ArticleScience and engineering ethics2021
Why a Virtual Assistant for Moral Enhancement When We Could have a Socrates?
Article in Science and engineering ethics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human Enhancement: A Conceptual Scoping Review.The Journal of medicine and philosophy · 2026Article
- Are You Sure This is What You Really Want? Conversational Recommender Systems for Enhancing Human Autonomy.Science and engineering ethics · 2026Article
- Addressing Autonomy Risks in Generative Chatbots with the Socratic Method.Science and engineering ethics · 2025Article
- Rage against the authority machines: how to design artificial moral advisors for moral enhancement.AI & society · 2025Article
- Know Thyself, Improve Thyself: Personalized LLMs for Self-Knowledge and Moral Enhancement.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) be more effective than human instruction for the moral enhancement of people? The author argues that it only would be if the use of this technology were aimed at increasing the individual's capacity to reflectively decide for themselves, rather than at directly influencing behaviour. To support this, it is shown how a disregard for personal autonomy, in particular, invalidates the main proposals for applying new technologies, both biomedical and AI-based, to moral enhancement. As an alternative to these proposals, this article proposes a virtual assistant that, through dialogue, neutrality and virtual reality technologies, can teach users to make better moral decisions on their own. The author concludes that, as long as certain precautions are taken in its design, such an assistant could do this better than a human instructor adopting the same educational methodology.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.