Ranie B. Villaver
The problem of AI alignment or AI value alignment is the problem of identifying which human value, principle, or ethics is the best with which Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (i.e., robots) should be designed. Among those that have been proposed is the ethics of Kongzi fL^ (Confucius) or Confucianism, a fundamentally skills-based ethic. Support for the suggestion of having Confucianism as the best theory, however, has not been fully articulated. In this paper, I argue that support for the suggestion is palpable in three articles on philosophy and ethics of technology and Confucianism, that of Pak-Hak Wong, and Shan Jing and Neelke Doorn. In this paper, I discuss each of these articles and show how they stress Confucian moral excellence, which is the reason why they support the suggestion. My discussion is in this paper's final section. In the first section, I discuss AI alignment, and in the next, I discuss Confucian moral excellence vis-à-vis Buddhist conception, because moral excellence is also the reason that has been given for proposing Buddhism as one rival theory, and because these traditions' conceptions of a morally excellent person are comparable. © (2026), (Philippine National Philosophical Research Society). All right reserved.
University of San Carlos, Philippines
