simply becomes another phrase for trying to make the right decision. The objection, then, is that Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, taken as a doctrine about what the ethical agent does when he deliberates, is in many cases inapplicable or unilluminating. A defense of Aristotle would have to say that the virtuous person does after all aim at a mean, if we allow for a broad enough notion of what sort of aiming is involved. For example, consider a juror who must determine whether a defendant is guilty as charged. He does not have before his mind a quantitative question; he is trying to decide whether the accused committed the crime, and is not looking for some quantity of action intermediate between extremes. Nonetheless, an excellent juror can be described as someone who, in trying to arrive at the correct decision, seeks to express the right degree of concern for all relevant considerations. He searches for the verdict that results from a deliberative process that is neither overly credulous nor unduly skeptical. Similarly, in facing situations that arouse anger, a virtuous agent must determine what action (if any) to take in response to an insult, and although this is not itself a quantitative question, his attempt to answer it properly requires him to have the right degree of concern for his standing as a member of the community. He aims at a mean in the sense that he looks for a response that avoids too much or too little attention to factors that must be taken into account in making a wise decision. Perhaps a greater difficulty can be raised if we ask how Aristotle determines which emotions are governed by the doctrine of the mean. Consider someone who loves to wrestle, for example. Is this passion something that must be felt by every human being at appropriate times and to the right degree? Surely someone who never felt this emotion to any degree could still live a perfectly happy life. Why then should we not say the same about at least some of the emotions that Aristotle builds into his analysis of the ethically virtuous agent? Why should we experience anger at all, or fear, or the degree of concern for wealth and honor that Aristotle commends? These are precisely the questions that were asked in antiquity by the Stoics, and they came to the conclusion that such common emotions as anger and fear are always inappropriate. Aristotle assumes, on the contrary, not simply that these common passions are sometimes appropriate, but that it is essential that every human being learn how to master them and experience them in the right way at the right times. A defense of his position would have to show that the emotions that figure in his account of the virtues are valuable components of any well-lived human life, when they are experienced properly. Perhaps such a project could be carried out, but Aristotle himself does not attempt to do so. He often says, in the course of his discussion, that when the good person chooses to act virtuously, he does so for the sake of the “kalon”—a word that can mean “beautiful”, “noble”, or “fine” (see for example 1120a23–4). This term indicates that Aristotle sees in ethical activity an attraction that is comparable to the beauty of well-crafted artifacts, including such artifacts as poetry, music, and drama. He draws this analogy in his discussion of the mean, when he says that every craft tries to produce a work from which nothing should be taken away and to which nothing further should be added (1106b5–14). A craft product, when well designed and produced by a good craftsman, is not merely useful, but also has such elements as balance, proportion and harmony—for these are properties that help make it useful. Similarly, Aristotle holds that a well-executed project that expresses the ethical virtues will not merely be advantageous but kalon as well—for the balance it strikes is part of what makes it advantageous. The young person learning to acquire the virtues must develop a love of doing what is kalon and a strong aversion to its opposite—the aischron, the shameful and ugly. Determining what is kalon is difficult (1106b28–33, 1109a24–30), and the normal human aversion to embracing difficulties helps account for the scarcity of virtue (1104b10–11). 5.2 Ethical Theory Does Not Offer a Decision Procedure It should be clear that neither the thesis that virtues lie between extremes nor the thesis that the good person aims at what is intermediate is intended as a procedure for making decisions. These doctrines of the mean help show what is attractive about the virtues, and they also help systematize our understanding of which qualities are virtues. Once we see that temperance, courage, and other generally recognized characteristics are mean states, we are in a position to generalize and to identify other mean states as virtues, even though they are not qualities for which we have a name. Aristotle remarks, for example, that the mean state with respect to anger has no name in Greek (1125b26–7). Though he is guided to some degree by distinctions captured by ordinary terms, his methodology allows him to recognize states for which no names exist. So far from offering a decision procedure, Aristotle insists that this is something that no ethical theory can do. His theory elucidates the nature of virtue, but what must be done on any particular occasion by a virtuous agent depends on the circumstances, and these vary so much from one occasion to another that there is no possibility of stating a series of rules, however complicated, that collectively solve every practical problem. This feature of ethical theory is not unique; Aristotle thinks it applies to many crafts, such as medicine and navigation (1104a7–10). He says that the virtuous person “sees the truth in each case, being as it were a standard and measure of them” (1113a32–3); but this appeal to the good person’s vision should not be taken to mean that he has an inarticulate and incommunicable insight into the truth. Aristotle thinks of the good person as someone who is good at deliberation, and he describes deliberation as a process of rational inquiry. The intermediate point that the good person tries to find is determined by logos (“reason”, “account”) and in the way that the person of practical reason would determine it. (1107a1–2) To say that such a person “sees” what to do is simply a way of registering the point that the good person’s reasoning does succeed in discovering what is best in each situation. He is “as it were a standard and measure” in the sense that his views should be regarded as authoritative by other members of the community. A standard or measure is something that settles disputes; and because good people are so skilled at discovering the mean in difficult cases, their advice must be sought and heeded. Although there is no possibility of writing a book of rules, however long, that will serve as a complete guide to wise decision-making, it would be a mistake to attribute to Aristotle the opposite position, namely that every purported rule admits of exceptions, so that even a small rule-book that applies to a limited number of situations is an impossibility. He makes it clear that certain emotions (spite, shamelessness, envy) and actions (adultery, theft, murder) are always wrong, regardless of the circumstances (1107a8–12). Although he says that the names of these emotions and actions convey their wrongness, he should not be taken to mean that their wrongness derives from linguistic usage. He defends the family as a social institution against the criticisms of Plato (Politics II.3–4), and so when he says that adultery is always wrong, he is prepared to argue for his point by explaining why marriage is a valuable custom and why extra-marital intercourse undermines the relationship between husband and wife. He is not making the tautological claim that wrongful sexual activity is wrong, but the more specific and contentious point that marriages ought to be governed by a rule of strict fidelity. Similarly, when he says that murder and theft are always wrong, he does not mean that wrongful killing and taking are wrong, but that the current system of laws regarding these matters ought to be strictly enforced. So, although Aristotle holds that ethics cannot be reduced to a system of rules, however complex, he insists that some rules are inviolable. 5.3 The Starting Point for Practical Reasoning We have seen that the decisions of a practically wise person are not mere intuitions, but can be justified by a chain of reasoning. (This is why Aristotle often talks in term of a practical syllogism, with a major premise that identifies some good to be achieved, and a minor premise that locates the good in some present-to-hand situation.) At the same time, he is acutely aware of the fact that reasoning can always be traced back to a starting point that is not itself justified by further reasoning. Neither good theoretical reasoning nor good practical reasoning moves in a circle; true thinking always presupposes and progresses in linear fashion from proper starting points. And that leads him to ask for an account of how the proper starting points of reasoning are to be determined. Practical reasoning always presupposes that one has some end, some goal one is trying to achieve; and the task of reasoning is to determine how that goal is to be accomplished. (This need not be means-end reasoning in the conventional sense; if, for example, our goal is the just resolution of a conflict, we must determine what constitutes justice in these particular circumstances. Here we are engaged in ethical inquiry, and are not asking a purely instrumental question.) But if practical reasoning is correct only if it begins from a correct premise, what is it that insures the correctness of its starting point? Aristotle replies: “Virtue makes the goal right, practical wisdom the things leading to it” (1144a7–8). By this he cannot mean that there is no room for reasoning about our ultimate end. For as we have seen, he gives a reasoned defense of his conception of happiness as virtuous activity. What he must have in mind, when he says that virtue makes the goal right, is that deliberation typically proceeds from a goal that is far more specific than the goal of attaining happiness by acting virtuously. To be sure, there may be occasions when a good person approaches an ethical problem by beginning with the premise that happiness consists in virtuous activity. But more often what happens is that a concrete goal presents itself as his starting point—helping a friend in need, or supporting a worthwhile civic project. Which specific project we set for ourselves is determined by our character. A good person starts from worthwhile concrete ends because his habits and emotional orientation have given him the ability to recognize that such goals are within reach, here and now. Those who are defective in character may have the rational skill needed to achieve their ends—the skill Aristotle calls cleverness (1144a23–8)—but often the ends they seek are worthless. The cause of this deficiency lies not in some impairment in their capacity to reason—for we are assuming that they are normal in this respect—but in the training of their passions. 6. Intellectual Virtues Since Aristotle often calls attention to the imprecision of ethical theory (see e.g. 1104a1–7), it comes as a surprise to many readers of the Ethics that he begins Book VI with the admission that his earlier statements about the mean need supplementation because they are not yet clear (saphes). In every practical discipline, the expert aims at a mark and uses right reason to avoid the twin extremes of excess and deficiency. But what is this right reason, and by what standard (horos) is it to be determined? Aristotle says that unless we answer that question, we will be none the wiser—just as a student of medicine will have failed to master his subject if he can only say that the right medicines to administer are the ones that are prescribed by medical expertise, but has no standard other than this (1138b18–34). It is not easy to understand the point Aristotle is making here. Has he not already told us that there can be no complete theoretical guide to ethics, that the best one can hope for is that in particular situations one’s ethical habits and practical wisdom will help one determine what to do? Furthermore, Aristotle nowhere announces, in the remainder of Book VI, that we have achieved the greater degree of accuracy that he seems to be looking for. The rest of this Book is a discussion of the various kinds of intellectual virtues: theoretical wisdom, science (epistêmê), intuitive understanding (nous), practical wisdom, and craft expertise. Aristotle explains what each of these states of mind is, draws various contrasts among them, and takes up various questions that can be raised about their usefulness. At no point does he explicitly return to the question he raised at the beginning of Book VI; he never says, “and now we have the standard of right reason that we were looking for”. Nor is it easy to see how his discussion of these five intellectual virtues can bring greater precision to the doctrine of the mean. We can make some progress towards solving this problem if we remind ourselves that at the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle describes his inquiry as an attempt to develop a better understanding of what our ultimate aim should be. The sketchy answer he gives in Book I is that happiness consists in virtuous activity. In Books II through V, he describes the virtues of the part of the soul that is rational in that it can be attentive to reason, even though it is not capable of deliberating. But precisely because these virtues are rational only in this derivative way, they are a less important component of our ultimate end than is the intellectual virtue—practical wisdom—with which they are integrated. If what we know about virtue is only what is said in Books II through V, then our grasp of our ultimate end is radically incomplete, because we still have not studied the intellectual virtue that enables us to reason well in any given situation. One of the things, at least, towards which Aristotle is gesturing, as he begins Book VI, is practical wisdom. This state of mind has not yet been analyzed, and that is one reason why he complains that his account of our ultimate end is not yet clear enough. But is practical wisdom the only ingredient of our ultimate end that has not yet been sufficiently discussed? Book VI discusses five intellectual virtues, not just practical wisdom, but it is clear that at least one of these—craft knowledge—is considered only in order to provide a contrast with the others. Aristotle is not recommending that his readers make this intellectual virtue part of their ultimate aim. But what of the remaining three: science, intuitive understanding, and the virtue that combines them, theoretical wisdom? Are these present in Book VI only in order to provide a contrast with practical wisdom, or is Aristotle saying that these too must be components of our goal? He does not fully address this issue, but it is evident from several of his remarks in Book VI that he takes theoretical wisdom to be a more valuable state of mind than practical wisdom. It is strange if someone thinks that politics or practical wisdom is the most excellent kind of knowledge, unless man is the best thing in the cosmos. (1141a20–22) He says that theoretical wisdom produces happiness by being a part of virtue (1144a3–6), and that practical wisdom looks to the development of theoretical wisdom, and issues commands for its sake (1145a8–11). So it is clear that exercising theoretical wisdom is a more important component of our ultimate goal than practical wisdom. Even so, it may still seem perplexing that these two intellectual virtues, either separately or collectively, should somehow fill a gap in the doctrine of the mean. Having read Book VI and completed our study of what these two forms of wisdom are, how are we better able to succeed in finding the mean in particular situations? The answer to this question may be that Aristotle does not intend Book VI to provide a full answer to that question, but rather to serve as a prolegomenon to an answer. For it is only near the end of Book X that he presents a full discussion of the relative merits of these two kinds of intellectual virtue, and comments on the different degrees to which each needs to be provided with resources. In X.7–8, he argues that the happiest kind of life is that of a philosopher—someone who exercises, over a long period of time, the virtue of theoretical wisdom, and has sufficient resources for doing so. (We will discuss these chapters more fully in section 10 below.) One of his reasons for thinking that such a life is superior to the second-best kind of life—that of a political leader, someone who devotes himself to the exercise of practical rather than theoretical wisdom—is that it requires less external equipment (1178a23–b7). Aristotle has already made it clear in his discussion of the ethical virtues that someone who is greatly honored by his community and commands large financial resources is in a position to exercise a higher order of ethical virtue than is someone who receives few honors and has little property. The virtue of magnificence is superior to mere liberality, and similarly greatness of soul is a higher excellence than the ordinary virtue that has to do with honor. (These qualities are discussed in IV.1–4.) The grandest expression of ethical virtue requires great political power, because it is the political leader who is in a position to do the greatest amount of good for the community. The person who chooses to lead a political life, and who aims at the fullest expression of practical wisdom, has a standard for deciding what level of resources he needs: he should have friends, property, and honors in sufficient quantities to allow his practical wisdom to express itself without impediment. But if one chooses instead the life of a philosopher, then one will look to a different standard—the fullest expression of theoretical wisdom—and one will need a smaller supply of these resources. This enables us to see how Aristotle’s treatment of the intellectual virtues does give greater content and precision to the doctrine of the mean. The best standard is the one adopted by the philosopher; the second-best is the one adopted by the political leader. In either case, it is the exercise of an intellectual virtue that provides a guideline for making important quantitative decisions. This supplement to the doctrine of the mean is fully compatible with Aristotle’s thesis that no set of rules, no matter how long and detailed, obviates the need for deliberative and ethical virtue. If one chooses the life of a philosopher, one should keep the level of one’s resources high enough to secure the leisure necessary for such a life, but not so high that one’s external equipment becomes a burden and a distraction rather than an aid to living well. That gives one a firmer idea of how to hit the mean, but it still leaves the details to be worked out. The philosopher will need to determine, in particular situations, where justice lies, how to spend wisely, when to meet or avoid a danger, and so on. All of the normal difficulties of ethical life remain, and they can be solved only by means of a detailed understanding of the particulars of each situation. Having philosophy as one’s ultimate aim does not put an end to the need for developing and exercising practical wisdom and the ethical virtues. 