From Correction to Formation: Towards a Character-Based Approach to AI Ethics Education

This paper asks how AI ethics education should respond when technologies do not merely extend professional activity but participate in reshaping the practices through which professional identities are formed. It argues that AI ethics literacy, while necessary, does not adequately address the complexity of these conditions and instead, develops a formative, character-based approach to AI ethics education centered on professional identity formation. First, I reconstruct an extensionist account of technological change and develop the concept of constitutive power to explain how some technologies reshape the norms, roles, and standards that define core professional practices. I then develop a character-based account of professional formation in which the work of moral cultivation and technological mediation continuously shape one another, with technomoral virtues enabling professionals to remain morally oriented within, and responsive to, the technological conditions that help form them. I conclude by developing a staged framework for AI ethics curriculum design that begins from differences in students’ capacities and moves through habituation, moral discernment, and ultimately lifelong professional formation oriented toward the common good.