Moral Philosophy and Politics 2022; 9(2): 181–199

Nir Eisikovits* and Dan Feldman

AI and Phronesis
https://doi.org/10.1515/mopp-2021-0026
Published online August 30, 2021

Abstract: We argue that the growing prevalence of statistical machine learning in

everyday decision making – from creditworthiness to police force allocation –
effectively replaces many of our humdrum practical judgments and that this will
eventually undermine our capacity for making such judgments. We lean on
Aristotle’s famous account of how phronesis and moral virtues develop to make our
case. If Aristotle is right that the habitual exercise of practical judgment allows us
to incrementally hone virtues, and if AI saves us time by taking over some of those
practical judgments, or if its pattern recognition capacities are very good at
learning that kind of behavior – we risk innovating ourselves out of moral
competence with the introduction of AI.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, phronesis, judgment, Aristotle, algorithmic bias,

technological optimism

In this paper, we argue that a key reason to worry about AI is that it undermines our
capacity for practical judgment. By gradually taking over some of the contexts in
which we exercise what Aristotle called phronesis, AI calls into question important
aspects of our moral development. Part 1 defines artificial intelligence, briefly
surveys the history of the technology and provides detail about the rise of
statistical machine learning, the most prevalent variant of AI. Part 2 explores and
questions a popular worry about the rise of AI – that it exacerbates existing social
and economic inequalities. Part 3 leans on Aristotle’s famous “function argument”
to suggest that the key reason to worry about AI is that it undermines our capacity
for practical judgment. Part 4 claims that this decline in our capacity for judgment
is made worse by AI mediated technology, which prompts us to pay greater
attention to our own lives and projects.

*Corresponding author: Nir Eisikovits, Applied Ethics Center, University of Massachusetts

Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125, USA, E-mail: [email protected]
Dan Feldman, Applied Ethics Center, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd.,
Boston, MA 02125, USA, E-mail: [email protected]
182 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

1 Artificial Intelligence and Statistical Machine

Learning
Artificial intelligences are machines that demonstrate human-like performance on
tasks that humans are generally good at. For example, humans are generally very
good at navigating crowded, complex spaces in order to achieve a goal, such as
getting from one side of a busy train platform to the other while conversing with a
friend. It has generally been impossible to program computers with enough
commonsense knowledge about the world and with sufficiently sophisticated
perceptual, planning and reasoning mechanisms to enable them to demonstrate
human-level performance on day-to-day tasks such as this. The overriding goal of
the AI research program has been to achieve human-level performance on just
these sorts of tasks. Today, computers are beginning to demonstrate remarkably
human-like capabilities but have yet to achieve anything like autonomous,
self-conscious, competent functioning in the natural world. Nevertheless, the
capabilities that are being commercialized are being called “artificial intelligence”
and are hailed in the press and sold in the marketplace as such.
The modern artificial intelligence research program emerged after World War
II, enabled by earlier work in cybernetics and the development of electronic digital
computers.1 By the late 1950s, computers were becoming commercially available
and computer science – the rigorous analysis of computational techniques – was
becoming an academic field. In 1956, a small group of researchers, with funding
from the Rockefeller Foundation, convened a conference at Dartmouth College
that served to name and to launch AI as a field (see McCarthy et al. 1955). The
post-war period also saw the continuation of research and development in
cybernetics and the building of practical systems integrating humans and
machines to achieve a functional purpose. By the early 1960s, digital computers
were central to how these hybrid human-machine systems were being imagined
and designed. A cybernetic system, an anti-aircraft gun control system, for
instance, would integrate human targeting and firing with machine target tracking
and aiming (see Mindell 1995).
Numerous articles in the popular press, pronouncements from respected
scientists and public hand wringing by prominent technology company executives
and entrepreneurs evince a palpable anxiety about the current trajectory of AI. The
late physicist Stephen Hawking and the very active and successful entrepreneur

1 There is a rich and varied historiography of computing, ranging from surveys of key technical
developments (see, e.g., Randell 1982) to detailed investigations into the relationship between the
Cold War and the computing community (see, e.g., Edwards 1996).
 AI and Phronesis 183