7. Akrasia In VII.1–10 Aristotle investigates character traits—continence and incontinence—that are not as blameworthy as the vices but not as praiseworthy as the virtues. (We began our discussion of these qualities in section 4.) The Greek terms are akrasia (“incontinence”; literally: “lack of mastery”) and enkrateia (“continence”; literally “mastery”). An akratic person goes against reason as a result of some pathos (“emotion”, “feeling”). Like the akratic, an enkratic person experiences a feeling that is contrary to reason; but unlike the akratic, he acts in accordance with reason. His defect consists solely in the fact that, more than most people, he experiences passions that conflict with his rational choice. The akratic person has not only this defect, but has the further flaw that he gives in to feeling rather than reason more often than the average person. Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of akrasia: impetuosity (propeteia) and weakness (astheneia). The person who is weak goes through a process of deliberation and makes a choice; but rather than act in accordance with his reasoned choice, he acts under the influence of a passion. By contrast, the impetuous person does not go through a process of deliberation and does not make a reasoned choice; he simply acts under the influence of a passion. At the time of action, the impetuous person experiences no internal conflict. But once his act has been completed, he regrets what he has done. One could say that he deliberates, if deliberation were something that post-dated rather than preceded action; but the thought process he goes through after he acts comes too late to save him from error. It is important to bear in mind that when Aristotle talks about impetuosity and weakness, he is discussing chronic conditions. The impetuous person is someone who acts emotionally and fails to deliberate not just once or twice but with some frequency; he makes this error more than most people do. Because of this pattern in his actions, we would be justified in saying of the impetuous person that had his passions not prevented him from doing so, he would have deliberated and chosen an action different from the one he did perform. The two kinds of passions that Aristotle focuses on, in his treatment of akrasia, are the appetite for pleasure and anger. Either can lead to impetuosity and weakness. But Aristotle gives pride of place to the appetite for pleasure as the passion that undermines reason. He calls the kind of akrasia caused by an appetite for pleasure “unqualified akrasia”—or, as we might say, akrasia “full stop”; akrasia caused by anger he considers a qualified form of akrasia and calls it akrasia “with respect to anger”. We thus have these four forms of akrasia: (A) impetuosity caused by pleasure, (B) impetuosity caused by anger, (C) weakness caused by pleasure (D) weakness caused by anger. It should be noticed that Aristotle’s treatment of akrasia is heavily influenced by Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in the Republic. Plato holds that either the spirited part (which houses anger, as well as other emotions) or the appetitive part (which houses the desire for physical pleasures) can disrupt the dictates of reason and result in action contrary to reason. The same threefold division of the soul can be seen in Aristotle’s approach to this topic. Although Aristotle characterizes akrasia and enkrateia in terms of a conflict between reason and feeling, his detailed analysis of these states of mind shows that what takes place is best described in a more complicated way. For the feeling that undermines reason contains some thought, which may be implicitly general. As Aristotle says, anger “reasoning as it were that one must fight against such a thing, is immediately provoked” (1149a33–4). And although in the next sentence he denies that our appetite for pleasure works in this way, he earlier had said that there can be a syllogism that favors pursuing enjoyment: “Everything sweet is pleasant, and this is sweet” leads to the pursuit of a particular pleasure (1147a31–30). Perhaps what he has in mind is that pleasure can operate in either way: it can prompt action unmediated by a general premise, or it can prompt us to act on such a syllogism. By contrast, anger always moves us by presenting itself as a bit of general, although hasty, reasoning. But of course Aristotle does not mean that a conflicted person has more than one faculty of reason. Rather his idea seems to be that in addition to our full-fledged reasoning capacity, we also have psychological mechanisms that are capable of a limited range of reasoning. When feeling conflicts with reason, what occurs is better described as a fight between feeling-allied-with-limited-reasoning and full-fledged reason. Part of us—reason—can remove itself from the distorting influence of feeling and consider all relevant factors, positive and negative. But another part of us—feeling or emotion—has a more limited field of reasoning—and sometimes it does not even make use of it. Although “passion” is sometimes used as a translation of Aristotle’s word pathos (other alternatives are “emotion” and “feeling”), it is important to bear in mind that his term does not necessarily designate a strong psychological force. Anger is a pathos whether it is weak or strong; so too is the appetite for bodily pleasures. And he clearly indicates that it is possible for an akratic person to be defeated by a weak pathos—the kind that most people would easily be able to control (1150a9–b16). So the general explanation for the occurrence of akrasia cannot be that the strength of a passion overwhelms reason. Aristotle should therefore be acquitted of an accusation made against him by J.L. Austin in a well-known footnote to his paper, “A Plea For Excuses”. Plato and Aristotle, he says, collapsed all succumbing to temptation into losing control of ourselves—a mistake illustrated by this example: I am very partial to ice cream, and a bombe is served divided into segments corresponding one to one with the persons at High Table: I am tempted to help myself to two segments and do so, thus succumbing to temptation and even conceivably (but why necessarily?) going against my principles. But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch the morsels from the dish and wolf them down, impervious to the consternation of my colleagues? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse. (1957: 24, fn 13 [1961: 146]) With this, Aristotle can agree: the pathos for the bombe can be a weak one, and in some people that will be enough to get them to act in a way that is disapproved by their reason at the very time of action. What is most remarkable about Aristotle’s discussion of akrasia is that he defends a position close to that of Socrates. When he first introduces the topic of akrasia, and surveys some of the problems involved in understanding this phenomenon, he says (1145b25–8) that Socrates held that there is no akrasia, and he describes this as a thesis that clearly conflicts with the appearances (phainomena). Since he says that his goal is to preserve as many of the appearances as possible (1145b2–7), it may come as a surprise that when he analyzes the conflict between reason and feeling, he arrives at the conclusion that in a way Socrates was right after all (1147b13–17). For, he says, the person who acts against reason does not have what is thought to be unqualified knowledge; in a way he has knowledge, but in a way does not. Aristotle explains what he has in mind by comparing akrasia to the condition of other people who might be described as knowing in a way, but not in an unqualified way. His examples are people who are asleep, mad, or drunk; he also compares the akratic to a student who has just begun to learn a subject, or an actor on the stage (1147a10–24). All of these people, he says, can utter the very words used by those who have knowledge; but their talk does not prove that they really have knowledge, strictly speaking. These analogies can be taken to mean that the form of akrasia that Aristotle calls weakness rather than impetuosity always results from some diminution of cognitive or intellectual acuity at the moment of action. The akratic says, at the time of action, that he ought not to indulge in this particular pleasure at this time. But does he know or even believe that he should refrain? Aristotle might be taken to reply: yes and no. He has some degree of recognition that he must not do this now, but not full recognition. His feeling, even if it is weak, has to some degree prevented him from completely grasping or affirming the point that he should not do this. And so in a way Socrates was right. When reason remains unimpaired and unclouded, its dictates will carry us all the way to action, so long as we are able to act. But Aristotle’s agreement with Socrates is only partial, because he insists on the power of the emotions to rival, weaken or bypass reason. Emotion challenges reason in all three of these ways. In both the akratic and the enkratic, it competes with reason for control over action; even when reason wins, it faces the difficult task of having to struggle with an internal rival. Second, in the akratic, it temporarily robs reason of its full acuity, thus handicapping it as a competitor. It is not merely a rival force, in these cases; it is a force that keeps reason from fully exercising its power. And third, passion can make someone impetuous; here its victory over reason is so powerful that the latter does not even enter into the arena of conscious reflection until it is too late to influence action. Supplementary Document: Alternate Readings of Aristotle on Akrasia 8. Pleasure Aristotle frequently emphasizes the importance of pleasure to human life and therefore to his study of how we should live (see for example 1099a7–20 and 1104b3–1105a16), but his full-scale examination of the nature and value of pleasure is found in two places: VII.11–14 and X.1–5. It is odd that pleasure receives two lengthy treatments; no other topic in the Ethics is revisited in this way. Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics is identical to Book VI of the Eudemian Ethics; for unknown reasons, the editor of the former decided to include within it both the treatment of pleasure that is unique to that work (X.1–5) and the study that is common to both treatises (VII.11–14). The two accounts are broadly similar. They agree about the value of pleasure, defend a theory about its nature, and oppose competing theories. Aristotle holds that a happy life must include pleasure, and he therefore opposes those who argue that pleasure is by its nature bad. He insists that there are other pleasures besides those of the senses, and that the best pleasures are the ones experienced by virtuous people who have sufficient resources for excellent activity. Book VII offers a brief account of what pleasure is and is not. It is not a process but an unimpeded activity of a natural state (1153a7–17). Aristotle does not elaborate on what a natural state is, but he obviously has in mind the healthy condition of the body, especially its sense faculties, and the virtuous condition of the soul. Little is said about what it is for an activity to be unimpeded, but Aristotle does remind us that virtuous activity is impeded by the absence of a sufficient supply of external goods (1153b17–19). One might object that people who are sick or who have moral deficiencies can experience pleasure, even though Aristotle does not take them to be in a natural state. He has two strategies for responding. First, when a sick person experiences some degree of pleasure as he is being restored to health, the pleasure he is feeling is caused by the fact that he is no longer completely ill. Some small part of him is in a natural state and is acting without impediment (1152b35–6). Second, Aristotle is willing to say that what seems pleasant to some people may in fact not be pleasant (1152b31–2), just as what tastes bitter to an unhealthy palate may not be bitter. To call something a pleasure is not only to report a state of mind but also to endorse it to others. Aristotle’s analysis of the nature of pleasure is not meant to apply to every case in which something seems pleasant to someone, but only to activities that really are pleasures. All of these are unimpeded activities of a natural state. It follows from this conception of pleasure that every instance of pleasure must be good to some extent. For how could an unimpeded activity of a natural state be bad or a matter of indifference? On the other hand, Aristotle does not mean to imply that every pleasure should be chosen. He briefly mentions the point that pleasures compete with each other, so that the enjoyment of one kind of activity impedes other activities that cannot be carried out at the same time (1153a20–22). His point is simply that although some pleasures may be good, they are not worth choosing when they interfere with other activities that are far better. This point is developed more fully in Ethics X.5. Furthermore, Aristotle’s analysis allows him to speak of certain pleasures as “bad without qualification” (1152b26–33), even though pleasure is the unimpeded activity of a natural state. To call a pleasure “bad without qualification” is to insist that it should be avoided, but allow that nonetheless it should be chosen in constraining circumstances. The pleasure of recovering from an illness, for example, is bad without qualification—meaning that it is not one of the pleasures one would ideally choose, if one could completely control one’s circumstances. Although it really is a pleasure and so something can be said in its favor, it is so inferior to other goods that ideally one ought to forego it. Nonetheless, it is a pleasure worth having—if one adds the qualification that it is only worth having in undesirable circumstances. The pleasure of recovering from an illness is good, because some small part of oneself is in a natural state and is acting without impediment; but it can also be called bad, if what one means by this is that one should avoid getting into a situation in which one experiences that pleasure. Aristotle indicates several times in VII.11–14 that merely to say that pleasure is a good does not do it enough justice; he also wants to say that the highest good is a pleasure. Here he is influenced by an idea expressed in the opening line of the Ethics: the good is that at which all things aim. In VII.13, he hints at the idea that all living things imitate the contemplative activity of god (1153b31–2). Plants and non-human animals seek to reproduce themselves because that is their way of participating in an unending series, and this is the closest they can come to the ceaseless thinking of the unmoved mover. Aristotle makes this point in several of his works (see for example De Anima 