Philosophy must provide a more robust understanding of human relations to non-living objects, in this case AI, infrastructures, and designed environments, because these objects now help constitute our shared world. But this demand must be philosophically disciplined: it should reinterpret concepts and institutions without abandoning methodological rigor or the project of human flourishing. I develop this by addressing function, nature, methodology and meaning respectively.
One essential function of philosophy is to clarify and preserve the conditions of judgment. I read in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition that labor, work, and action are distinguished as the three fundamental activities of the vita activa. Crucially, Arendt argues that without the stability of the world produced by work, the fragile freedom of action cannot endure. This indicates that artifacts and institutions are not politically neutral background; they are the material basis of the common world in which judgment, speech and responsibility occur. Oremus’s worry that AI will be used to manufacture shared appearances such as misinformation and deepfakes is therefore a political problem: such machine-mediated deceptions threaten the common world that sustains plurality and interpersonal accountability. If philosophy’s function is to secure conditions for collective judgement, it cannot leave analysis of those mediating artifacts to technologists alone. Philosophical work must supply principled standards for institutional design and conceptual tools, for instance criteria for legitimate authorization, distinctions between explanation and manipulation, and formal accounts of distributed responsibility, that let citizens and institutions judge technological action.
The nature of philosophy is conceptual renovation when existing categories fail. Oremus’s passage already does so: the “programming — the parameters that AI is given” determines outcomes; chatbots model a plurality of voices; the social effects emerge from networks of designers, platforms, users and regulatory void. For philosophy this means revising ontology and ethical terminology: moral considerability must be recognized to understand how algorithms shape choices, epistemic infrastructures to know how information pipelines produce truth-like appearances, and affordances to recognize how design shape functions. Philosophical nature, then, is diagnostic and classificatory: it must supply a vocabulary and normative taxonomies that let policymakers and publics see which network configurations are unjust, which require structural change, and which can be governed through procedural design rather than blunt prohibition. I remember once in my robotics club, I always thought sensors as mere tools that obeyed commands, but in practice they often shaped what strategies we adopt, pushing us to redesign tasks around their features. It felt as if the boundary between “what we decided” and “what the machine decided” blurred, forcing us to rethink the line we had drawn between human intention and mechanical execution. Sometimes our concepts lag behind reality, and philosophy begins when we struggle to redraw those categories.
A central objection insists that engineers are more epistemically privileged to understand the inner workings of non-living systems. Oremus’s emphasis on programming underlines this point: knowing a model’s architecture, datasets and failure modes is a technical task. If “understanding” is reduced to causal, empirical explanation, then philosophy should back down. Indeed, philosophy should not pretend to be system engineers, but it mistakes the kind of understanding philosophy must supply. Philosophy’s methodology is conceptual analysis, normative reasoning and reflective equilibrium between principles and cases. Is an opaque recommender system compatible with democratic accountability? What sorts of consent make sense when agency is distributed across networks? Philosophy supplies justificatory frameworks like legitimacy conditions, criteria of fairness, thresholds for explainability that guide which of these inquiries matter and how their results should be institutionalized. The productive path is collaboration: philosophers refine normative goals and conceptual boundaries; scientists and engineers test, measure and implement.
Another objection appeals to the meaning of philosophy: Alasdair MacIntyre emphasizes practices, virtues and the narrative unity of life, suggesting philosophy’s telos is cultivating human goods within traditions. Expanding philosophical attention to non-living objects risks dispersing the discipline away from moral formation and communal goods. Since the heart of ethics lies in character and lived practices, philosophy should not become a catalogue of technical guidebook. But rather than displacing meaning, attending to technological mediation can be constitutive for virtue formation. Non-living systems can shape habituation given the environment of attention economies and constant notification, opportunities for action, and the scaffolding of moral agency with concealed identity. To cultivate virtues, communities must shape technological environments that either support or erode those virtues. Here philosophy reclaims its telos: it becomes the tool to designing social and material conditions where human flourishing is possible. This means philosophical prescriptions about technology can protect the social practices through which virtues are learned.
Oremus’s passage and the post-humanist prompt together require philosophy to do more than abstract theorizing: philosophy must diagnose how non-living artifacts reconstruct our public world, revise categories of agency and responsibility, and supply normative frameworks that govern design and institutions. Philosophy’s task is neither to replace science nor to flatten humans and objects, but to translate empirical knowledge into norms, to reconceptualize agency in networked contexts, and to design institutions and educative practices that sustain judgment, responsibility and flourishing in a world shared with powerful non-living objects.