Elon Musk, to name two, have been vocal in their concerns about the “existential
threat” that AI represents (see Domonoske 2017; Love 2014). They are worried
about the emergence of machines that are cognitively superior to humans, control
the physical world, reproduce and have their own agendas. These functionally
superior entities would have little use for humans and would certainly not accept
human oversight. In fact, they may have no use for humans at all, leading to
speculation about how our species would fare. The human relationship to other
species is not an encouraging example of how cognitively superior entities treat
others. Will we be the AI’s pets? Pests to be exterminated? Irrelevant and so harmed
incidentally as the AI pursues its own goals?
Fascinating and perhaps frightening as such speculation is, it is a significant
leap from the current capabilities labeled AI to the dystopia of super-intelligence
(cf. Bostrom 2016). It may be more useful, at least for now, to engage with the
challenges and implications of AI as another example of the complex conse-
quences of the human development of tools.
From this perspective, AI occupies one end of a spectrum of implementation
options for achieving useful machines. The spectrum ranges from essentially
human with simple mechanical tools (such as hammers and wheels) to fully digital
with humans setting goals and leaving implementation to the machines. An
artificial general intelligence would be as capable of functioning in the world as a
human and, at the limit, of setting its own goals. In fact, autonomous goal setting
might be the characteristic that moves such a machine off this spectrum and
prompts new anxieties. Certainly off this spectrum is super-intelligence – artificial
general intelligence that exceeds human capabilities across the broad range of
human cognitive abilities, the sort of machine that leads to the existential anxiety
discussed above. While one can be concerned about super-intelligence, that is not
our concern. Instead, we wish to understand the implications for being human of
the emergence (not to say rise) of intelligent machines that approach and often
exceed the human capability for recognizing patterns.
The broad AI research program introduced above encompasses a range of
cognitive capabilities. While there are certain cognitive tasks that computers have
long performed and have done so dramatically more effectively and efficiently
than people, such as arithmetic, sampling, or responding to quantifiable changes
in the environment, the research program contemplates automated learning,
planning and reasoning based on a “commonsense” understanding of the world.2

2 See, for example, Minsky’s (1955, 9) research abstract in McCarthy et al. where he suggests that
an AI machine “would tend to build up within itself an abstract model of the environment in which
it is placed … [It] could first explores solutions within the internal abstract model … and then
attempt external experiments … These external experiments would appear to be rather clever.”
184 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

The learning part of the agenda has made the most visible progress in the last
two decades or so. By the mid-1990s, statistical machine learning – an approach to
recognizing patterns – started showing dramatic results. In the time since, known
but previously impractical computational neural networks extended the power
and effectiveness of the pattern recognition toolkit. Statistical machine learning
(ML) has come to dominate the popular understanding of AI.
In fact, based on journalistic and commercial activity, we see a two-
dimensional telescoping of AI. First, the rich AI research agenda that includes
planning, reasoning, learning, knowledge representation and other similarly
broad investigations has often been reduced to learning. Second, learning itself
has often been reduced to one technique (multiple hidden layer neural networks,
called deep learning) in one branch of the field – statistical machine learning.
There are exceptions to this generalization: autonomous robots, notably in the
form of autonomous motor vehicles, must plan their actions and reason about their
environment. Even in these applications, though, deep learning has become a
pivotal enabling technique and garnered much attention.3 Nevertheless, the
agenda of the fully developed AI research program would be substantially
impoverished if we understood AI to wholly consist of statistical machine learning.
A substantial fraction of deployed statistical machine learning is based on
algorithms that emerge when one asks an apparently simple question: given a set
of facts that have already been placed into categories, in which category should I
place a new fact when I run across it? For instance, if I can describe the leaves of
plants and categorize them by their color, shape and size can I then, upon
encountering a previously unknown leaf, correctly identify it as being of one type
or another? Key concepts then are to select a pattern-recognizing algorithm and
construct a pattern recognizer, and then to apply that algorithm to new data. The
first is referred to as training and the second as predicting.4
Of the many machine learning algorithms, so-called deep learning has come to
represent both the potential and the pitfalls of the field. Deep learning algorithms
are all based on neural networks, and neural networks, in turn, are based on a still
superficial understanding of the massive connectivity between neurons in organic
brains. They are models of a biological system and as such they seem to reproduce
certain aspects of human learning, such as pattern recognition.

3 The website iiot-world.com has a brief summary of machine learning applied to the autonomous
driving problem (“Machine Learning Algorithms in Autonomous Driving”) at https://iiot-world.
com/machine-learning/machine-learning-algorithms-in-autonomous-driving/ while Fridman
et al. (2018) have written about the substantial challenges in achieving autonomous driving.
4 Machine learning techniques (algorithms) can be divided into types: clustering, categorization
and regression. For a reasonably accessible introduction to the field for the technically inclined,
see Witten, Frank, and Hall (2016).
 AI and Phronesis 185

