Is artificial intelligence quietly convincing us that human judgment no longer matters?
In 2023 Senate testimony, philosopher Shannon Vallor argued that a widespread AI narrative treats practical wisdom — what Aristotle called phronesis — not as a real human capacity worth defending, but as something already outdated. Her claim is precise: the danger is not that AI systems lack judgment, but that a political narrative built around AI convinces people their own judgment no longer matters, because a machine will supposedly do it better.
Vallor scopes her concern to AI technologies affecting basic liberties and the opportunity to flourish — echoing a question Philippa Foot spent her career insisting had a factual answer, though Vallor does not build her own argument on Foot’s terms directly.
In her 2024 book The AI Mirror, Vallor extends the argument through the case of Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who claimed in 2022 that the company’s AI system had become conscious. Where most observers dismissed the claim, Vallor treats the episode as a symptom of something larger: AI systems trained on recorded human behavior function as a mirror, not a judge — one that, in her words, extracts and amplifies whatever patterns already dominate their training data.
And in Technology and the Virtues (2016), Vallor had already named the underlying stakes — not superintelligence itself, but a widening gap between our technological power and what she calls technomoral wisdom. Eight years and two books later, before Congress, that same gap is the argument this episode has been circling from a different direction — arrived at independently, through the same philosopher and the same concept of phronesis that Gadamer, Foot, and MacIntyre each read in their own way.
If judgment itself is becoming optional, what happens to the practices — and the people — that depend on it?
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Mentioned in this clip:
— Shannon Vallor, 2023 U.S. Senate testimony
— Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror (Oxford University Press, 2024)
— Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues (Oxford University Press, 2016), Sections 2.1 and 5.2
— Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (referenced)

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