415a23–b7), and in Ethics X.7–8 he gives a full defense of the idea that the happiest human life resembles the life of a divine being. He conceives of god as a being who continually enjoys a “single and simple pleasure” (1154b26)—the pleasure of pure thought—whereas human beings, because of their complexity, grow weary of whatever they do. He will elaborate on these points in X.8; in VII.11–14, he appeals to his conception of divine activity only in order to defend the thesis that our highest good consists in a certain kind of pleasure. Human happiness does not consist in every kind of pleasure, but it does consist in one kind of pleasure—the pleasure felt by a human being who engages in theoretical activity and thereby imitates the pleasurable thinking of god. Book X offers a much more elaborate account of what pleasure is and what it is not. It is not a process, because processes go through developmental stages: building a temple is a process because the temple is not present all at once, but only comes into being through stages that unfold over time. By contrast, pleasure, like seeing and many other activities, is not something that comes into existence through a developmental process. If I am enjoying a conversation, for example, I do not need to wait until it is finished in order to feel pleased; I take pleasure in the activity all along the way. The defining nature of pleasure is that it is an activity that accompanies other activities, and in some sense brings them to completion. Pleasure occurs when something within us, having been brought into good condition, is activated in relation to an external object that is also in good condition. The pleasure of drawing, for example, requires both the development of drawing ability and an object of attention that is worth drawing. The conception of pleasure that Aristotle develops in Book X is obviously closely related to the analysis he gives in Book VII. But the theory proposed in the later Book brings out a point that had received too little attention earlier: pleasure is by its nature something that accompanies something else. It is not enough to say that it is what happens when we are in good condition and are active in unimpeded circumstances; one must add to that point the further idea that pleasure plays a certain role in complementing something other than itself. Drawing well and the pleasure of drawing well always occur together, and so they are easy to confuse, but Aristotle’s analysis in Book X emphasizes the importance of making this distinction. He says that pleasure completes the activity that it accompanies, but then adds, mysteriously, that it completes the activity in the manner of an end that is added on. In the translation of W.D. Ross, it “supervenes as the bloom of youth does on those in the flower of their age” (1174b33). It is unclear what thought is being expressed here, but perhaps Aristotle is merely trying to avoid a possible misunderstanding: when he says that pleasure completes an activity, he does not mean that the activity it accompanies is in some way defective, and that the pleasure improves the activity by removing this defect. Aristotle’s language is open to that misinterpretation because the verb that is translated “complete” (teleein) can also mean “perfect”. The latter might be taken to mean that the activity accompanied by pleasure has not yet reached a sufficiently high level of excellence, and that the role of pleasure is to bring it to the point of perfection. Aristotle does not deny that when we take pleasure in an activity we get better at it, but when he says that pleasure completes an activity by supervening on it, like the bloom that accompanies those who have achieved the highest point of physical beauty, his point is that the activity complemented by pleasure is already perfect, and the pleasure that accompanies it is a bonus that serves no further purpose. Taking pleasure in an activity does help us improve at it, but enjoyment does not cease when perfection is achieved—on the contrary, that is when pleasure is at its peak. That is when it reveals most fully what it is: an added bonus that crowns our achievement. It is clear, at any rate, that in Book X Aristotle gives a fuller account of what pleasure is than he had in Book VII. We should take note of a further difference between these two discussions: In Book X, he makes the point that pleasure is a good but not the good. He cites and endorses an argument given by Plato in the Philebus: If we imagine a life filled with pleasure and then mentally add wisdom to it, the result is made more desirable. But the good is something that cannot be improved upon in this way. Therefore pleasure is not the good (1172b23–35). By contrast, in Book VII Aristotle strongly implies that the pleasure of contemplation is the good, because in one way or another all living beings aim at this sort of pleasure. Aristotle observes in Book X that what all things aim at is good (1172b35–1173a1); significantly, he falls short of endorsing the argument that since all aim at pleasure, it must be the good. Book VII makes the point that pleasures interfere with each other, and so even if all kinds of pleasures are good, it does not follow that all of them are worth choosing. One must make a selection among pleasures by determining which are better. But how is one to make this choice? Book VII does not say, but in Book X, Aristotle holds that the selection of pleasures is not to be made with reference to pleasure itself, but with reference to the activities they accompany. Since activities differ with respect to goodness and badness, some being worth choosing, others worth avoiding, and others neither, the same is true of pleasures as well. (1175b24–6) Aristotle’s statement implies that in order to determine whether (for example) the pleasure of virtuous activity is more desirable than that of eating, we are not to attend to the pleasures themselves but to the activities with which we are pleased. A pleasure’s goodness derives from the goodness of its associated activity. And surely the reason why pleasure is not the criterion to which we should look in making these decisions is that it is not the good. The standard we should use in making comparisons between rival options is virtuous activity, because that has been shown to be identical to happiness. That is why Aristotle says that what is judged pleasant by a good man really is pleasant, because the good man is the measure of things (1176a15–19). He does not mean that the way to lead our lives is to search for a good man and continually rely on him to tell us what is pleasurable. Rather, his point is that there is no way of telling what is genuinely pleasurable (and therefore what is most pleasurable) unless we already have some other standard of value. Aristotle’s discussion of pleasure thus helps confirm his initial hypothesis that to live our lives well we must focus on one sort of good above all others: virtuous activity. It is the good in terms of which all other goods must be understood. Aristotle’s analysis of friendship supports the same conclusion. 9. Friendship The topic of Books VIII and IX of the Ethics is friendship. Although it is difficult to avoid the term “friendship” as a translation of “philia”, and this is an accurate term for the kind of relationship he is most interested in, we should bear in mind that he is discussing a wider range of phenomena than this translation might lead us to expect, for the Greeks use the term, “philia”, to name the relationship that holds among family members, and do not reserve it for voluntary relationships. Although Aristotle is interested in classifying the different forms that friendship takes, his main theme in Books VIII and IX is to show the close relationship between virtuous activity and friendship. He is vindicating his conception of happiness as virtuous activity by showing how satisfying are the relationships that a virtuous person can normally expect to have. His taxonomy begins with the premise that there are three main reasons why one person might like someone else. (The verb, “philein”, which is cognate to the noun “philia”, can sometimes be translated “like” or even “love”—though in other cases philia involves very little in the way of feeling.) One might like someone because he is good, or because he is useful, or because he is pleasant. And so there are three bases for friendships, depending on which of these qualities binds friends together. When two individuals recognize that the other person is someone of good character, and they spend time with each other, engaged in activities that exercise their virtues, then they form one kind of friendship. If they are equally virtuous, their friendship is perfect. If, however, there is a large gap in their moral development (as between a parent and a small child, or between a husband and a wife), then although their relationship may be based on the other person’s good character, it will be imperfect precisely because of their inequality. The imperfect friendships that Aristotle focuses on, however, are not unequal relationships based on good character. Rather, they are relationships held together because each individual regards the other as the source of some advantage to himself or some pleasure he receives. When Aristotle calls these relationships “imperfect”, he is tacitly relying on widely accepted assumptions about what makes a relationship satisfying. These friendships are defective, and have a smaller claim to be called “friendships”, because the individuals involved have little trust in each other, quarrel frequently, and are ready to break off their association abruptly. Aristotle does not mean to suggest that unequal relations based on the mutual recognition of good character are defective in these same ways. Rather, when he says that unequal relationships based on character are imperfect, his point is that people are friends in the fullest sense when they gladly spend their days together in shared activities, and this close and constant interaction is less available to those who are not equal in their moral development. When Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship, he introduces a notion that is central to his understanding of this phenomenon: a genuine friend is someone who loves or likes another person for the sake of that other person. Wanting what is good for the sake of another he calls “good will” (eunoia), and friendship is reciprocal good will, provided that each recognizes the presence of this attitude in the other. Does such good will exist in all three kinds of friendship, or is it confined to relationships based on virtue? At first, Aristotle leaves open the first of these two possibilities. He says: it is necessary that friends bear good will to each other and wish good things for each other, without this escaping their notice, because of one of the reasons mentioned. (1156a4–5) The reasons mentioned are goodness, pleasure, and advantage; and so it seems that Aristotle is leaving room for the idea that in all three kinds of friendships, even those based on advantage and pleasure alone, the individuals wish each other well for the sake of the other. But in fact, as Aristotle continues to develop his taxonomy, he does not choose to exploit this possibility. He speaks as though it is only in friendships based on character that one finds a desire to benefit the other person for the sake of the other person. Those who wish good things to their friends for the sake of the latter are friends most of all, because they do so because of their friends themselves, and not coincidentally. (1156b9–11) When one benefits someone not because of the kind of person he is, but only because of the advantages to oneself, then, Aristotle says, one is not a friend towards the other person, but only towards the profit that comes one’s way (1157a15–16). In such statements as these, Aristotle comes rather close to saying that relationships based on profit or pleasure should not be called friendships at all. But he decides to stay close to common parlance and to use the term “friend” loosely. Friendships based on character are the ones in which each person benefits the other for the sake of other; and these are friendships most of all. Because each party benefits the other, it is advantageous to form such friendships. And since each enjoys the trust and companionship of the other, there is considerable pleasure in these relationships as well. Because these perfect friendships produce advantages and pleasures for each of the parties, there is some basis for going along with common usage and calling any relationship entered into for the sake of just one of these goods a friendship. Friendships based on advantage alone or pleasure alone deserve to be called friendships because in full-fledged friendships these two properties, advantage and pleasure, are present. It is striking that in the Ethics Aristotle never thinks of saying that the uniting factor in all friendships is the desire each friend has for the good of the other. Aristotle does not raise questions about what it is to desire good for the sake of another person. He treats this as an easily understood phenomenon, and has no doubts about its existence. But it is also clear that he takes this motive to be compatible with a love of one’s own good and a desire for one’s own happiness. Someone who has practical wisdom will recognize that he needs friends and other resources in order to exercise his virtues over a long period of time. When he makes friends, and benefits friends he has made, he will be aware of the fact that such a relationship is good for him. And yet to have a friend is to want to benefit someone for that other person’s sake; it is not a merely self-interested strategy. Aristotle sees no difficulty here, and rightly so. For there is no reason why acts of friendship should not be undertaken partly for the good of one’s friend and partly for one’s own good. Acting for the sake of another does not in itself demand self-sacrifice. It requires caring about someone other than oneself, but does not demand some loss of care for oneself. For when we know how to benefit a friend for his sake, we exercise the ethical virtues, and this is precisely what our happiness consists in. Aristotle makes it clear that the number of people with whom one can sustain the kind of relationship he calls a perfect friendship is quite small (IX.10). Even if one lived in a city populated entirely by perfectly virtuous citizens, the number with whom one could carry on a friendship of the perfect type would be at most a handful. For he thinks that this kind of friendship can exist only when one spends a great deal of time with the other person, participating in joint activities and engaging in mutually beneficial behavior; and one cannot cooperate on these close terms with every member of the political community. One may well ask why this kind of close friendship is necessary for happiness. If one lived in a community filled with good people, and cooperated on an occasional basis with each of them, in a spirit of good will and admiration, would that not provide sufficient scope for virtuous activity and a well-lived life? Admittedly, close friends are often in a better position to benefit each other than are fellow citizens, who generally have little knowledge of one’s individual circumstances. But this only shows that it is advantageous to be on the receiving end of a friend’s help. The more important question for Aristotle is why one needs to be on the giving end of this relationship. And obviously the answer cannot be that one needs to give in order to receive; that would turn active love for one’s friend into a mere means to the benefits received. Aristotle attempts to answer this question in IX.11, but his treatment is disappointing. His fullest argument depends crucially on the notion that a friend is “another self”, someone, in other words, with whom one has a relationship very similar to the relationship one has with oneself. A virtuous person loves the recognition of himself as virtuous; to have a close friend is to possess yet another person, besides oneself, whose virtue one can recognize at extremely close quarters; and so, it must be desirable to have someone very much like oneself whose virtuous activity one can perceive. The argument is unconvincing because it does not explain why the perception of virtuous activity in fellow citizens would not be an adequate substitute for the perception of virtue in one’s friends. Aristotle would be on stronger grounds if he could show that in the absence of close friends one would be severely restricted in the kinds of virtuous activities one could undertake. But he cannot present such an argument, because he does not believe it. He says that it is “finer and more godlike” to bring about the well being of a whole city than to sustain the happiness of just one person (1094b7–10). He refuses to regard private life—the realm of the household and the small circle of one’s friends—as the best or most favorable location for the exercise of virtue. He is convinced that the loss of this private sphere would greatly detract from a well-lived life, but he is hard put to explain why. He might