Pattern recognition algorithms based on statistical machine learning have

become essential to the administration of numerous governmental and commer-
cial activities. In many cases they perform evaluative functions previously reserved
for humans. Examples include teacher evaluations (see Pal and Pal 2013), the
assessment of the likelihood of criminal recidivism (see Wang, Mathieu, and Cai
2010), the granting of credit (see Chawla 2018) and detection of fraudulent credit
transactions (see Awoyemi, Adetunmbi, and Oluwadare 2017), the identification of
tumors in radiographs (see Qin et al. 2018) and whether or not a very sick patient
should be referred to hospice care (see Avati et al. 2018). The adoption of machine
learning for these tasks relies on the belief that computers are dispassionate and
unbiased implementers of objectively appropriate decision-making criteria.
However, as substantial current scholarship is beginning to show, these as-
sumptions are not necessarily justified.
The statistical underpinnings of machine learning do not guarantee either
objectivity or accuracy. The purpose of training is to construct an algorithm that
successfully induces generalizations about certain types of data from a (large)
number of specific instances. The training phase of the modeling process depends
on large, accurately labeled datasets, the choice of genuinely meaningful criteria,
and careful technical steps to ensure that the algorithm works on data that it hasn’t
been trained on. The model must make usefully accurate predictions about new
data and a model maintenance process must incorporate mechanisms for cor-
recting it based on new data – that is, the model must be periodically re-trained.

2 AI and Fairness
Many critiques of the deployment of machine learning focus on methodological
failures in the training and predicting stages. However, aside from simply doing
the job poorly – using too little training data, selecting less relevant features,
testing the model’s predictive power inadequately (or not at all!) and failing to
retrain based on new data – many machine learning models embed the (often
unconscious) biases of the people who construct them.
Biased and inaccurate machine learning can lead to unfairness in the form of
reduced opportunity, unjustified denial of various social and economic benefits
and skewed distribution of resources. Cathy O’Neil (2016) provides a number of in-
depth examples of specific applications of machine learning that she refers to as
“weapons of math destruction (WMDs).” WMDs are mathematical models
embedded in automated systems and applied in lieu of human judgment in ways
that affect human outcomes. These particular models are opaque (not subject to
inspection by the subjects they affect), self-reinforcing (they tend to create social
186 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

outcomes that lead to similar social outcomes in the future), without mechanisms
for correction and, crucially, embed the biases of their designers. O’Neil notes that
“when [she] considers the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data,
[she is] often reminded of phrenology” (2016, p. 121). Her concern is that the
modeling is “sloppy” and “self-serving” (and hence pseudo-scientific) rather than
that it is intrinsically problematic. That is, good models well applied are accept-
able; it is poorly designed and implemented models deployed on a large scale that
are troubling.
The flaws in ML models can (and, O’Neil and others would argue, often do)
contribute to the preservation and perpetuation of social and economic
disadvantages by encoding the model developers’ biases, reinforcing bias by
providing more instances of it and, due to their opacity – are resistant to criticism
and correction (see also Danks and London 2017; Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018). Key
to these failings is that the models are models because they generally use proxies
for the phenomenon they purport to measure. They attempt to make a prediction
about someone’s propensity to reoffend, for example, based on socioeconomic
facts that are correlated with that person and others who have or have not reof-
fended. Scientists and statisticians are well aware of the danger of confusing
correlation with causality and those competent at statistical inference carefully
guard against it.
Statistical machine learning, as noted above, is a collection of techniques
for recognizing patterns, and deep learning is one of these techniques. It is
distinguished from many others by both its ability to recognize patterns that often
are not obvious to more typical statistical techniques and by its opacity. It is
generally impossible to understand how it is that any particular neural network
decides to classify inputs into one category or another. This confounds any
disinterested attempt to evaluate the operation of these algorithms. However,
even this problem is starting to be addressed (see Kuang 2017). The failures that
critics like O’Neil focus on result from poorly designed or implemented modeling.
Suppose, however, that statistical techniques, even the most challenging to un-
derstand, can be applied rigorously and yield systems that are not intrinsically
biased and harmful and that can be inspected in order to understand their oper-
ation. Assume, for the sake of argument, that concerns around AI, machine
learning and equity can be addressed.5 Would this exhaust our worries about the
technology?

5 Consider, for example, the intriguing claim made by Kearns and Roth (2019) that some such
“fixes” to algorithmic bias can be integrated into the design of the algorithms themselves by
quantifying and then incorporating moral restrictions into the code.
 AI and Phronesis 187

