After Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI Alignment
The Gradient Peli Grietzer
A philosophical essay argues that AI agents should be designed with eudaimonic rationality—a practices-based form of reasoning rooted in virtue ethics—rather than consequentialist goal-optimization, because human flourishing itself involves this type of rational activity. The essay identifies eudaimonic rationality as a natural and stable form of agency found in domains like mathematics and friendship, where agents promote excellence through excellence rather than optimizing toward external goals. This framework would make AI systems more robust to alignment problems like inner misalignment, goal drift, and violations of safety properties like corrigibility and transparency, while also naturally supporting human values without creating the type mismatch that plagues goal-based AI alignment approaches.
Why it matters
Preface This essay argues that rational people don’t have goals, and that rational AIs shouldn’t have goals. Human actions are rational not because we direct them at some final ‘goals,’ but because we align actions to practices[1]: networks of actions, action-dispositions, action-evaluation criteria,