have done better to focus on the benefits of being the object of a close friend’s solicitude. Just as property is ill cared for when it is owned by all, and just as a child would be poorly nurtured were he to receive no special parental care—points Aristotle makes in Politics II.2–5—so in the absence of friendship we would lose a benefit that could not be replaced by the care of the larger community. But Aristotle is not looking for a defense of this sort, because he conceives of friendship as lying primarily in activity rather than receptivity. It is difficult, within his framework, to show that virtuous activity towards a friend is a uniquely important good. Since Aristotle thinks that the pursuit of one’s own happiness, properly understood, requires ethically virtuous activity and will therefore be of great value not only to one’s friends but to the larger political community as well, he argues that self-love is an entirely proper emotion—provided it is expressed in the love of virtue (IX.8). Self-love is rightly condemned when it consists in the pursuit of as large a share of external goods—particularly wealth and power—as one can acquire, because such self-love inevitably brings one into conflict with others and undermines the stability of the political community. It may be tempting to cast Aristotle’s defense of self-love into modern terms by calling him an egoist, and “egoism” is a broad enough term so that, properly defined, it can be made to fit Aristotle’s ethical outlook. If egoism is the thesis that one will always act rightly if one consults one’s self-interest, properly understood, then nothing would be amiss in identifying him as an egoist. But egoism is sometimes understood in a stronger sense. Just as consequentialism is the thesis that one should maximize the general good, whatever the good turns out to be, so egoism can be defined as the parallel thesis that one should maximize one’s own good, whatever the good turns out to be. Egoism, in other words, can be treated as a purely formal thesis: it holds that whether the good is pleasure, or virtue, or the satisfaction of desires, one should not attempt to maximize the total amount of good in the world, but only one’s own. When egoism takes this abstract form, it is an expression of the idea that the claims of others are never worth attending to, unless in some way or other their good can be shown to serve one’s own. The only underived reason for action is self-interest; that an act helps another does not by itself provide a reason for performing it, unless some connection can be made between the good of that other and one’s own. There is no reason to attribute this extreme form of egoism to Aristotle. On the contrary, his defense of self-love makes it clear that he is not willing to defend the bare idea that one ought to love oneself alone or above others; he defends self-love only when this emotion is tied to the correct theory of where one’s good lies, for it is only in this way that he can show that self-love need not be a destructive passion. He takes it for granted that self-love is properly condemned whenever it can be shown to be harmful to the community. It is praiseworthy only if it can be shown that a self-lover will be an admirable citizen. In making this assumption, Aristotle reveals that he thinks that the claims of other members of the community to proper treatment are intrinsically valid. This is precisely what a strong form of egoism cannot accept. We should also keep in mind Aristotle’s statement in the Politics that the political community is prior to the individual citizen—just as the whole body is prior to any of its parts (1253a18–29). Aristotle makes use of this claim when he proposes that in the ideal community each child should receive the same education, and that the responsibility for providing such an education should be taken out of the hands of private individuals and made a matter of common concern (1337a21–7). No citizen, he says, belongs to himself; all belong to the city (1337a28–9). What he means is that when it comes to such matters as education, which affect the good of all, each individual should be guided by the collective decisions of the whole community. An individual citizen does not belong to himself, in the sense that it is not up to him alone to determine how he should act; he should subordinate his individual decision-making powers to those of the whole. The strong form of egoism we have been discussing cannot accept Aristotle’s doctrine of the priority of the city to the individual. It tells the individual that the good of others has, in itself, no valid claim on him, but that he should serve other members of the community only to the extent that he can connect their interests to his own. Such a doctrine leaves no room for the thought that the individual citizen does not belong to himself but to the whole. 10. Three Lives Compared In Book I Aristotle says that three kinds of lives are thought to be especially attractive: one is devoted to pleasure, a second to politics, and a third to knowledge and understanding (1095b17–19). In X.6–9 he returns to these three alternatives, and explores them more fully than he had in Book I. The life of pleasure is construed in Book I as a life devoted to physical pleasure, and is quickly dismissed because of its vulgarity. In X.6, Aristotle concedes that physical pleasures, and more generally, amusements of all sorts, are desirable in themselves, and therefore have some claim to be our ultimate end. But his discussion of happiness in Book X does not start from scratch; he builds on his thesis that pleasure cannot be our ultimate target, because what counts as pleasant must be judged by some standard other than pleasure itself, namely the judgment of the virtuous person. Amusements will not be absent from a happy life, since everyone needs relaxation, and amusements fill this need. But they play a subordinate role, because we seek relaxation in order to return to more important activities. Aristotle turns therefore, in X.7–8, to the two remaining alternatives—politics and philosophy—and presents a series of arguments to show that the philosophical life, a life devoted to theoria (contemplation, study), is best. Theoria is not the process of learning that leads to understanding; that process is not a candidate for our ultimate end, because it is undertaken for the sake of a further goal. What Aristotle has in mind when he talks about theoria is the activity of someone who has already achieved theoretical wisdom. The happiest life is lived by someone who has a full understanding of the basic causal principles that govern the operation of the universe, and who has the resources needed for living a life devoted to the exercise of that understanding. Evidently Aristotle believes that his own life and that of his philosophical friends was the best available to a human being. He compares it to the life of a god: god thinks without interruption and endlessly, and a philosopher enjoys something similar for a limited period of time. It may seem odd that after devoting so much attention to the practical virtues, Aristotle should conclude his treatise with the thesis that the best activity of the best life is not ethical. In fact, some scholars have held that X.7–8 are deeply at odds with the rest of the Ethics; they take Aristotle to be saying that we should be prepared to act unethically, if need be, in order to devote ourselves as much as possible to contemplation. But it is difficult to believe that he intends to reverse himself so abruptly, and there are many indications that he intends the arguments of X.7–8 to be continuous with the themes he emphasizes throughout the rest of the Ethics. The best way to understand him is to take him to be assuming that one will need the ethical virtues in order to live the life of a philosopher, even though exercising those virtues is not the philosopher’s ultimate end. To be adequately equipped to live a life of thought and discussion, one will need practical wisdom, temperance, justice, and the other ethical virtues. To say that there is something better even than ethical activity, and that ethical activity promotes this higher goal, is entirely compatible with everything else that we find in the Ethics. Although Aristotle’s principal goal in X.7–8 is to show the superiority of philosophy to politics, he does not deny that a political life is happy. Perfect happiness, he says, consists in contemplation; but he indicates that the life devoted to practical thought and ethical virtue is happy in a secondary way. He thinks of this second-best life as that of a political leader, because he assumes that the person who most fully exercises such qualities as justice and greatness of soul is the man who has the large resources needed to promote the common good of the city. The political life has a major defect, despite the fact that it consists in fully exercising the ethical virtues, because it is a life devoid of philosophical understanding and activity. Were someone to combine both careers, practicing politics at certain times and engaged in philosophical discussion at other times (as Plato’s philosopher-kings do), he would lead a life better than that of Aristotle’s politician, but worse than that of Aristotle’s philosopher. But his complaint about the political life is not simply that it is devoid of philosophical activity. The points he makes against it reveal drawbacks inherent in ethical and political activity. Perhaps the most telling of these defects is that the life of the political leader is in a certain sense unleisurely (1177b4–15). What Aristotle has in mind when he makes this complaint is that ethical activities are remedial: they are needed when something has gone wrong, or threatens to do so. Courage, for example, is exercised in war, and war remedies an evil; it is not something we should wish for. Aristotle implies that all other political activities have the same feature, although perhaps to a smaller degree. Corrective justice would provide him with further evidence for his thesis—but what of justice in the distribution of goods? Perhaps Aristotle would reply that in existing political communities a virtuous person must accommodate himself to the least bad method of distribution, because, human nature being what it is, a certain amount of injustice must be tolerated. As the courageous person cannot be completely satisfied with his courageous action, no matter how much self-mastery it shows, because he is a peace-lover and not a killer, so the just person living in the real world must experience some degree of dissatisfaction with his attempts to give each person his due. The pleasures of exercising the ethical virtues are, in normal circumstances, mixed with pain. Unalloyed pleasure is available to us only when we remove ourselves from the all-too-human world and contemplate the rational order of the cosmos. No human life can consist solely in these pure pleasures; and in certain circumstances one may owe it to one’s community to forego a philosophical life and devote oneself to the good of the city. But the paradigms of human happiness are those people who are lucky enough to devote much of their time to the study of a world more orderly than the human world we inhabit. Although Aristotle argues for the superiority of the philosophical life in X.7–8, he says in X.9, the final chapter of the Ethics, that his project is not yet complete, because we can make human beings virtuous, or good even to some small degree, only if we undertake a study of the art of legislation. The final section of the Ethics is therefore intended as a prolegomenon to Aristotle’s political writings. We must investigate the kinds of political systems exhibited by existing Greek cities, the forces that destroy or preserve cities, and the best sort of political order. Although the study of virtue Aristotle has just completed is meant to be helpful to all human beings who have been brought up well—even those who have no intention of pursuing a political career—it is also designed to serve a larger purpose. Human beings cannot achieve happiness, or even something that approximates happiness, unless they live in communities that foster good habits and provide the basic equipment of a well-lived life. The study of the human good has therefore led to two conclusions: The best life is not to be found in the practice of politics. But the well being of whole communities depends on the willingness of some to lead a second-best life—a life devoted to the study and practice of the art of politics, and to the expression of those qualities of thought and passion that exhibit our rational self-mastery. Glossary appearances: phainomena beautiful: kalon clear: saphes complete (verb, also: to perfect): telein condition: hexis continence (literally: mastery): enkrateia continent: enkratês disposition: hexis emotion: pathos evil: kakos, phaulos excellence: aretê feeling: pathos fine: kalon flourishing: eudaimonia friendship: philia; philein (the verb cognate to the noun “philia”, can sometimes be translated “like” or even “love”) function: ergon good will: eunoia happiness: eudaimonia happy: eudaimon impetuosity: propeteia incontinence (literally: lack of mastery): akrasia incontinent: akratês intuitive understanding: nous live well: eu zên practical wisdom: phronêsis science: epistêmê standard: horos state: hexis task: ergon virtue: aretê weakness: astheneia work: ergon Further Reading A. Single-Authored Overviews Broadie 1991; Bostock 2000; Burger 2008; Gauthier & Jolif 1958–59; Hall 2019; Hardie 1980; Pakaluk 2005; Price 2011; Reeve 2012a; Urmson 1987. B. Anthologies Anton & Preus (eds.) 1991; Barnes, Schofield, & Sorabji (eds.) 1977; Bartlett & Collins (eds.) 1999; Engstrom & Whiting (eds.) 1996; Heinaman (ed.) 1995; Kraut (ed.) 2006b; Miller (ed.) 2011; Natali (ed.) 2009; Pakaluk & Pearson (eds.) 2010; Polansky (ed.) 2014; Roche (ed.) 1988c; Rorty (ed.) 1980; Sherman (ed.) 1999; Sim (ed.) 1995. C. Studies of Particular Topics C.1 The Chronological Order of Aristotle’s Ethical Treatises Kenny 1978, 1979, 1992; Rowe 1971. C.2 The Methodology and Metaphysics of Ethical Theory Barnes 1980; Berryman 2019; J.M. Cooper 1999 (ch. 12); Frede 2012; Heinaman (ed.) 1995; Irwin 1988b; Karbowski 2014b, 2015a, 2015b, 2019; Kontos 2011; Kraut 1998; McDowell 1995; Nussbaum 1985, 1986 (chs 8–9); Reeve 1992 (ch. 1), 2012b; Roche 1988b, 1992; Scott 2015; Segvic 2002; Shields 2012a; Zingano 2007b. C.3 The Human Good and the Human Function Annas 1993 (ch. 18); Barney 2008; Broadie 2005, 2007a; Charles 1999; Clark 1975 (14–27, 145–63); J.M. Cooper 1986 (chs 1, 3), 1999 (chs 9, 13); Curzer 1991; Gadamer 1986; Gerson 2004; Gomez-Lobo 1989; Heinaman 2002, 2007; Irwin 2012; Keyt 1978; Korsgaard 1986a, 1986b; Kraut 1979a, 1979b, 1989, 2002 (ch. 3); Lawrence 1993, 1997, 2001; G.R. Lear 2000; J. Lear 2000; MacDonald 1989; Natali 2010; Nussbaum 1986 (chs 11, 12); Purinton 1998; Reeve 1992 (chs 3, 4); Roche 1988a; Santas 2001 (chs 6–7); Scott 1999, 2000; Segvic 2004; Suits 1974; Van Cleemput 2006; Wedin 1981; N. White 2002, 2006; S. White 1992; Whiting 1986, 1988; Wielenberg 2004; Williams 1985 (ch. 3). C.4 The Nature of Virtue and Accounts of Particular Virtues Brickhouse 2003; Brown 1997; Brunschwig 1996; Clark 1975 (84–97); N. Cooper 1989; Curzer 1990, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2005, 2012; Di Muzio 2000; Gardiner 2001; Gottlieb 1991, 1994a, 1994b, 1996, 2009; Halper 1999; Hardie 1978; Hursthouse 1988; Hutchinson 1986; Irwin 1988a; Jimenez 2020; Kraut 2002 (ch. 4), 2012, 2013; Leunissen 2012, 2013, 2017; Lorenz 2009; McKerlie 2001; Pakaluk 2004; Pearson 2006, 2007; Peterson 1988; Russell 2012a; Santas 2001 (ch. 8); Scaltsas 1995; Schütrumpf 1989; Sherman 1989, 1997; Sim 2007; Taylor 2004; Telfer 1989–90; Tuozzo 1995; Whiting 1996; Young 1988; Yu 2007. C.5 Practical Reasoning, Moral Psychology, and Action Broadie 1998; Charles 1984, 2007; Coope 2012; J. Cooper 1986 (ch. 1), 1999 (chs 10, 11, 19); Dahl 1984; Destrée 2007; Engberg-Pedersen 1983; Fortenbaugh 1975; Gottlieb, 2021; Gröngross 2007; Hursthouse 1984; Kontos 2018; Kontos 2021; Kraut 2006a; Lorenz 2006; McDowell 1996a, 1996b, 1998; McKerlie 1998; Meyer 1993; Milo 1966; Moss 2011, 2012; Natali (ed.) 2009; Nussbaum 1986 (ch. 10); Olfert 2017; Pakaluk & Pearson (eds.) 2010; Pickavé & Whiting 2008; Politis 1998; Reeve 1992 (ch. 2), 2013; Segvic 2009a; Sherman 2000; Taylor 2003b; Walsh 1963; Zingano 2007a. C.6 Pleasure Gosling &Taylor 1982 (chs 11–17); Gottlieb 1993; Natali (ed.) 2009; Owen 1971; Pearson 2012; Rorty 1974; Taylor 2003a, 2003b; Urmson 1967; Warren 2009; Wolfsdorf 2013 (ch. 6). C.7 Friendship Annas 1977, 1993 (ch. 12); Brewer 2005; J.M. Cooper 1999 (chs 14, 15); Hitz 2011; Kahn 1981; Milgram 1987; Nehamas 2010; Pakaluk 1998; Pangle 2003; Price 1989 (chs 4–7); Rogers 1994; Schollmeier 1994; Sherman 1987; Stern-Gillet 1995; Walker 2014; Whiting 1991. C.8 Feminism and Aristotle Freeland 1998; Karbowski 2014a; Modrak 1994; Ward (ed.) 1996. C.9 Aristotle and Contemporary Ethics Bielskis 2020; Broadie 2006; Chappell (ed.) 2006; Garver 2006; Gill (ed.) 2005; Kraut 2018; LeBar 2013; MacIntyre 1999; Peters 2014; Russell 2012b; Stohr 2003, 2009; Wiggins 2009.