3 AI and Phronesis
While AI raises concerns about equity and fairness, as we explained in the previous
section, we think that these are not the most significant reasons to worry about
the technology. Many of these failures can, in principle, be addressed by revising
the algorithms such that they no longer encode the prejudices of those who
wrote them, and by putting in place a quality control mechanism that keeps the
algorithms in check after they have started working. In fact, this is already
happening: face recognition algorithms used to be better at recognizing the faces
of white men than at recognizing anyone’s else face. When this became known, the
ensuing public outcry quickly resulted in the algorithms being tweaked – more
images of men and women of color were added to the machine learning process,
which duly improved (see Lohr 2018; Sumagaysay 2018). And, it goes without
saying, the algorithms would have not had this problem in the first place if there
had been more coders who were not white men.
To put it differently, AI frequently reflects and perpetuates the biases of its
creators, but these biases can be pointed out and the algorithms can be corrected.
And AI, in spite of anxieties prevalent in popular culture, is not a brain. It does not
have an amygdala that organically incorporates unconscious bias and anxiety into
decision making. There is nothing inherent to an algorithm that inclines it to
morally faulty decisions. Thus, its judgments may, in time, actually become fairer
than ours.
Our question, then, is this: If algorithmic bias concerns about AI were elimi-
nated, would there be something left to worry about? To put it more sharply, if AI
decisions became fairer than typical human decisions, would there be any residual
discomfort with the technology? And, if there is, is that discomfort philosophically
interesting or just a function of our difficulty to get psychologically accustomed to
new modes of decision making?
The most serious concern about the rise of AI can be gleaned with the help
of Aristotle’s famous “function argument” (1999, Book I). Very broadly, that
argument runs something like this: Human actions typically aim towards an end or
“good” that is beyond the action itself (we go to the dentist to keep our teeth
healthy, we avoid certain foods to keep our hearts healthy and so on). But there
must be a “highest good” in the realm of action, something desired for its own sake
and not for the sake of something else, otherwise all desire and striving would be
futile. We usually call this highest good “happiness”. The happiness or eudaimonia
of X consists in the fulfillment of X’s function. A good X, a flourishing X, a happy X
is one that does its work (ergon) and fulfills its function (a good shoe is one that gets
us comfortably from one place to another and good car is one that transports us
188 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

with a mix of elegance and practicality). Indeed, everything we encounter has a

function. Humans must have a function too. The function of human beings is the
excellent exercise of rationality. A well-functioning human being is one that uses
reason well, in order to modulate wants and desires. That regulation – that exer-
cise – the ability to rationally weigh particulars in different areas and decide how
much of a desire we realize and when, is the key to human flourishing. What we are
when we are well-functioning humans is creatures who can exercise practical
judgment – creatures who can navigate particulars well – and it is by the repeated
exercise of this judgment and the navigation of particulars that we gradually
become possessed of the moral virtues, that we acquire them as second nature, that
we become full-fledged human beings and, with some luck, flourish.
The argument is more complicated than this (for example, Aristotle speaks of
two possible exercises of rationality – passively following others’ good judgment
and actively conceiving of the good oneself – such that one begins with the former
and moves to the latter.) But for our purposes we can stick with this sketch.
There are, of course, well known problems with Aristotle’s function argument.
The assumption that there must be a highest good is questionable (Aristotle says
that without a highest good all desire and striving would be futile, but perhaps all
desire and striving just are futile or at least they are not made meaningful by a good
outside of themselves); it’s not clear why humans as such must have a function
even if all human professions (carpenters, brick layers, programmers) or all human
body parts (the eye, the ear) have one. It’s not clear that a creature’s happiness
must be understood in terms of its function (the early utilitarians and, later, Freud
would argue that it should be understood in terms of pleasure and pain or desire
satisfaction).6
And yet Aristotle’s basic insights – that we are judgment making creatures,
that making judgements requires weighting particulars, that there is connection

6 For an excellent discussion see Roochnik (2013), especially chapters 5 and 6. Our argument
assumes but does not explicitly defend one position in a long-standing debate in Aristotle
scholarship, between intellectualist and inclusionist understandings of eudaimonia, or human
flourishing. Briefly, the former position, usually traced to Aristotle’s argument in Book 10 sections
6–8 of the Nicomachean Ethics holds that human flourishing is primarily about, and is indeed
defined by, theoria or contemplative activity. The contemplative life can involve and perhaps even
requires some ethical activities to sustain it, but a person’s happiness consists in the realization (or
as close as possible) of the life of reflection; ethical virtue will be merely instrumental to that
purpose. Inclusionists, on the other hand, argue that there can be more than one good that is
sought for its own sake, and that flourishing will consist in a combination of ethical and
contemplative virtues. For a leading intellectualist account see Kraut (1989). For examples of the
inclusivist position see Roche (1988) and Annas (1999). We proceed from inclusivists assumptions
here – that part of what makes a human life valuable and happy is the exercise of phronesis and
that the development and practice of moral virtues are good for their own sake.
 AI and Phronesis 189

