How to Tell We—and AI—Are Choosing the Good

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How to Tell We—and AI—Are Choosing the Good<br>While defining the good can be hard, we can look for signs that accompany it

Deepak Subburam<br>Jun 26, 2026

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Remember Edward Snowden? The NSA contractor who leaked classified documents, publicizing the government’s surveillance apparatus? His action brought to light major privacy concerns, and led to the government ending its bulk data collection programs1. Many of us think that was a good thing, and that Snowden did good.<br>What if some AI made a similar decision? Say you work at a hedge fund, and are researching trading strategies using an AI. Your AI determines that the strategy you are contemplating amounts to illegal market manipulation, and proceeds to leak your source code implementing it to the Wall Street Journal and the SEC. Did the AI do good?

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We are constantly deciding what to do, increasingly enlisting AI to help us. We use the good as a criterion, and trust that our AI use is aligned with that criterion. Goodness, however, is difficult to define and elaborate. We could associate goodness with general happiness, and choose the action that maximizes general happiness. But that approach—utilitarianism—has serious issues2. There are philosophers who consider the question of what the good consists in intractable3. We typically make do by relying on our intuition, an affordance not available to AI.<br>That is why we shall turn instead to examine what typically accompanies good action. Can we look for indicators, tells, that can help us—and our AIs—recognize when we are or are not on the straight and narrow? I present three. In increasing levels of inwardness: means and ends, vice and virtue, shallow and deep.

Walking the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral. Photo by User:Maksim at Wikimedia<br>Means and Ends: Kant and Kierkegaard

We’ve all heard the cliché the ends justify the means. Snowden violated the terms of his contract by taking with him classified documents and then disclosing them. He did his employer wrong. But then, his employer was doing the public wrong. Didn’t Snowden’s action help correct that wrong? Well, not according to Immanuel Kant. He would say two wrongs do not make a right.<br>If everyone broke agreements for what they deem a positive end, agreements as such will lose their instrumental function. Our economy and society will suffer. That is how I’d apply Kant’s thinking to Snowden’s case. Kant’s categorical imperative, in its first formulation, reads: “Act only on that maxim which you can will as a law for all rational beings.”4<br>A philosopher friend of mine had another take. He said Kant’s categorical imperative isn’t about global consequence (”rule-utilitarianism”), but about respecting the dignity of all other rational beings5. Even so, the conclusion is effectively the same: Deceiving your employer, by smuggling documents out and reneging on your non-disclosure promise to them, is just plain unethical.

Portrait of Kant, 1790. Painter unknown, possibly Elisabeth von Stägemann.<br>The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would say pretty much the same thing. For someone willing the Good, he writes, “the means and the end are one and the same thing”. One is not responsible for whether they reach their goal, “[b]ut without exception, he is eternally responsible for the kind of means he uses”6. Being particular about means may seem burdensome, and means may not be as compelling as a Muskian vision. But attending to the means focuses us on our present actions and what we can control, granting us a measure of peace. By not fretting about whether we reach our goal, we avoid the “passionate one’s torment”7.<br>So here is an indicator we can use to check our actions: Do we attend to our act’s right-ness as much as if not more so than its goal? This principle is easily translated to AI actions. An AI agent may not take an unethical step to reach a user’s requested goal, no matter how urgent and important-sounding the goal is made out to be.<br>Vice and Virtue: Aristotle

A college student loves playing the piano, but she worries she can’t make a living doing so. So she studies accounting instead of music, and becomes an accountant. Did she choose well? If your intuition says that it depends, you would find company in Aristotle.<br>Aristotle writes that courage, like most virtues of character, is a balanced condition between two opposing vices; in this case, between cowardice and foolhardiness8. Was our student friend too cowardly to take a chance, or simply being realistic? Perhaps she likes accounting too, and exercised the virtue of practical judgment (phronesis)9, judging where her personal interests meets the world’s needs.<br>Other virtues Aristotle develops include temperance, generosity, justice, and amiability. Together, they make the following query a decent tell of choosing the good: Are we acting in accordance with the virtues?<br>Being-at-work in accordance with...