Virtue EthicsFirst published Fri Jul 18, 2003; substantive revision Tue Oct 11, 2022 Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent. This is not to say that only virtue ethicists attend to virtues, any more than it is to say that only consequentialists attend to consequences or only deontologists to rules. Each of the above-mentioned approaches can make room for virtues, consequences, and rules. Indeed, any plausible normative ethical theory will have something to say about all three. What distinguishes virtue ethics from consequentialism or deontology is the centrality of virtue within the theory (Watson 1990; Kawall 2009). Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions will be grounded in them. We begin by discussing two concepts that are central to all forms of virtue ethics, namely, virtue and practical wisdom. Then we note some of the features that distinguish different virtue ethical theories from one another before turning to objections that have been raised against virtue ethics and responses offered on its behalf. We conclude with a look at some of the directions in which future research might develop. 1. Preliminaries 1.1 Virtue 1.2 Practical Wisdom 2. Forms of Virtue Ethics 2.1 Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics 2.2 Agent-Based and Exemplarist Virtue Ethics 2.3 Target-Centered Virtue Ethics 2.4 Platonistic Virtue Ethics 3. Objections to virtue ethics 4. Future Directions Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. Preliminaries In the West, virtue ethics’ founding fathers are Plato and Aristotle, and in the East it can be traced back to Mencius and Confucius. It persisted as the dominant approach in Western moral philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, suffered a momentary eclipse during the nineteenth century, but re-emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s. It was heralded by Anscombe’s famous article “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe 1958) which crystallized an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing. Neither of them, at that time, paid attention to a number of topics that had always figured in the virtue ethics tradition—virtues and vices, motives and moral character, moral education, moral wisdom or discernment, friendship and family relationships, a deep concept of happiness, the role of the emotions in our moral life and the fundamentally important questions of what sorts of persons we should be and how we should live. Its re-emergence had an invigorating effect on the other two approaches, many of whose proponents then began to address these topics in the terms of their favoured theory. (One consequence of this has been that it is now necessary to distinguish “virtue ethics” (the third approach) from “virtue theory”, a term which includes accounts of virtue within the other approaches.) Interest in Kant’s virtue theory has redirected philosophers’ attention to Kant’s long neglected Doctrine of Virtue, and utilitarians have developed consequentialist virtue theories (Driver 2001; Hurka 2001). It has also generated virtue ethical readings of philosophers other than Plato and Aristotle, such as Martineau, Hume and Nietzsche, and thereby different forms of virtue ethics have developed (Slote 2001; Swanton 2003, 2011a). Although modern virtue ethics does not have to take a “neo-Aristotelian” or eudaimonist form (see section 2), almost any modern version still shows that its roots are in ancient Greek philosophy by the employment of three concepts derived from it. These are arête (excellence or virtue), phronesis (practical or moral wisdom) and eudaimonia (usually translated as happiness or flourishing). (See Annas 2011 for a short, clear, and authoritative account of all three.) We discuss the first two in the remainder of this section. Eudaimonia is discussed in connection with eudaimonist versions of virtue ethics in the next. 1.1 Virtue A virtue is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition, well entrenched in its possessor—something that, as we say, goes all the way down, unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker—to notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react in certain characteristic ways. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset. A significant aspect of this mindset is the wholehearted acceptance of a distinctive range of considerations as reasons for action. An honest person cannot be identified simply as one who, for example, practices honest dealing and does not cheat. If such actions are done merely because the agent thinks that honesty is the best policy, or because they fear being caught out, rather than through recognising “To do otherwise would be dishonest” as the relevant reason, they are not the actions of an honest person. An honest person cannot be identified simply as one who, for example, tells the truth because it is the truth, for one can have the virtue of honesty without being tactless or indiscreet. The honest person recognises “That would be a lie” as a strong (though perhaps not overriding) reason for not making certain statements in certain circumstances, and gives due, but not overriding, weight to “That would be the truth” as a reason for making them. An honest person’s reasons and choices with respect to honest and dishonest actions reflect her views about honesty, truth, and deception—but of course such views manifest themselves with respect to other actions, and to emotional reactions as well. Valuing honesty as she does, she chooses, where possible to work with honest people, to have honest friends, to bring up her children to be honest. She disapproves of, dislikes, deplores dishonesty, is not amused by certain tales of chicanery, despises or pities those who succeed through deception rather than thinking they have been clever, is unsurprised, or pleased (as appropriate) when honesty triumphs, is shocked or distressed when those near and dear to her do what is dishonest and so on. Given that a virtue is such a multi-track disposition, it would obviously be reckless to attribute one to an agent on the basis of a single observed action or even a series of similar actions, especially if you don’t know the agent’s reasons for doing as she did (Sreenivasan 2002). Possessing a virtue is a matter of degree. To possess such a disposition fully is to possess full or perfect virtue, which is rare, and there are a number of ways of falling short of this ideal (Athanassoulis 2000). Most people who can truly be described as fairly virtuous, and certainly markedly better than those who can truly be described as dishonest, self-centred and greedy, still have their blind spots—little areas where they do not act for the reasons one would expect. So someone honest or kind in most situations, and notably so in demanding ones, may nevertheless be trivially tainted by snobbery, inclined to be disingenuous about their forebears and less than kind to strangers with the wrong accent. Further, it is not easy to get one’s emotions in harmony with one’s rational recognition of certain reasons for action. I may be honest enough to recognise that I must own up to a mistake because it would be dishonest not to do so without my acceptance being so wholehearted that I can own up easily, with no inner conflict. Following (and adapting) Aristotle, virtue ethicists draw a distinction between full or perfect virtue and “continence”, or strength of will. The fully virtuous do what they should without a struggle against contrary desires; the continent have to control a desire or temptation to do otherwise. Describing the continent as “falling short” of perfect virtue appears to go against the intuition that there is something particularly admirable about people who manage to act well when it is especially hard for them to do so, but the plausibility of this depends on exactly what “makes it hard” (Foot 1978: 11–14). If it is the circumstances in which the agent acts—say that she is very poor when she sees someone drop a full purse or that she is in deep grief when someone visits seeking help—then indeed it is particularly admirable of her to restore the purse or give the help when it is hard for her to do so. But if what makes it hard is an imperfection in her character—the temptation to keep what is not hers, or a callous indifference to the suffering of others—then it is not. 1.2 Practical Wisdom Another way in which one can easily fall short of full virtue is through lacking phronesis—moral or practical wisdom. The concept of a virtue is the concept of something that makes its possessor good: a virtuous person is a morally good, excellent or admirable person who acts and feels as she should. These are commonly accepted truisms. But it is equally common, in relation to particular (putative) examples of virtues to give these truisms up. We may say of someone that he is generous or honest “to a fault”. It is commonly asserted that someone’s compassion might lead them to act wrongly, to tell a lie they should not have told, for example, in their desire to prevent someone else’s hurt feelings. It is also said that courage, in a desperado, enables him to do far more wicked things than he would have been able to do if he were timid. So it would appear that generosity, honesty, compassion and courage despite being virtues, are sometimes faults. Someone who is generous, honest, compassionate, and courageous might not be a morally good person—or, if it is still held to be a truism that they are, then morally good people may be led by what makes them morally good to act wrongly! How have we arrived at such an odd conclusion? The answer lies in too ready an acceptance of ordinary usage, which permits a fairly wide-ranging application of many of the virtue terms, combined, perhaps, with a modern readiness to suppose that the virtuous agent is motivated by emotion or inclination, not by rational choice. If one thinks of generosity or honesty as the disposition to be moved to action by generous or honest impulses such as the desire to give or to speak the truth, if one thinks of compassion as the disposition to be moved by the sufferings of others and to act on that emotion, if one thinks of courage as mere fearlessness or the willingness to face danger, then it will indeed seem obvious that these are all dispositions that can lead to their possessor’s acting wrongly. But it is also obvious, as soon as it is stated, that these are dispositions that can be possessed by children, and although children thus endowed (bar the “courageous” disposition) would undoubtedly be very nice children, we would not say that they were morally virtuous or admirable people. The ordinary usage, or the reliance on motivation by inclination, gives us what Aristotle calls “natural virtue”—a proto version of full virtue awaiting perfection by phronesis or practical wisdom. Aristotle makes a number of specific remarks about phronesis that are the subject of much scholarly debate, but the (related) modern concept is best understood by thinking of what the virtuous morally mature adult has that nice children, including nice adolescents, lack. Both the virtuous adult and the nice child have good intentions, but the child is much more prone to mess things up because he is ignorant of what he needs to know in order to do what he intends. A virtuous adult is not, of course, infallible and may also, on occasion, fail to do what she intended to do through lack of knowledge, but only on those occasions on which the lack of knowledge is not culpable. So, for example, children and adolescents often harm those they intend to benefit either because they do not know how to set about securing the benefit or because their understanding of what is beneficial and harmful is limited and often mistaken. Such ignorance in small children is rarely, if ever culpable. Adults, on the other hand, are culpable if they mess things up by being thoughtless, insensitive, reckless, impulsive, shortsighted, and by assuming that what suits them will suit everyone instead of taking a more objective viewpoint. They are also culpable if their understanding of what is beneficial and harmful is mistaken. It is part of practical wisdom to know how to secure real benefits effectively; those who have practical wisdom will not make the mistake of concealing the hurtful truth from the person who really needs to know it in the belief that they are benefiting him. Quite generally, given that good intentions are intentions to act well or “do the right thing”, we may say that practical wisdom is the knowledge or understanding that enables its possessor, unlike the nice adolescents, to do just that, in any given situation. The detailed specification of what is involved in such knowledge or understanding has not yet appeared in the literature, but some aspects of it are becoming well known. Even many deontologists now stress the point that their action-guiding rules cannot, reliably, be applied without practical wisdom, because correct application requires situational appreciation—the capacity to recognise, in any particular situation, those features of it that are morally salient. This brings out two aspects of practical wisdom. One is that it characteristically comes only with experience of life. Amongst the morally relevant features of a situation may be the likely consequences, for the people involved, of a certain action, and this is something that adolescents are notoriously clueless about precisely because they are inexperienced. It is part of practical wisdom to be wise about human beings and human life. (It should go without saying that the virtuous are mindful of the consequences of possible actions. How could they fail to be reckless, thoughtless and short-sighted if they were not?) The second is the practically wise agent’s capacity to recognise some features of a situation as more important than others, or indeed, in that situation, as the only relevant ones. The wise do not see things in the same way as the nice adolescents who, with their under-developed virtues, still tend to see the personally disadvantageous nature of a certain action as competing in importance with its honesty or benevolence or justice. These aspects coalesce in the description of the practically wise as those who understand what is truly worthwhile, truly important, and thereby truly advantageous in life, who know, in short, how to live well. 2. Forms of Virtue Ethics While all forms of virtue ethics agree that virtue is central and practical wisdom required, they differ in how they combine these and other concepts to illuminate what we should do in particular contexts and how we should live our lives as a whole. In what follows we sketch four distinct forms taken by contemporary virtue ethics, namely, a) eudaimonist virtue ethics, b) agent-based and exemplarist virtue ethics, c) target-centered virtue ethics, and d) Platonistic virtue ethics. 2.1 Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics The distinctive feature of eudaimonist versions of virtue ethics is that they define virtues in terms of their relationship to eudaimonia. A virtue is a trait that contributes to or is a constituent of eudaimonia and we ought to develop virtues, the eudaimonist claims, precisely because they contribute to eudaimonia. The concept of eudaimonia, a key term in ancient Greek moral philosophy, is standardly translated as “happiness” or “flourishing” and occasionally as “well-being.” Each translation has its disadvantages. The trouble with “flourishing” is that animals and even plants can flourish but eudaimonia is possible only for rational beings. The trouble with “happiness” is that in ordinary conversation it connotes something subjectively determined. It is for me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy. If I think I am happy then I am—it is not something I can be wrong about (barring advanced cases of self-deception). Contrast my being healthy or flourishing. Here we have no difficulty in recognizing that I might think I was healthy, either physically or psychologically, or think that I was flourishing but be wrong. In this respect, “flourishing” is a better translation than “happiness”. It is all too easy to be mistaken about whether one’s life is eudaimon (the adjective from eudaimonia) not simply because it is easy to deceive oneself, but because it is easy to have a mistaken conception of eudaimonia, or of what it is to live well as a human being, believing it to consist largely in physical pleasure or luxury for example. Eudaimonia is, avowedly, a moralized or value-laden concept of happiness, something like “true” or “real” happiness or “the sort of happiness worth seeking or having.” It is thereby the sort of concept about which there can be substantial disagreement between people with different views about human life that cannot be resolved by appeal to some external standard on which, despite their different views, the parties to the disagreement concur (Hursthouse 1999: 188–189). Most versions of virtue ethics agree that living a life in accordance with virtue is necessary for eudaimonia. This supreme good is not conceived of as an independently defined state (made up of, say, a list of non-moral goods that does not include virtuous activity) which exercise of the virtues might be thought to promote. It is, within virtue ethics, already conceived of as something of which virtuous activity is at least partially constitutive (Kraut 1989). Thereby virtue ethicists claim that a human life devoted to physical pleasure or the acquisition of wealth is not eudaimon, but a wasted life. But although all standard versions of virtue ethics insist on that conceptual link between virtue and eudaimonia, further links are matters of dispute and generate different versions. For Aristotle, virtue is necessary but not sufficient—what is also needed are external goods which are a matter of luck. For Plato and the Stoics, virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia (Annas 1993). According to eudaimonist virtue ethics, the good life is the eudaimon life, and the virtues are what enable a human being to be eudaimon because the virtues just are those character traits that benefit their possessor in that way, barring bad luck. So there is a link between eudaimonia and what confers virtue status on a character trait. (For a discussion of the differences between eudaimonists see Baril 2014. For recent defenses of eudaimonism see Annas 2011; LeBar 2013b; Badhwar 2014; and Bloomfield 2014.) 