between making these practical judgments over time and what it means to be good
or have good character traits – are powerful. And if we take those insights seriously
it follows that reducing the scope in which we can make such judgments is
problematic; it destabilizes the very conditions for becoming a good, flourishing
person.
Knowing how much I should donate to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent
Association when they call for a contribution to benefit orphans of police officers
requires the capacity to quickly assess whether the information in the request is
reliable, how much money I still need to spend on other obligations this month,
how much money I have already given to charity, and where this cause stands in
relation to other charitable causes. Someone who can quickly weigh all of these
factors and give the right amount of money to the right cause for the right reasons
and at the right time is generous. Someone who gives nothing is stingy. Someone
who bankrupts herself is lavish. The latter two are failures of judgment. Both
involve a coarseness in navigating the particulars. Aristotle tells us that it is
through the process of making these judgments in the same way a generous person
would make them that we ultimately become generous. The same is true about
hiring decisions and about punishment decisions and about creditworthiness
decisions and decisions made in myriad other contexts.
Who to hire, who to fire, whether to approve a loan, where to allocate police
forces, how much to punish, how much to give to charity are all decisions that
require the weighting of particulars and, in the end, require virtue to be done well.
Our life circumstances are such that many of these judgments are made at work in
our professional capacity. But AI is gradually replacing practical decision making
in our work lives. As we write this, employment decisions in large chain franchises,
loan and credit approval decisions, and charitable giving decisions are being
farmed out to algorithms. And the algorithms are doing an increasingly competent
job with these decisions. The trend is likely to expand, with more and more aspects
of local government (tax assessments, decisions about licensees) becoming
automated (see Hughes 2017). Whether or not the algorithms are actually “making
judgments” is a quandary we don’t have to enter.
They are certainly replacing judgments and it’s the decline in human capacity
we are focused on here rather than the status of algorithms.
Algorithms are eliminating many of the contexts we have for weighting
particulars and thus exercising our practical wisdom. Middling management jobs
are the opportunities many of us have to hone our ability to make judgments, and
many of these jobs are being automated.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz and political scientist Kenneth Sharpe (2011)
write of a Pennsylvania judge, Lois Forer, who sentenced a felon to less than the
minimum two-year term for armed robbery. She did this because the felony
190 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

perpetrated was a non-characteristic, anxiety driven slip up. The felon, “Michael”,
lost his job, fell into a panic about how he would feed his family and robbed a cab
driver (using a toy gun). Forer gave Michael an 11-month sentence and helped keep
his family intact by mandating that he work during the day and return to jail at
night. This “wise improvisation” by the judge seemed like a successful compro-
mise and an appropriate weighting of the relevant circumstances. Michael
completed his sentence and found a new job; he and his family got back on track.
But the prosecution appealed the sentence, the higher court mandated the mini-
mum penalty, judge Forer dutifully imposed it, and then she resigned from the
bench. She quit because she had become a judge who was not allowed to judge.
Being on the bench was meaningful for her, among other things, because it
allowed her to use her judgment. The work was no longer of interest once that
capacity had been curtailed. Forer was demoralized because, at least for her,
judging itself became demoralized.
This case provides a helpful analogy for thinking about the trouble with AI.
Sentencing guidelines are not, strictly speaking, machine learning algorithms. But
they are close enough. Like algorithms, they are decision making procedures that
obviate and replace human judgments. As in the case of sentencing guidelines, AI
based decision making is gradually replacing the need to navigate, weigh and
assess stories. The algorithms are likely to do a good, fair, maybe even nuanced
job. But that ability to navigate, weigh and assess stories is at the heart of what it
means to be an active human who realizes her function or, to use Aristotle’s
language, “does her work”. When machines do it for us those tasks will become
demoralized and we will become demoralized. An algorithmic sentencing
decision, teacher termination decision or loan approval may be both fair and
successful, yet demoralizing to the official who used to make it. Put differently, AI
risks demoralizing us and our activities because a big part of what it means to be
moralized is to use practical judgment or phronesis.
If Aristotle is right that habit instills morally excellent behavior – if the
habitual exercise of practical judgments allows us to incrementally hone virtues,
and AI saves us time by taking over some of those practical judgments, or if its
pattern recognition capacities are very good at learning that kind of behavior – we
risk innovating ourselves out of moral competence with the introduction of AI. We
will, simply, lose the habit. Though Aristotelian ethics are not algorithmic like
Kantian or utilitarian accounts, moral capacity and skill à la Aristotle – developed
as they are by practice and habit – are algorithmizable. In fact, the habitual
weighting of particulars through time with small tweaks based on prior in-
teractions – the essence of virtue acquisition for Aristotle – is also a perfect
description of a machine learning model. This does not mean the machine be-
comes virtuous – it is certainly hard to argue that the conditions for virtue that
 AI and Phronesis 191

Aristotle enumerates (acting knowingly, choosing the action for its own sake,
acting from a stable state of character) are met (Aristotle 1999, Book II); it just
means that our practical judgment can be replaced by machines. In other words, if
the person who has practical wisdom, the phronimos, is one who navigates par-
ticulars well, one who assigns appropriate weight to them based on context
(Aristotle 1999, Book VI),7 AI can emulate what that person does. In creating an
algorithm, weights are assigned to different aspects of the task or situation the
machine is confronted with, and the machine gradually adjusts these weights
through continuous iterations. Suppose we are talking about locating a medical
advisor for a serious disease: practical judgment would weigh expertise, avail-
ability, bedside manner etc. and revise judgments about the preferred expert based
on the efficacy of the interactions they yield. An algorithm can be written to
approximate that process – at least well enough.8
Aristotle argues that human flourishing or eudaimonia is achieved through
work – by practicing the capacities that, like our ability to make practical judg-
ments, make us human. Now if AI, by replacing some of these practical judgments,
results in us practicing less we will, through our engagement with this technology,
become less of ourselves. What is at issue is the judge who, like Forer, does less
judging due to the introduction of sentencing guidelines, or the HR manager who
does less hiring do to the algorithmic streamlining of her job. In each case the
capacity for judgment is restricted and as a result the activities themselves become
demoralized and thus demoralizing.9

