Response 5

Notes:

For this week, the prompt is

In "Moral Machines: From Value Alignment to Embodied Virtue," Wendell Wallach and Shannon Vallor identify a "cluster of advanced moral capacities" (p. 392) and several "cognitive and affective potentials" (p. 399) that they think are critical for humans but will be challenging, if not impossible, for machines to possess.

Compare one of these capacities or potentials to ideas introduced in Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics. On this response, depth will help you learn more than comparing a couple of capacities or potentials to a couple of ideas from NE.

Advanced Moral Capacities from Moral Machines

Creative Moral Reasoning: Inventing new, appropriate moral solutions not determined by past experience.
Moral Discourse: Cooperatively reasoning with other agents to negotiate moral solutions.
Critical Moral Reflection: Critically evaluating one's own (and others') moral values and rules from a moral point of view.
Moral Discernment: Recognizing new or subtle forms of moral importance and conflict.
Holistic Moral Judgment: Making sense of a complex situation as a whole, beyond just adding up its ethical parts.

The 5 intellectual virtues from Book VI (Ch. 4-5)

Aristotle distinguishes five ways the soul grasps truth:

Techne (art/craft): ability to make things (production, poiesis).
Epistēmē (scientific knowledge): demonstrative knowledge of necessary truths.
Phronēsis (practical wisdom): good deliberation about what is good for humans in action (praxis).
Nous (intellect): direct grasp of first principles.
Sophia (theoretical wisdom): highest intellectual virtue, combining nous (principles) + epistēmē (demonstrations) in knowing the highest realities.

Ch. 6–7 — Practical wisdom (phronēsis)

Deliberation is about what is in our power and can be otherwise.
Phronēsis is the true reasoned capacity to act well in relation to the human good.
Concerns not universals only but also particulars (what to do in concrete situations).
Not the same as cleverness (deinotēs): cleverness can achieve any end, good or bad; phronēsis is ordered toward the good.

Draft

Machines with with creative moral reasoning
In Moral machines we are presented the moral capacities from which humans are rich but machines lack, one of them is named "Creative Moral Reasoning", which is the capacity of inventing new, appropriate moral solutions that are not determined by past experience which I believe connects well with one of the ideas shared in Book VI of Nichomachean Ethics. More specifically, one of the 5 intellectual virtues listed by Aristoteles, "phronēsis", also called practical wisdom. This is the reasoned capacity of humans to act well in relation to good, that in contrast with cleverness, which can achieve any end, either good or bad, practical wisdom is ordered towards good. And similarly in difference with scientific knowledge, which deals with necessary and established truths, practical wisdom deals with deliberation and the ever changing environment of human affairs. This notion of a volatile and "ever-changing" circumstances appears in both ideas. From the perspective of creative moral reasoning, the authors talk about how machines lack this capacity of coming up with innovative moral solutions, and how they statistically optimize data but lack this context-sensitive grasp of what counts as good in new situations. This matches Aristotle’s view that good deliberation involves finding means to good ends in contingent, ever, changing circumstances, something no fixed formula or algorithm can capture. phronēsis involves experience, that machines may have in the best case, but it also requires something else than that, moral virtue itself, in order to provide the capacity to end at good, but deliberation also involves this kind of innovation factor in figuring out how to act well in new circumstances. Thus, this notion embodies exactly the kind of creative, situational moral reasoning that humans have and machines cannot replicate according to "Moral Machines".

Practical Wisdom and Creative Moral Reasoning
In Moral Machines we are presented with moral capacities that humans possess but machines lack. One of them, "Creative Moral Reasoning," is the ability to invent new, appropriate moral solutions not determined by past experience. I believe this connects closely with an idea from Book VI of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the intellectual virtue of phronēsis, also called practical wisdom. Unlike cleverness, which can reach any end whether good or bad, phronēsis is ordered toward the good. And unlike scientific knowledge, which deals with necessary and established truths, practical wisdom concerns deliberation in the ever-changing field of human affairs. Likewise, Moral Machines emphasizes that even if machines statistically process massive amounts of data, what I would call a kind of "experience", they still lack the essential ingredient that makes phronēsis real: moral virtue, the orientation toward the good. Practical wisdom requires not only this moral grounding but also the ability to creatively deliberate about how to act well in unpredictable, volatile circumstances. This innovative, situational reasoning is precisely the kind of capacity that humans have and machines, as Moral Machines argues, are not able replicate.