2.2 Agent-Based and Exemplarist Virtue Ethics Rather than deriving the normativity of virtue from the value of eudaimonia, agent-based virtue ethicists argue that other forms of normativity—including the value of eudaimonia—are traced back to and ultimately explained in terms of the motivational and dispositional qualities of agents. It is unclear how many other forms of normativity must be explained in terms of the qualities of agents in order for a theory to count as agent-based. The two best-known agent-based theorists, Michael Slote and Linda Zagzebski, trace a wide range of normative qualities back to the qualities of agents. For example, Slote defines rightness and wrongness in terms of agents’ motivations: “[A]gent-based virtue ethics … understands rightness in terms of good motivations and wrongness in terms of the having of bad (or insufficiently good) motives” (2001: 14). Similarly, he explains the goodness of an action, the value of eudaimonia, the justice of a law or social institution, and the normativity of practical rationality in terms of the motivational and dispositional qualities of agents (2001: 99–100, 154, 2000). Zagzebski likewise defines right and wrong actions by reference to the emotions, motives, and dispositions of virtuous and vicious agents. For example, “A wrong act = an act that the phronimos characteristically would not do, and he would feel guilty if he did = an act such that it is not the case that he might do it = an act that expresses a vice = an act that is against a requirement of virtue (the virtuous self)” (Zagzebski 2004: 160). Her definitions of duties, good and bad ends, and good and bad states of affairs are similarly grounded in the motivational and dispositional states of exemplary agents (1998, 2004, 2010). However, there could also be less ambitious agent-based approaches to virtue ethics (see Slote 1997). At the very least, an agent-based approach must be committed to explaining what one should do by reference to the motivational and dispositional states of agents. But this is not yet a sufficient condition for counting as an agent-based approach, since the same condition will be met by every virtue ethical account. For a theory to count as an agent-based form of virtue ethics it must also be the case that the normative properties of motivations and dispositions cannot be explained in terms of the normative properties of something else (such as eudaimonia or states of affairs) which is taken to be more fundamental. Beyond this basic commitment, there is room for agent-based theories to be developed in a number of different directions. The most important distinguishing factor has to do with how motivations and dispositions are taken to matter for the purposes of explaining other normative qualities. For Slote what matters are this particular agent’s actual motives and dispositions. The goodness of action A, for example, is derived from the agent’s motives when she performs A. If those motives are good then the action is good, if not then not. On Zagzebski’s account, by contrast, a good or bad, right or wrong action is defined not by this agent’s actual motives but rather by whether this is the sort of action a virtuously motivated agent would perform (Zagzebski 2004: 160). Appeal to the virtuous agent’s hypothetical motives and dispositions enables Zagzebski to distinguish between performing the right action and doing so for the right reasons (a distinction that, as Brady (2004) observes, Slote has trouble drawing). Another point on which agent-based forms of virtue ethics might differ concerns how one identifies virtuous motivations and dispositions. According to Zagzebski’s exemplarist account, “We do not have criteria for goodness in advance of identifying the exemplars of goodness” (Zagzebski 2004: 41). As we observe the people around us, we find ourselves wanting to be like some of them (in at least some respects) and not wanting to be like others. The former provide us with positive exemplars and the latter with negative ones. Our understanding of better and worse motivations and virtuous and vicious dispositions is grounded in these primitive responses to exemplars (2004: 53). This is not to say that every time we act we stop and ask ourselves what one of our exemplars would do in this situations. Our moral concepts become more refined over time as we encounter a wider variety of exemplars and begin to draw systematic connections between them, noting what they have in common, how they differ, and which of these commonalities and differences matter, morally speaking. Recognizable motivational profiles emerge and come to be labeled as virtues or vices, and these, in turn, shape our understanding of the obligations we have and the ends we should pursue. However, even though the systematising of moral thought can travel a long way from our starting point, according to the exemplarist it never reaches a stage where reference to exemplars is replaced by the recognition of something more fundamental. At the end of the day, according to the exemplarist, our moral system still rests on our basic propensity to take a liking (or disliking) to exemplars. Nevertheless, one could be an agent-based theorist without advancing the exemplarist’s account of the origins or reference conditions for judgments of good and bad, virtuous and vicious. 2.3 Target-Centered Virtue Ethics The touchstone for eudaimonist virtue ethicists is a flourishing human life. For agent-based virtue ethicists it is an exemplary agent’s motivations. The target-centered view developed by Christine Swanton (2003), by contrast, begins with our existing conceptions of the virtues. We already have a passable idea of which traits are virtues and what they involve. Of course, this untutored understanding can be clarified and improved, and it is one of the tasks of the virtue ethicist to help us do precisely that. But rather than stripping things back to something as basic as the motivations we want to imitate or building it up to something as elaborate as an entire flourishing life, the target-centered view begins where most ethics students find themselves, namely, with the idea that generosity, courage, self-discipline, compassion, and the like get a tick of approval. It then examines what these traits involve. A complete account of virtue will map out 1) its field, 2) its mode of responsiveness, 3) its basis of moral acknowledgment, and 4) its target. Different virtues are concerned with different fields. Courage, for example, is concerned with what might harm us, whereas generosity is concerned with the sharing of time, talent, and property. The basis of acknowledgment of a virtue is the feature within the virtue’s field to which it responds. To continue with our previous examples, generosity is attentive to the benefits that others might enjoy through one’s agency, and courage responds to threats to value, status, or the bonds that exist between oneself and particular others, and the fear such threats might generate. A virtue’s mode has to do with how it responds to the bases of acknowledgment within its field. Generosity promotes a good, namely, another’s benefit, whereas courage defends a value, bond, or status. Finally, a virtue’s target is that at which it is aimed. Courage aims to control fear and handle danger, while generosity aims to share time, talents, or possessions with others in ways that benefit them. A virtue, on a target-centered account, “is a disposition to respond to, or acknowledge, items within its field or fields in an excellent or good enough way” (Swanton 2003: 19). A virtuous act is an act that hits the target of a virtue, which is to say that it succeeds in responding to items in its field in the specified way (233). Providing a target-centered definition of a right action requires us to move beyond the analysis of a single virtue and the actions that follow from it. This is because a single action context may involve a number of different, overlapping fields. Determination might lead me to persist in trying to complete a difficult task even if doing so requires a singleness of purpose. But love for my family might make a different use of my time and attention. In order to define right action a target-centered view must explain how we handle different virtues’ conflicting claims on our resources. There are at least three different ways to address this challenge. A perfectionist target-centered account would stipulate, “An act is right if and only if it is overall virtuous, and that entails that it is the, or a, best action possible in the circumstances” (239–240). A more permissive target-centered account would not identify ‘right’ with ‘best’, but would allow an action to count as right provided “it is good enough even if not the (or a) best action” (240). A minimalist target-centered account would not even require an action to be good in order to be right. On such a view, “An act is right if and only if it is not overall vicious” (240). (For further discussion of target-centered virtue ethics see Van Zyl 2014; and Smith 2016). 2.4 Platonistic Virtue Ethics The fourth form a virtue ethic might adopt takes its inspiration from Plato. The Socrates of Plato’s dialogues devotes a great deal of time to asking his fellow Athenians to explain the nature of virtues like justice, courage, piety, and wisdom. So it is clear that Plato counts as a virtue theorist. But it is a matter of some debate whether he should be read as a virtue ethicist (White 2015). What is not open to debate is whether Plato has had an important influence on the contemporary revival of interest in virtue ethics. A number of those who have contributed to the revival have done so as Plato scholars (e.g., Prior 1991; Kamtekar 1998; Annas 1999; and Reshotko 2006). However, often they have ended up championing a eudaimonist version of virtue ethics (see Prior 2001 and Annas 2011), rather than a version that would warrant a separate classification. Nevertheless, there are two variants that call for distinct treatment. Timothy Chappell takes the defining feature of Platonistic virtue ethics to be that “Good agency in the truest and fullest sense presupposes the contemplation of the Form of the Good” (2014). Chappell follows Iris Murdoch in arguing that “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego” (Murdoch 1971: 51). Constantly attending to our needs, our desires, our passions, and our thoughts skews our perspective on what the world is actually like and blinds us to the goods around us. Contemplating the goodness of something we encounter—which is to say, carefully attending to it “for its own sake, in order to understand it” (Chappell 2014: 300)—breaks this natural tendency by drawing our attention away from ourselves. Contemplating such goodness with regularity makes room for new habits of thought that focus more readily and more honestly on things other than the self. It alters the quality of our consciousness. And “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue” (Murdoch 1971: 82). The virtues get defined, then, in terms of qualities that help one “pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is” (91). And good agency is defined by the possession and exercise of such virtues. Within Chappell’s and Murdoch’s framework, then, not all normative properties get defined in terms of virtue. Goodness, in particular, is not so defined. But the kind of goodness which is possible for creatures like us is defined by virtue, and any answer to the question of what one should do or how one should live will appeal to the virtues. Another Platonistic variant of virtue ethics is exemplified by Robert Merrihew Adams. Unlike Murdoch and Chappell, his starting point is not a set of claims about our consciousness of goodness. Rather, he begins with an account of the metaphysics of goodness. Like Murdoch and others influenced by Platonism, Adams’s account of goodness is built around a conception of a supremely perfect good. And like Augustine, Adams takes that perfect good to be God. God is both the exemplification and the source of all goodness. Other things are good, he suggests, to the extent that they resemble God (Adams 1999). The resemblance requirement identifies a necessary condition for being good, but it does not yet give us a sufficient condition. This is because there are ways in which finite creatures might resemble God that would not be suitable to the type of creature they are. For example, if God were all-knowing, then the belief, “I am all-knowing,” would be a suitable belief for God to have. In God, such a belief—because true—would be part of God’s perfection. However, as neither you nor I are all-knowing, the belief, “I am all-knowing,” in one of us would not be good. To rule out such cases we need to introduce another factor. That factor is the fitting response to goodness, which Adams suggests is love. Adams uses love to weed out problematic resemblances: “being excellent in the way that a finite thing can be consists in resembling God in a way that could serve God as a reason for loving the thing” (Adams 1999: 36). Virtues come into the account as one of the ways in which some things (namely, persons) could resemble God. “[M]ost of the excellences that are most important to us, and of whose value we are most confident, are excellences of persons or of qualities or actions or works or lives or stories of persons” (1999: 42). This is one of the reasons Adams offers for conceiving of the ideal of perfection as a personal God, rather than an impersonal form of the Good. Many of the excellences of persons of which we are most confident are virtues such as love, wisdom, justice, patience, and generosity. And within many theistic traditions, including Adams’s own Christian tradition, such virtues are commonly attributed to divine agents. A Platonistic account like the one Adams puts forward in Finite and Infinite Goods clearly does not derive all other normative properties from the virtues (for a discussion of the relationship between this view and the one he puts forward in A Theory of Virtue (2006) see Pettigrove 2014). Goodness provides the normative foundation. Virtues are not built on that foundation; rather, as one of the varieties of goodness of whose value we are most confident, virtues form part of the foundation. Obligations, by contrast, come into the account at a different level. Moral obligations, Adams argues, are determined by the expectations and demands that “arise in a relationship or system of relationships that is good or valuable” (1999: 244). Other things being equal, the more virtuous the parties to the relationship, the more binding the obligation. Thus, within Adams’s account, the good (which includes virtue) is prior to the right. However, once good relationships have given rise to obligations, those obligations take on a life of their own. Their bindingness is not traced directly to considerations of goodness. Rather, they are determined by the expectations of the parties and the demands of the relationship. 3. Objections to virtue ethics A number of objections have been raised against virtue ethics, some of which bear more directly on one form of virtue ethics than on others. In this section we consider eight objections, namely, the a) application, b) adequacy, c) relativism, d) conflict, e) self-effacement, f) justification, g) egoism, and h) situationist problems. a) In the early days of virtue ethics’ revival, the approach was associated with an “anti-codifiability” thesis about ethics, directed against the prevailing pretensions of normative theory. At the time, utilitarians and deontologists commonly (though not universally) held that the task of ethical theory was to come up with a code consisting of universal rules or principles (possibly only one, as in the case of act-utilitarianism) which would have two significant features: i) the rule(s) would amount to a decision procedure for determining what the right action was in any particular case; ii) the rule(s) would be stated in such terms that any non-virtuous person could understand and apply it (them) correctly. Virtue ethicists maintained, contrary to these two claims, that it was quite unrealistic to imagine that there could be such a code (see, in particular, McDowell 1979). The results of attempts to produce and employ such a code, in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when medical and then bioethics boomed and bloomed, tended to support the virtue ethicists’ claim. More and more utilitarians and deontologists found themselves agreed on their general rules but on opposite sides of the controversial moral issues in contemporary discussion. It came to be recognised that moral sensitivity, perception, imagination, and judgement informed by experience—phronesis in short—is needed to apply rules or principles correctly. Hence many (though by no means all) utilitarians and deontologists have explicitly abandoned (ii) and much less emphasis is placed on (i). Nevertheless, the complaint that virtue ethics does not produce codifiable principles is still a commonly voiced criticism of the approach, expressed as the objection that it is, in principle, unable to provide action-guidance. Initially, the objection was based on a misunderstanding. Blinkered by slogans that described virtue ethics as “concerned with Being rather than Doing,” as addressing “What sort of person should I be?” but not “What should I do?” as being “agent-centered rather than act-centered,” its critics maintained that it was unable to provide action-guidance. Hence, rather than being a normative rival to utilitarian and deontological ethics, it could claim to be no more than a valuable supplement to them. The rather odd idea was that all virtue ethics could offer was, “Identify a moral exemplar and do what he would do,” as though the university student trying to decide whether to study music (her preference) or engineering (her parents’ preference) was supposed to ask herself, “What would Socrates study if he were in my circumstances?” But the objection failed to take note of Anscombe’s hint that a great deal of specific action guidance could be found in rules employing the virtue and vice terms (“v-rules”) such as “Do what is honest/charitable; do not do what is dishonest/uncharitable” (Hursthouse 1999). (It is a noteworthy feature of our virtue and vice vocabulary that, although our list of generally recognised virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of vice terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceeding anything that anyone who thinks in terms of standard deontological rules has ever come up with. Much invaluable action guidance comes from avoiding courses of action that would be irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, selfish, mercenary, indiscreet, tactless, arrogant, unsympathetic, cold, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, presumptuous, rude, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted, vindictive, calculating, ungrateful, grudging, brutal, profligate, disloyal, and on and on.) (b) A closely related objection has to do with whether virtue ethics can provide an adequate account of right action. This worry can take two forms. (i) One might think a virtue ethical account of right action is extensionally inadequate. It is possible to perform a right action without being virtuous and a virtuous person can occasionally perform the wrong action without that calling her virtue into question. If virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for right action, one might wonder whether the relationship between rightness/wrongness and virtue/vice is close enough for the former to be identified in terms of the latter. (ii) Alternatively, even if one thought it possible to produce a virtue ethical account that picked out all (and only) right actions, one might still think that at least in some cases virtue is not what explains rightness (Adams 2006:6–8). Some virtue ethicists respond to the adequacy objection by rejecting the assumption that virtue ethics ought to be in the business of providing an account of right action in the first place. Following in the footsteps of Anscombe (1958) and MacIntyre (1985), Talbot Brewer (2009) argues that to work with the categories of rightness and wrongness is already to get off on the wrong foot. Contemporary conceptions of right and wrong action, built as they are around a notion of moral duty that presupposes a framework of divine (or moral) law or around a conception of obligation that is defined in contrast to self-interest, carry baggage the virtue ethicist is better off without. Virtue ethics can address the questions of how one should live, what kind of person one should become, and even what one should do without that committing it to providing an account of ‘right action’. One might choose, instead, to work with aretaic concepts (defined in terms of virtues and vices) and axiological concepts (defined in terms of good and bad, better