7 As Roochnik (2013, 170) puts it: “the phronimos accurately sizes up and then navigates effec-
tively through the particulars of the situation.”
8 This type of approximation raises some interesting questions internal to Aristotle’s function
argument: if judgment is replaceable by machines we are not uniquely suited to it. If uniqueness is
a criterion for identifying the human function, as Aristotle argues, the ability to rationally weigh
particulars and make practical judgments about them may no longer be a viable candidate. Further
if, for Aristotle, the acquisition of virtues is hierarchical and we move from habit based moral
virtues to the more abstract intellectual ones, we may fail to develop the moral virtues in the first
place because AI would diminish the need for judgment. There would, then, be a ripple effect on
our capacity to display the intellectual virtues.
9 The argument we offer here corresponds with the growing literature on deskilling – the impact
of technology on the viability of important human capacities. Most relevant to our claims are Vallor
(2016, section 3) and Danaher (2019b). Vallor produces a list of twelve techno-moral virtues (in
reality, existing virtues that are reimagined to apply to the impact of technology). In part 3 of the
book, she applies that list to contemporary technological questions ranging from the rise of social
media to robotics and bio-enhancement. Vallor warns that these technologies threaten basic
virtues and capabilities: too much engagement on our phones weakens social skills and our
capacity to engage intimately. Autonomous weaponry may weaken a nation’s prudent hesitation
before going to war. Caregiving robots may preclude meaningful opportunities for becoming
empathetic or caring for those who depend on us. Extreme reliance on technology results in a loss
192 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

This is not necessarily an anxious, dystopian statement about technology’s

encroachment. Let us reiterate: There are good reasons to think that this kind of
algorithmic decision making will yield good, ultimately better results, than our
own judgment produces. It is quite possible that just as self-driving cars will
ultimately become safer than human driven cars, algorithmic sentencing, police
force allocation, and hiring decisions will ultimately be fairer and more efficient
than what we have now. We are simply pointing out that the scope and opportu-
nities for human judgment are narrowing. There is no reason to assume that
synthetic judgments will be worse for being synthetic. Quite the opposite. But
Aristotle tells us that we flourish by doing what human beings are naturally suited
to do. And that is to use our judgment. AI encroaches on that territory. Now a critic
may plausibly object to this argument along the following lines: Why is the
concern about the atrophying of judgment such a big deal, why should we worry so
much about our capacity for phronesis, especially if algorithmic replacements
bring fairer, more equitable results for those who have been mistreated by our
faulty, unfair, human, all too human judgments? Shouldn’t we be concerned with
better outcomes for those who were previously hurt by our misjudgments than
about preserving the process of judging? Stated differently, perhaps the virtuous
thing to do given the precarity and deficiency of our judgment is to gradually give it
over to algorithms once it becomes clear they can do a better job than us? This is an
important and powerful objection. But if we accept the Aristotelian premise that
the ability to make judgments is a large part of what people value about themselves

of virtues centered on sociality, prudence, loyalty and commitment. Vallor’s argument is related to
the one offered here. But our focus is not so much on AI’s impact on specific virtues as on its
significance for the very conditions of becoming virtuous. If Aristotle is right that developing
virtues turns on the capacity for phronesis, and if we are right that AI undermines phronesis, AI
isn’t just undermining or deskilling particular virtues – it is undermining the very possibility of
developing virtues in the first place. Danaher argues that the rise of robots and AI will result in a
shift from agency towards “patiency” – a passive, receptive mode of existing in which we are
subject to and done to rather than responsibly originate action. Agency, Danaher argues, consists
in four capacities: a “(i) the capacity for sensing, i.e. acquiring information from the world around
us; (ii) the capacity for processing, i.e. categorising, sorting and rendering useful that information;
(iii) the capacity for acting, i.e. the ability to use the processed information to form and implement
action plans; and (iv) the capacity for learning, i.e. the ability to grow and develop the other three
capacities.” Robots and AI are meant to either supplement or replace all four. To the extent that
they do, these technologies undermine agency. Aristotle’s account of phronesis is not identical to
what it means to be agentic but it is, of course, related. The phronimos must be able to acquire
information, categorize and sort it, act on it, and learn how to improve in these three domains. Our
Aristotelian focus is on the fourth aspect of agency. It is the learning, through the consistent,
habitual exercise of practical judgment that ultimately gives rise to virtues. We are arguing that the
opportunities for this kind of learning are being curtailed by the rise of AI.
 AI and Phronesis 193

