Eugene Kelly

The translator of Scheler’s essay, “On the Rehabilitation of Virtue,” presents an account of the context of this essay in Scheler’s work and of its relevance to his concept of the ordo amoris and to his critique of Kant. The translator discusses the intended audience of the essay, its moral purpose, and the method of its procedure. The postscript further reflects on the essay’s central themes of humility and reverence, suggesting avenues for a critical assessment of Scheler’s conclusions. It ends with some reflections on the contemporary value of Scheler’s contributions in this essay to a historical and philosophical understanding of the conflict between science and religion.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be directed at humane ends. The development of AI has produced great uncertainties of ensuring AI alignment with human values (AI value alignment) through AI operations from design to use. For the purposes of addressing this problem, we adopt the phenomenological theories of material values and technological mediation to be that beginning step. In this paper, we first discuss the AI value alignment from the relevant AI studies. Second, we briefly present what are material values and technological mediation and reflect on the AI value alignment through the lenses of these theories. We conclude that a set of finite human values can be defined and adapted to the stable life tasks that AI systems will be called upon to accomplish. The AI value alignment can also be fostered between designers and users through technological mediation. Upon that foundation, we propose a set of common principles to understand the AI value alignment through phenomenological theories. This paper contributes the unique knowledge of phenomenological theories to the discourse on AI alignment with human values.

Although Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) were contemporaries and wrote under the influence of the phenomenological movement, the large differences between their initiatives and achievements in philosophy resulted in scholars rarely reading them together. However, they shared one major concept in ethics, that of material value ethics. This ethics is (1) non‐formal, and involves a profound criticism of Kantian ethical formalism, and (2) is founded in a phenomenology of the values themselves, that its, the content, available in intuition, of such values as trust, utility, friendship, or even the Aristotelian virtues. The present article seeks to uncover a latent harmony and consistency in the two men's material value ethics, and considers the possibility of its recovery for contemporary virtue ethics.