and worse) and leave out deontic notions (like right/wrong action, duty, and obligation) altogether. Other virtue ethicists wish to retain the concept of right action but note that in the current philosophical discussion a number of distinct qualities march under that banner. In some contexts, ‘right action’ identifies the best action an agent might perform in the circumstances. In others, it designates an action that is commendable (even if not the best possible). In still others, it picks out actions that are not blameworthy (even if not commendable). A virtue ethicist might choose to define one of these—for example, the best action—in terms of virtues and vices, but appeal to other normative concepts—such as legitimate expectations—when defining other conceptions of right action. As we observed in section 2, a virtue ethical account need not attempt to reduce all other normative concepts to virtues and vices. What is required is simply (i) that virtue is not reduced to some other normative concept that is taken to be more fundamental and (ii) that some other normative concepts are explained in terms of virtue and vice. This takes the sting out of the adequacy objection, which is most compelling against versions of virtue ethics that attempt to define all of the senses of ‘right action’ in terms of virtues. Appealing to virtues and vices makes it much easier to achieve extensional adequacy. Making room for normative concepts that are not taken to be reducible to virtue and vice concepts makes it even easier to generate a theory that is both extensionally and explanatorily adequate. Whether one needs other concepts and, if so, how many, is still a matter of debate among virtue ethicists, as is the question of whether virtue ethics even ought to be offering an account of right action. Either way virtue ethicists have resources available to them to address the adequacy objection. Insofar as the different versions of virtue ethics all retain an emphasis on the virtues, they are open to the familiar problem of (c) the charge of cultural relativity. Is it not the case that different cultures embody different virtues, (MacIntyre 1985) and hence that the v-rules will pick out actions as right or wrong only relative to a particular culture? Different replies have been made to this charge. One—the tu quoque, or “partners in crime” response—exhibits a quite familiar pattern in virtue ethicists’ defensive strategy (Solomon 1988). They admit that, for them, cultural relativism is a challenge, but point out that it is just as much a problem for the other two approaches. The (putative) cultural variation in character traits regarded as virtues is no greater—indeed markedly less—than the cultural variation in rules of conduct, and different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes happiness or welfare. That cultural relativity should be a problem common to all three approaches is hardly surprising. It is related, after all, to the “justification problem” (see below) the quite general metaethical problem of justifying one’s moral beliefs to those who disagree, whether they be moral sceptics, pluralists or from another culture. A bolder strategy involves claiming that virtue ethics has less difficulty with cultural relativity than the other two approaches. Much cultural disagreement arises, it may be claimed, from local understandings of the virtues, but the virtues themselves are not relative to culture (Nussbaum 1993). Another objection to which the tu quoque response is partially appropriate is (d) “the conflict problem.” What does virtue ethics have to say about dilemmas—cases in which, apparently, the requirements of different virtues conflict because they point in opposed directions? Charity prompts me to kill the person who would be better off dead, but justice forbids it. Honesty points to telling the hurtful truth, kindness and compassion to remaining silent or even lying. What shall I do? Of course, the same sorts of dilemmas are generated by conflicts between deontological rules. Deontology and virtue ethics share the conflict problem (and are happy to take it on board rather than follow some of the utilitarians in their consequentialist resolutions of such dilemmas) and in fact their strategies for responding to it are parallel. Both aim to resolve a number of dilemmas by arguing that the conflict is merely apparent; a discriminating understanding of the virtues or rules in question, possessed only by those with practical wisdom, will perceive that, in this particular case, the virtues do not make opposing demands or that one rule outranks another, or has a certain exception clause built into it. Whether this is all there is to it depends on whether there are any irresolvable dilemmas. If there are, proponents of either normative approach may point out reasonably that it could only be a mistake to offer a resolution of what is, ex hypothesi, irresolvable. Another problem arguably shared by all three approaches is (e), that of being self-effacing. An ethical theory is self-effacing if, roughly, whatever it claims justifies a particular action, or makes it right, had better not be the agent’s motive for doing it. Michael Stocker (1976) originally introduced it as a problem for deontology and consequentialism. He pointed out that the agent who, rightly, visits a friend in hospital will rather lessen the impact of his visit on her if he tells her either that he is doing it because it is his duty or because he thought it would maximize the general happiness. But as Simon Keller observes, she won’t be any better pleased if he tells her that he is visiting her because it is what a virtuous agent would do, so virtue ethics would appear to have the problem too (Keller 2007). However, virtue ethics’ defenders have argued that not all forms of virtue ethics are subject to this objection (Pettigrove 2011) and those that are are not seriously undermined by the problem (Martinez 2011). Another problem for virtue ethics, which is shared by both utilitarianism and deontology, is (f) “the justification problem.” Abstractly conceived, this is the problem of how we justify or ground our ethical beliefs, an issue that is hotly debated at the level of metaethics. In its particular versions, for deontology there is the question of how to justify its claims that certain moral rules are the correct ones, and for utilitarianism of how to justify its claim that all that really matters morally are consequences for happiness or well-being. For virtue ethics, the problem concerns the question of which character traits are the virtues. In the metaethical debate, there is widespread disagreement about the possibility of providing an external foundation for ethics—“external” in the sense of being external to ethical beliefs—and the same disagreement is found amongst deontologists and utilitarians. Some believe that their normative ethics can be placed on a secure basis, resistant to any form of scepticism, such as what anyone rationally desires, or would accept or agree on, regardless of their ethical outlook; others that it cannot. Virtue ethicists have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation while continuing to maintain that their claims can be validated. Some follow a form of Rawls’s coherentist approach (Slote 2001; Swanton 2003); neo-Aristotelians a form of ethical naturalism. A misunderstanding of eudaimonia as an unmoralized concept leads some critics to suppose that the neo-Aristotelians are attempting to ground their claims in a scientific account of human nature and what counts, for a human being, as flourishing. Others assume that, if this is not what they are doing, they cannot be validating their claims that, for example, justice, charity, courage, and generosity are virtues. Either they are illegitimately helping themselves to Aristotle’s discredited natural teleology (Williams 1985) or producing mere rationalizations of their own personal or culturally inculcated values. But McDowell, Foot, MacIntyre and Hursthouse have all outlined versions of a third way between these two extremes. Eudaimonia in virtue ethics, is indeed a moralized concept, but it is not only that. Claims about what constitutes flourishing for human beings no more float free of scientific facts about what human beings are like than ethological claims about what constitutes flourishing for elephants. In both cases, the truth of the claims depends in part on what kind of animal they are and what capacities, desires and interests the humans or elephants have. The best available science today (including evolutionary theory and psychology) supports rather than undermines the ancient Greek assumption that we are social animals, like elephants and wolves and unlike polar bears. No rationalizing explanation in terms of anything like a social contract is needed to explain why we choose to live together, subjugating our egoistic desires in order to secure the advantages of co-operation. Like other social animals, our natural impulses are not solely directed towards our own pleasures and preservation, but include altruistic and cooperative ones. This basic fact about us should make more comprehensible the claim that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of human flourishing and also undercut the objection that virtue ethics is, in some sense, egoistic. (g) The egoism objection has a number of sources. One is a simple confusion. Once it is understood that the fully virtuous agent characteristically does what she should without inner conflict, it is triumphantly asserted that “she is only doing what she wants to do and hence is being selfish.” So when the generous person gives gladly, as the generous are wont to do, it turns out she is not generous and unselfish after all, or at least not as generous as the one who greedily wants to hang on to everything she has but forces herself to give because she thinks she should! A related version ascribes bizarre reasons to the virtuous agent, unjustifiably assuming that she acts as she does because she believes that acting thus on this occasion will help her to achieve eudaimonia. But “the virtuous agent” is just “the agent with the virtues” and it is part of our ordinary understanding of the virtue terms that each carries with it its own typical range of reasons for acting. The virtuous agent acts as she does because she believes that someone’s suffering will be averted, or someone benefited, or the truth established, or a debt repaid, or … thereby. It is the exercise of the virtues during one’s life that is held to be at least partially constitutive of eudaimonia, and this is consistent with recognising that bad luck may land the virtuous agent in circumstances that require her to give up her life. Given the sorts of considerations that courageous, honest, loyal, charitable people wholeheartedly recognise as reasons for action, they may find themselves compelled to face danger for a worthwhile end, to speak out in someone’s defence, or refuse to reveal the names of their comrades, even when they know that this will inevitably lead to their execution, to share their last crust and face starvation. On the view that the exercise of the virtues is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia, such cases are described as those in which the virtuous agent sees that, as things have unfortunately turned out, eudaimonia is not possible for them (Foot 2001, 95). On the Stoical view that it is both necessary and sufficient, a eudaimon life is a life that has been successfully lived (where “success” of course is not to be understood in a materialistic way) and such people die knowing not only that they have made a success of their lives but that they have also brought their lives to a markedly successful completion. Either way, such heroic acts can hardly be regarded as egoistic. A lingering suggestion of egoism may be found in the misconceived distinction between so-called “self-regarding” and “other-regarding” virtues. Those who have been insulated from the ancient tradition tend to regard justice and benevolence as real virtues, which benefit others but not their possessor, and prudence, fortitude and providence (the virtue whose opposite is “improvidence” or being a spendthrift) as not real virtues at all because they benefit only their possessor. This is a mistake on two counts. Firstly, justice and benevolence do, in general, benefit their possessors, since without them eudaimonia is not possible. Secondly, given that we live together, as social animals, the “self-regarding” virtues do benefit others—those who lack them are a great drain on, and sometimes grief to, those who are close to them (as parents with improvident or imprudent adult offspring know only too well). The most recent objection (h) to virtue ethics claims that work in “situationist” social psychology shows that there are no such things as character traits and thereby no such things as virtues for virtue ethics to be about (Doris 1998; Harman 1999). In reply, some virtue ethicists have argued that the social psychologists’ studies are irrelevant to the multi-track disposition (see above) that a virtue is supposed to be (Sreenivasan 2002; Kamtekar 2004). Mindful of just how multi-track it is, they agree that it would be reckless in the extreme to ascribe a demanding virtue such as charity to people of whom they know no more than that they have exhibited conventional decency; this would indeed be “a fundamental attribution error.” Others have worked to develop alternative, empirically grounded conceptions of character traits (Snow 2010; Miller 2013 and 2014; however see Upton 2016 for objections to Miller). There have been other responses as well (summarized helpfully in Prinz 2009 and Miller 2014). Notable among these is a response by Adams (2006, echoing Merritt 2000) who steers a middle road between “no character traits at all” and the exacting standard of the Aristotelian conception of virtue which, because of its emphasis on phronesis, requires a high level of character integration. On his conception, character traits may be “frail and fragmentary” but still virtues, and not uncommon. But giving up the idea that practical wisdom is the heart of all the virtues, as Adams has to do, is a substantial sacrifice, as Russell (2009) and Kamtekar (2010) argue. Even though the “situationist challenge” has left traditional virtue ethicists unmoved, it has generated a healthy engagement with empirical psychological literature, which has also been fuelled by the growing literature on Foot’s Natural Goodness and, quite independently, an upsurge of interest in character education (see below). 4. Future Directions Over the past thirty-five years most of those contributing to the revival of virtue ethics have worked within a neo-Aristotelian, eudaimonist framework. However, as noted in section 2, other forms of virtue ethics have begun to emerge. Theorists have begun to turn to philosophers like Hutcheson, Hume, Nietzsche, Martineau, and Heidegger for resources they might use to develop alternatives (see Russell 2006; Swanton 2013 and 2015; Taylor 2015; and Harcourt 2015). Others have turned their attention eastward, exploring Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions (Yu 2007; Slingerland 2011; Finnigan and Tanaka 2011; McRae 2012; Angle and Slote 2013; Davis 2014; Flanagan 2015; Perrett and Pettigrove 2015; and Sim 2015). These explorations promise to open up new avenues for the development of virtue ethics. Although virtue ethics has grown remarkably in the last thirty-five years, it is still very much in the minority, particularly in the area of applied ethics. Many editors of big textbook collections on “moral problems” or “applied ethics” now try to include articles representative of each of the three normative approaches but are often unable to find a virtue ethics article addressing a particular issue. This is sometimes, no doubt, because “the” issue has been set up as a deontologicial/utilitarian debate, but it is often simply because no virtue ethicist has yet written on the topic. However, the last decade has seen an increase in the amount of attention applied virtue ethics has received (Walker and Ivanhoe 2007; Hartman 2013; Austin 2014; Van Hooft 2014; and Annas 2015). This area can certainly be expected to grow in the future, and it looks as though applying virtue ethics in the field of environmental ethics may prove particularly fruitful (Sandler 2007; Hursthouse 2007, 2011; Zwolinski and Schmidtz 2013; Cafaro 2015). Whether virtue ethics can be expected to grow into “virtue politics”—i.e. to extend from moral philosophy into political philosophy—is not so clear. Gisela Striker (2006) has argued that Aristotle’s ethics cannot be understood adequately without attending to its place in his politics. That suggests that at least those virtue ethicists who take their inspiration from Aristotle should have resources to offer for the development of virtue politics. But, while Plato and Aristotle can be great inspirations as far as virtue ethics is concerned, neither, on the face of it, are attractive sources of insight where politics is concerned. However, recent work suggests that Aristotelian ideas can, after all, generate a satisfyingly liberal political philosophy (Nussbaum 2006; LeBar 2013a). Moreover, as noted above, virtue ethics does not have to be neo-Aristotelian. It may be that the virtue ethics of Hutcheson and Hume can be naturally extended into a modern political philosophy (Hursthouse 1990–91; Slote 1993). Following Plato and Aristotle, modern virtue ethics has always emphasised the importance of moral education, not as the inculcation of rules but as the training of character. There is now a growing movement towards virtues education, amongst both academics (Carr 1999; Athanassoulis 2014; Curren 2015) and teachers in the classroom. One exciting thing about research in this area is its engagement with other academic disciplines, including psychology, educational theory, and theology (see Cline 2015; and Snow 2015). Finally, one of the more productive developments of virtue ethics has come through the study of particular virtues and vices. There are now a number of careful studies of the cardinal virtues and capital vices (Pieper 1966; Taylor 2006; Curzer 2012; Timpe and Boyd 2014). Others have explored less widely discussed virtues or vices, such as civility, decency, truthfulness, ambition, and meekness (Calhoun 2000; Kekes 2002; Williams 2002; and Pettigrove 2007 and 2012). One of the questions these studies raise is “How many virtues are there?” A second is, “How are these virtues related to one another?” Some virtue ethicists have been happy to work on the assumption that there is no principled reason for limiting the number of virtues and plenty of reason for positing a plurality of them (Swanton 2003; Battaly 2015). Others have been concerned that such an open-handed approach to the virtues will make it difficult for virtue ethicists to come up with an adequate account of right action or deal with the conflict problem discussed above. Dan Russell has proposed cardinality and a version of the unity thesis as a solution to what he calls “the enumeration problem” (the problem of too many virtues). The apparent proliferation of virtues can be significantly reduced if we group virtues together with some being cardinal and others subordinate extensions of those cardinal virtues. Possible conflicts between the remaining virtues can then be managed if they are tied together in some way as part of a unified whole (Russell 2009). This highlights two important avenues for future research, one of which explores individual virtues and the other of which analyses how they might be related to one another.