(namely, they don’t exclusively value better outcomes), then it is, at the very least,
worth having a serious social discussion about whether the benefit of fairer out-
comes is worth the cost of losing foundational capabilities. More descriptively, the
paper’s argument can serve as a reminder, for those who would embrace these
improved outcomes, of the Rousseauian insight that technological progress rarely
comes without a degree of regress. That the triumphalist picture of linear
advancement suggested by the focus on better social results is over-simplified.
That these improved results come with a significant diminution in what, until now,
we assumed is an essential aspect of being a fully functional human. Second, if we
accept the Aristotelian picture that tells us that the capacity for judgment is
practice-dependent, that the ability to weigh particulars turns on having sufficient
contexts in which to weigh them, the elimination of some of these contexts may
diminish the capacity for judgment across the board. In other words, there may
well be a spill-over effect from using one’s judgment less in commercial and po-
litical contexts to the ability to use it in more private settings or in other areas that
are not similarly influenced by machine learning.

4 Life Hacking
The risk for a decline in our capacity for practical judgment comes at the same time
as artificial intelligence is making it possible to obtain and use more data about more
aspects of our lives than ever before. Information about our sleep quality (based on a
measurements of body temperature, room temperature, how many times we toss at
night), heart rate, eating habits, exercise patterns, shopping behavior, heating and
cooling preferences and so on, are now made available to us by a variety of apps
deploying machine learning technology. An app called Sleep Cycle deploys a
phone’s sensors to figure out how much time we spend in each sleep cycle so that we
can be woken at the optimal time. A sister app, Power Nap, is meant to facilitate an
afternoon doze that keeps us out of deep sleep. Nest learns our home energy con-
sumption patterns and adjusts our environmental systems to economize on costs.
Statistical machine learning based apps give us unprecedented amounts of
data about our lives and come with the promise of life hacking – optimizing the
way we sleep, eat, exercise, heat, cool and so on. There are, of course, remarkable
benefits to be gained: It’s good to save money on utilities, it may be helpful to
know how our sleep cycles work, and it is critical to track one’s sugar intake
if one is diabetic.10 But such tools also risk creating an excessive sense of

10 The Seattle based company Brook provides such a service for diabetics, see https://www.
brook.health.
194 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

self-importance – a technologically induced narcissism that convinces us that we

are important enough to have all of this data collected about us. This is not the
kind of self-importance that comes with the ability to flatteringly curate Facebook
or LinkedIn profiles, or airbrush pictures on Instagram. There is an increasingly
robust body of literature on how spending a great deal of time on social media
carries the risk of exacerbating and sometimes even bringing about personality
disorders including narcissism and OCD (see Aboujaoude 2012, Ch. 3; Rosen 2013;
Terkle 2011). Machine learning driven life hacking is relatively new and its impact
has not yet been rigorously studied. But it is plausible to assume that the massive
collection of health information, behavioral information and other data points
about the most humdrum aspects of our lives, with the purpose of hacking
ourselves into optimal efficiency, will lead us to believe that we are the kind of
creatures whose humdrum data matters a great deal. As AI helps us become
preoccupied with how many minutes we spent in REM sleep, with how much
protein we have ingested and with the variability of our heart rate through the
day, it makes us into our own projects – rigorously and empirically engaging in
tracking, assessing, and improving ourselves. A critic may object that, far from
being problematic, such opportunities for self-design offer a calming antidote to
the concerns about phronesis raised in the previous section, that life hacking
provides us with a plethora of new contexts in which to exercise our judgment.
And yet, all of these contexts pertain to ourselves. To develop practical judgment
we must face outwards, towards others people and towards the world around us.
The ability to navigate particulars well and to acquire virtues depends on
exposure, on having a rich life in which one engages with others in a variety of
situations in which our moral abilities are called on and challenged. An increased
engagement with oneself does not qualify as such an existence.
The conjunction between a decline in the ability to use practical judgment on
the one hand and an increased sense of self-importance on the other paints a
worrying picture – we are at risk of taking ourselves more and more seriously even
as our capacities for putting such evaluations in perspective decline. Self-love can
be checked by sound practical judgment. But AI threatens a perfect storm:
encouraging a growing preoccupation with ourselves while degrading the capacity
to put such navel gazing into perspective.

