Charles Freiberg

In this essay, we explore the parts of ethical life that cannot be captured and may actually be foreclosed by the dominant principle-centered approach to AI ethics. We argue that principles maintain traces of the moral encounters they were abstracted from, including traces of the moral and metaphysical intuitions that guided people in those encounters. Principlism is thus haunted by an unacknowledged particularity and what we call a “spectral moral ontology.” While bioethics principlism remains connected to the animating force of the encounter through a moral actor, who vivifies its spectral moral ontology, AI possibly removes this moral actor. To do so, programmers must further abstract from the moral encounter by reducing the principles to formal logics cutting “ethics” off from its animating force. This approach to AI ethics creates and deploys a reductive spectral moral ontology that is woefully inadequate to the complexity and irreducibility of the moral encounter.

The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 demonstrated to many educators that writing or, at least, the type of writing often asked of students had been automated. While this rightfully raised a host of practical concerns, mostly around cheating, it should also raise questions about what kind of intellectual life the liberal arts will open once they are no longer centered on writing. In this paper, I argue that the automation of writing and the subsequent decentering of writing within the liberal arts is a threat to the liberal arts’ intellectual life. I first argue that technics always participate in the constitution of the intellectual life, and so any transformation in the technical supplement will transform the intellectual life. I then argue that the technical supplement of the liberal arts’ intellectual life is writing. Thus, the decentering of writing transforms and threatens the liberal arts’ intellectual life. Considering this transformation and threat, those of us involved in the liberal arts need to re-examine what type of intellectual life we want to/can live and pass on. It becomes imperative for those of us in the liberal arts to recognize and to respond creatively to this existential crisis.