Though three-quarters of the overcrowded world are starving, we are lucky here to have morethan enough, thanks to population control.

We are experiencing civil strife at this moment due to breakdowns in human-centered discourse and dialogue. Technology is, in part, to blame because, despite its marvelous achievements, it disconnects us from direct human interaction, eroding trust and squandering meaning. We have lost sympathy and absorbed indifference through online echo-chambers or fervent social media chains.

a genius in everyone’s pocket could remove that barrier, essentially making everyone a PhD virologist who can be walked through the process of designing, synthesizing, and releasing a biological weapon

Edward Tellella, another physicist, had naughty calculation that there's a nonzero chance that detonating the bomb would ignite the entire atmosphere of Earth, killing not just all humans, but every single shred of life. By that time, the US also knew that the Nazis were no longer capable of making the bomb nor even pursuing their own project anymore. They still went ahead and took the risk.

Eio Wilson this Harvard sociologist said the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains and emotions. We have medieval institutions that operate at a medieval clock rate and we have godlike technology that's moving at now 21st to 24th century speed when AI self improves

We're anti-inhumane toxic technology governed by toxic incentives

the collective human technology project

Fn Eraise of qcribes

technogenesis

The first microcomputers in schools were in the classrooms of visionary teachers who used them (often with LOGO) in very personal ways to cut across deeply rooted features of School (what Tyack and Cuban neatly call "the grammar of school") such as a bureaucratically imposed linear curriculum, separation of subjects, and depersonalization of work. School responded to this foreign body by an "immune reaction" that blocked these subversive features: The control of computers was shifted from the classrooms of subversive teachers into "computer labs" isolated from the mainstream of learning, a computer curriculum was developed... in short, before the computer could change School, School changed the computer.

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Why does the threat of a cunning, replicating robot society look soclose from one perspective, yet so distant from another? The differencelies in the well-known tendency of futurologists to count “1, 2, 3 . . . amillion.” That is, once the first step on a path is taken, it’s very easy toassume that all subsequent steps are trivial.

Similar social forces are at work on technologies today. But becausethe digerati, like technoenthusiasts before them, look to the future withtechnological tunnel vision, they too have trouble bringing other forcesinto view.

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Adding Value to Hive .:. My Hive Engine Witness Node

A Chip For A Memory!!!

A Web2 Bridge for Hive idea

Why WhatsApp is My Favorite App

Why WhatsApp is My Favorite App

You agree to update Your E911 Registered Address before you use your T-Mobile VoIP service or Wi-Fi Calling service at a different location.

the majority of your data usage being Smartphone Mobile HotSpot (tethering) usage for any 3 billing cycles within any 6-month period;

Just as Jobs had an intuition that more was possible for the humble tele-phone, I have a similar sense that something more is possible not just for thetechnological media by which we convey meaning—but for language itself.

It is hard to find an old technology that is not available in any form any where on earth.

We believe the bill unduly dictates one particular technical approach, and does so without considering the privacy, security, and equity risks it poses.

the greatest risk is always the bio like biow weapons

Most environmental books now are about practical technological innovation or social changes that have to happen. My argument is that’s not going to work. That’s not going to happen. It requires a transformation in our assumptions about the nature of what we are and what the world is. Otherwise, that instrumental and exploitative relation will remain.

these things are not externalities that the existing system can figure out, but they are the logical outcomes of the existing system. And so any lens we use to say, well, technology will save the day. Well, technology is an extension and an externality of neoliberal capitalism

neoliberalism and its predecessors of industrial capitalism and even proto capitalism were based on separation from the natural world. And and we can we call it sort of separation or dualism

the majority of working group three which has been dominated by the integrated assessment model these big models that basically economic models with a bit of technology or a bit of mythical technology and a bit of um social sciences bolted on the side and and a small climate model but basically just economic models the business as usual models these models have dominated what we have to do about climate change

A repository depends on the interaction of people, processes, and technologies to support secure, persistent, and reliable services. Its activities and functions are supported by software, hardware, and technical services.

Implementing relevant and appropriate standards, tools, and technologies for data management and curation

the newsphere is the mental body of the planet which is essentially what's attempting to come into configuration and to the extent to which you can actually Liberate the technology to become that essentially you're building a platform that allows the embodied in the intelligence of the earth into the technology so that it can then synchronically unfold Evolution based on how things spontaneously

we now have all of the technology that goes all the way to Rainbow body

essentially what we're doing is you know is taking the best technology of the East and the west and bringing them together

the newsphere is the mental body of the planet which is essentially what's attempting to come into configuration and to the extent to which you can actually Liberate the technology to become that essentially you're building a platform that allows the embodied in the intelligence of the earth into the technology so that it can then synchronically unfold Evolution based on how things spontaneously unfold anyway

Media questions are important, then, but they only seem to me to be really significant if they are set in a far wider frame, rather than focusing just on media technologies themselves’ (684).

And the same will apply to the objection that theSystem is unusual. Seldom have there been any newsuggestions which have not been condemned as ' un-us

the latest trend in investment to fight online rumors, which is far too focused on technological fixes for what is fundamentally a human problem.

The Early History of Counting is a great article focusing on how long humanity has been offloading its brain, which makes me feel way less awkward about taking so many notes and using fancy tools like calculators and LLMs. Ancient philosophers like Socrates complained about books making people lazy because of not doing oral memorization anymore, which solved into people complaining about computers. Stone Age cavemen probably complained about people offloading their number sense onto tally sticks.

We should also insist that every piece of technology is, by essence, political. That you cannot understand technology without understanding the people. And you cannot understand people without understanding politics. Every choice you made has an impact on the world.

I do find his work on technology interesting and an important point in thinking carefully about humans’ relationship to technology, and I will continue to refer to it, because it helps us think better

Probably not. But it would do us good to remember that machines are supposed to make our lives better, not faster. Perhaps we should unplug just a little before we become undone. Such decompression is why we think so many Levenger customers savor the pensive pause of the fountain pen (which David McCullough also uses).

TensionThe ability to see like a data structure afforded us the technology we have today. But it was built for and within a set of societal systems—and stories—that can’t cope with nebulosity. Worse still is the transitional era we’ve entered, in which overwhelming complexity leads more and more people to believe in nothing. That way lies madness. Seeing is a choice, and we need to reclaim that choice. However, we need to see things and do things differently, and build sociotechnical systems that embody this difference.This is best seen through a small example. In our jobs, many of us deal with interpersonal dynamics that sometimes overwhelm the rules. The rules are still there—those that the company operates by and laws that it follows—meaning there are limits to how those interpersonal dynamics can play out. But those rules are rigid and bureaucratic, and most of the time they are irrelevant to what you’re dealing with. People learn to work with and around the rules rather than follow them to the letter. Some of these might be deliberate hacks, ones that are known, and passed down, by an organization’s workers. A work-to-rule strike, or quiet quitting for that matter, is effective at slowing a company to a halt because work is never as routine as schedules, processes, leadership principles, or any other codified rules might allow management to believe.The tension we face is that on an everyday basis, we want things to be simple and certain. But that means ignoring the messiness of reality. And when we delegate that simplicity and certainty to systems—either to institutions or increasingly to software—they feel impersonal and oppressive. People used to say that they felt like large institutions were treating them like a number. For decades, we have literally been numbers in government and corporate data structures. BreakdownAs historian Jill Lepore wrote, we used to be in a world of mystery. Then we began to understand those mysteries and use science to turn them into facts. And then we quantified and operationalized those facts through numbers. We’re currently in a world of data—overwhelming, human-incomprehensible amounts of data—that we use to make predictions even though that data isn’t enough to fully grapple with the complexity of reality.How do we move past this era of breakdown? It’s not by eschewing technology. We need our complex socio-technical systems. We need mental models to make sense of the complexities of our world. But we also need to understand and accept their inherent imperfections. We need to make sure we’re avoiding static and biased patterns—of the sort that a state functionary or a rigid algorithm might produce—while leaving room for the messiness inherent in human interactions. Chapman calls this balance “fluidity,” where society (and really, the tech we use every day) gives us the disparate things we need to be happy while also enabling the complex global society we have today.

The complexity of society today, and the failure of rigid systems to cope, is scary to many. Nobody’s in charge of, or could possibly even understand, all these complex technological systems that now run our global society.

modern technology lets us all see like a state

The challenge with previous generations of tech—and the engineers who built them—is that they got stuck in the rigidity of systems.

transcript analysis, self-assessment and audience response.

memenuhi kebutuhan masyarakat akan informasi,pengetahuan, hiburan, dan meningkatkan kemampuanliterasi bermedia

Technics and civilization as a whole are the result of human choices and aptitudes and strivings….The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises. In order to reconquer the machine and subdue it to human purposes, one must first understand it and assimilate it. So far, we have embraced the machine without fully understanding it, or, like the weaker romantics, we have rejected the machine without first seeing how much of it we could intelligently assimilate.” ― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

The initial focus is on the learner’s home language (it’s currently being piloted with grade 3 isiZulu-speaking learners at a school in Soweto, Johannesburg). English is introduced gradually as a target language. The language and speech technology has been developed to provide linguistic accuracy and is grounded in teaching principles.

Automobile and Carriage Builders' Journal, October 1908. Duringthe last five or six years the carriage builder has been adopting,perhaps slowly, and often unwillingly, the card system in his office.,owing to the extra detail the motor business has brought with it.It will have probably been introduced by a new partner who hasbrought new money into the business, when extra funds were necessaryto cope with the new state of affairs. The motor manufacturer usesit instinctively, for he brings with him,

Yet it is doubtful whether since theintroduction of the typewriter there has been an invention so beneficialto modern business as the card-index system.

The progress of the card system in England has•undoubtedly been very slow; a fact which may be due primarilyto the constitutional conservatism of English business men, althoughprobably it is partly accounted for by the natural irritation and reaction•caused by the hustling but not always tactful enthusiasm of the manyAmerican salesmen who for several years past have been its principalmissionaries.

The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

Samuel Hartlib was well aware of this improvement. While extolling the clever invention of Harrison, Hartlib noted that combinations and links con-stituted the ‘argumentative part’ of the card index.60

People marveled at new invention after new invention and there was a tendency to see mechanical and especially electrical advances as somehow endowed with life. The phonograph, for example, was held to be alive and print adverts even claimed it had a soul.

persuasive technology, BJ Fog's contribution to the problem that we're all faced with today, which is that were addicted to our devices. So how does that work? Well, basically his theory has three parts where you have motivation, you have ability, and there's a trigger. And if you're above a certain threshold, you have the right motivation and the right ability, that trigger will trigger a behavior. If you don't have enough motivation, or if you don't have enough skill set, then that trigger won't work. Or if you have the motivation in the skill set, and the trigger doesn't happen, then you'll never trip into the behavior.

Don't worry about performance too early though - it's more important to get the design right, and "right" in this case means using the database the way a database is meant to be used, as a transactional system.

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.

Drexler startedthe Foresight Institute in the late 1980s “to help prepare society for an-ticipated advanced technologies”

About two-thirds of the world's population have  access to it. We have to understand how to make   all of these applications literally accessible  to everyone.

A typewriter repair technician by trade from Michigan, Carl Elmer Anderson started the Anderson Typewriter Company in Pasadena in 1912 after falling in love with the City as a vacationer.

The Anderson Typewriter Company changed its name in the mid ‘90s to Anderson Business Technology to better represent the new digital technology it provided customers