A recent report of the professional association for electrical engineers, IEEE (IEEE 2019), calls attention to the importance of technology for politics. It describes the aims of engineering the new legal information technology this way: “Ultimately, our goal should be eudiamonia, a practice elucidated by Aristotle that defines human well-being, both at the individual and collective level, as the highest virtue for a society” (IEEE 2019, 2). The association with the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics may at first seem surprising since the consumerist values of Silicon Valley typically run towards anti-teleological perspectives. But, as the report notes, the information and computing technologies (ICT) that are being developed are “specifically designed to reduce the necessity for human intervention in our day-to-day lives.” And for this reason, it is “raising concerns about their impact on individuals and societies” (IEEE, 3). This admission is a significant moment, which finds the professional association for electrical engineers acknowledging Aristotle’s claim that “all communities aim at some good” (Arist. Pol. I. trans. Jowett, 1252.5 ) (Aristotle 1996, 1986) and “the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim”…
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