5 Conclusion
If the right controls are put in place AI need not encode the prejudices of its
creators. In fact, the technology is likely to become progressively fairer and safer.
 AI and Phronesis 195

The real reason to worry about AI is that it will gradually erode and displace our
capacity for making practical judgments.
Techno optimists will scoff at this worry: technology always brings a degree
of disruption and always generates the anxiety that the very essence of human
nature is being undone. And yet here we still are. Automation, in particular, has
always generated fears and anxieties about human displacement (see, e.g., Kang
2011; Mayor 2018). In fact, the very term luddite (used to describe those who are
alarmed by the harms of new technology) commemorates early 19th century
hosiery workers who smashed weaving machines for fear that the technology
would put them out of work (see Randall 1998; Sale 1996). While the weaving
machines probably did displace workers who could not acquire new skills,
automation, more broadly, has tended to increase productivity rather than
unemployment. This critique is sometimes referred to as the luddite fallacy (see,
e.g., Ford 2009, Ch. 2).
But AI is inevitably bringing about a world with fewer contexts for making
practical judgments. Some workers will benefit and move up the organizational
hierarchy and will start making more sophisticated judgments than the ones that
were just automated. AI will free a few of us up to be strategists. This is the usual,
calming salve offered by the technology’s proponents. When all the judgments that
can be automated are automated, we will become available for more creative work.
But this reply seems complacent; we can’t all arrive at these sunlit uplands.11 We
are not all going to become strategists. Many important estimates suggest that
within the next generation, a third or more of existing jobs will disappear due to AI
powered automation.12 In fact, the very attraction of the technology, the very
reason that companies are engaged in an AI arms race, is the cost saving involved
in the automation of the means of production. When AI works well we will be
making the same number of products and we will be providing similar services
with fewer people. This is its true economic draw (Roose 2019).

11 A recent account of the impact of automation on Amazon fulfillment centers suggests that the
jobs that were not automated became more rather than less dreary. Far from freeing remaining
workers to perform more creative tasks, robots were introduced into the few parts of the work that
afforded workers a degree of autonomy and privacy (such as walking through the warehouse to
find ordered items). See MacGillis (2021).
12 Job loss rates range between 14 and 47% percent in the next few decades. For a useful overview
of key studies see: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2018/04/18/will-robots-and-ai-
take-your-job-the-economic-and-political-consequences-of-automation/. The mean rate is 38%.
The World Economic Forum recently released a report that predicted that from the 1.37 million
workers who will lose their jobs to automation in the next decade, only a quarter can
benefit from programs that will teach them new skills. Three quarters will likely become
unemployed. The report is available here: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Towards_a_
Reskilling_Revolution.pdf.
196 N. Eisikovits and D. Feldman

The techno-optimist will plausibly retort that less work does not necessarily
mean fewer opportunities for developing or exercising judgment. Assuming we
can financially sustain newly unemployed, and assuming we can create
new sources of demand for automatically generated products in a market con-
sisting of fewer paid workers, what is to stop people from honing their judgement
in their leisurely activities? Why couldn’t they develop phronesis by engaging in
hobbies and artistic pursuits? Or while dedicating themselves more fully to
family life?13
This is a potent objection. But like many kinds of philosophical optimism,
techno-optimism suggests a problematic tradeoff in which we are to be assuaged
about the concrete loss of existing goods by the promise of attractive yet hypo-
thetical benefits. The future world of secure leisure may indeed provide
remarkable opportunities for honing our judgment. But whether or not that world
comes about depends on the prudent formulation and competent execution of
public policy. In the meantime, the losses in skill and judgment are concrete and
ongoing. What is the argument for preferring hypothetical future goods to
foundational current skills? Further, there is reason to worry that, given leisure,
future humans will not continue to hone their practical judgment and phronesis,
practicing the foundations of their agency, but will passively slip into what
(Danaher 2019a) and others (see, e.g., Floridi 1999; Gunkel 2011) describe as
moral patiency. Stated differently, the techno-optimist argument that a world
with less work will provide ample opportunities to develop phronesis depends on
two separate layers of optimism: the first that circumstances and policy prowess
will make widespread sustainable leisure practical, and the second that human
psychology is robust enough to sustain agency and judgment under those new
conditions.
The upshot of our argument is that while AI has the potential to streamline the
functioning of both private and public enterprises and to reduce the biases
inherent in their operations, the deployment of the technology to replace more and
more everyday human judgments will undermine our capacity for judgment
making. To the extent that this capacity is a foundational part of what we value
about ourselves, this loss will adversely impact our well-being and diminish our
self-understanding. Neither the utilitarians who claim that the tradeoff is worth it
nor the techno-optimists who claim that it’s not really a tradeoff offer convincing

13 See, for example, Frude (2019). Danaher (2019b) provocatively proposes that a retreat into
virtual worlds could help maintain key human capacities and allow us to flourish in a post-work
world. Though automation can result in deskilling and a reduction of agency, these technologi-
cally created problems, Danaher argues, are susceptible to a technological solution.
 AI and Phronesis 197

arguments. A technology that threatens to undo a foundational human capacity

deserves closer moral scrutiny.

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