Technomoral Civic Virtues: a Critical Appreciation of Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues

Abstract

This paper begins by summarizing the chief, original contributions to technology ethics in Shannon Vallor’s recent book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Vallor 2016), highlighting especially the book’s distinctive inclusion of not only the western virtue ethics tradition but also the analogous traditions in Buddhist and Confucian ethics. But the main point of the paper is to suggest that the theoretical framework developed in the book be extended to include an analysis of the distinctive civic virtues that are crucial to the well functioning of communities of makers, marketers, consumers, and regulators of technology, constituting, as it were, technomoral civic virtue ethics. It is suggested that prominent among these civic virtues is what is dubbed “Socratism,” the habit of regular querying of community aims and practices for the purpose of keeping community action focused on the goods internal to community practice, and the goods of the larger communities in which these local communities are embedded.