Exemplarism for the AI Age

Across cultures, exemplars have long served as central sources of moral insight. This paper outlines how a virtue ethics that grants exemplars foundational importance is uniquely suited for our technomoral lives: lives increasingly entwined with ever more pervasive and intimate technological systems such as AI. I show how this approach addresses two challenges confronting technology ethics. First, technology ethics must provide guidance precisely when emerging technologies alter the circumstances of human agency in ways that challenge established moral insights. Second, it should offer a theory compelling enough to inspire ethical practice, even amid paralyzing complexity and dogmatic commitments to technological acceleration. Drawing on work by Linda Zagzebski, I articulate a version of technomoral exemplarism whose externalist semantics enables the empirical study of technomoral virtues in the absence of established theory, and whose strong affective grounding motivates moral practice. By outlining and illustrating technomoral exemplarism, I aim to motivate philosophical and empirical engagement with diverse exemplars toward developing a virtue ethics suited for the growing entwinement of our lives with technologies such as AI. The framework also invites future research into whether technomoral exemplars and functional analogues of admiration in AI systems could contribute to AI alignment.