Technology and the Virtues Quotes

“If they are widely lacking in the relevant institutions and cultures, then the most pressing question for us is this: How can we begin to design and implement now educational and cultural projects to enhance the cultivation of technomoral virtue?”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“However, if we recall the view of care ethicists that we become moral selves largely by teaching ourselves to actively respond to and meet the needs of others, we see the attendant moral cost of a trend toward expanding technological surrogates for human caring. Without intimate and repeated exposure to our mutual dependence, vulnerability, weakness, concern, and gratitude for one another, it is unclear how we can cultivate our moral”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“we can no longer afford the modern illusion that our technosocial innovations are conducive to human mastery.”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“define the technomoral virtue of self-control as an exemplary ability in technosocial contexts to choose, and ideally to desire for their own sakes, those goods and experiences that most contribute to contemporary and future human flourishing.”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“The ethical implications of these phenomena are significant on individual, local, and global scales. Our desires and consumption habits reflect the physical and emotional health of our persons and our societies. They shape the activities that bind our family and community lives; the kinds and amounts of natural resources that are extracted, used, priced, and distributed; and the type and amount of environmental waste that is produced by those activities. Not only material goods but increasingly, virtual goods, relationships, and experiences fill the ever-expanding catalog of things we are invited to desire and pursue. Online app and game developers encourage us to spend collective billions of human hours growing virtual crops in Farmville, massacring pigs with Angry Birds, or solving new puzzles in the Candy Kingdom. Advanced techniques of software design psychology magnify the addictive (the preferred software nomenclature is ‘sticky’) qualities of apps, driving users to make more and more in-app purchases, share our monetizable information or contacts, or just keep playing into the wee hours of the night to reach whatever surprises await us on the next game level.”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“The perceptual element of moral attention thus serves as a bridge between my understanding of the general aim of moral action (to promote the goods proper to a human life); my knowledge of the particular facts of my circumstances; and my judgment of the best course of action toward that goal that is available to me in these circumstances.”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“The challenge we face today is not a moral dilemma; it is rather a moral imperative, long overdue in recognition, to collectively cultivate the technomoral virtues needed to confront… emerging technosocial challenges wisely and well.”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting

“Markets, as human institutions, are legitimized only by their promotion of human flourishing. To sacrifice the latter to the former is neither pragmatism nor realism—it is insanity.”
― Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting