AI Has No Moral Compass. Do You?

Why the Age of AI Demands We Take Character Formation Seriously

Here’s something to chew on:

Anthropic, the company behind Claude — a chatbot used by 30 million users per month — has exactly one person (whom we know of) working on AI ethics. One. A young Scottish philosopher is doing the vital work of training a large language model to discern right from wrong.

I don’t say this to shame Anthropic. In fact, Anthropic appears to be the only company (that we know of) being explicit about the moral foundations and reasoning of its chatbot. Hundreds of millions of users worldwide are leveraging tools from other LLMs that do not appear to have an explicit moral compass being cultivated from within.

I raise this because this is yet another example of where we are: extraordinary technical power advancing without an equally strong moral infrastructure to support it.

Across social media platforms, autonomous systems, crypto markets, and AI deployment, we’ve witnessed repeated failures of second-order thinking—harms to trust, democracy, labor, youth, and mental health. Many of the most powerful technologists in the world were trained to optimize systems—but not to interrogate their consequences. They learned how to build, but not always how to ask should we, for whom, or at what cost? The most glaring example of this is how many tech billionaires won’t allow their own children to use the products they themselves have created.

Why do we keep producing people who are skilled but not wise?

Scholars Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin describe it simply: Learners must “know the good, love the good, and do the good.” Know it intellectually. Feel it morally. Enact it practically. All three. Without the third, we produce people who can articulate ethical principles and still choose a divergent path.

Restoring our uniquely human advantage of having a moral compass in an age of AI is more important than ever. Because skills, untethered from character, have a way of bending toward self-interest. When we train people relentlessly in technical competence but treat character as optional, we hand out sharper and sharper tools to people who’ve never interrogated what they’re for.

Under pressure, people default to what benefits them most — not because they’re bad people, but because without deeper commitments to anchor them, the easiest path tends to be the most self-serving one. Perhaps even more worrisome is that sophisticated analytical ability without ethical grounding makes people dangerous in morally ambiguous situations. They can construct compelling justifications and rationale for almost anything.

Moral clarity is the missing half. Not moralizing, not certainty — but a cultivated practice: the habit of genuinely asking what is the right thing here? We need more builders to be willing to sit with that question, with the courage to act on the answer even when it’s costly. When that clarity combines with technical fluency, we equip learners not just to thrive in turbulent work lives but also to lead wisely. Someone who can execute skillfully and ask hard questions about what they’re doing and why — that person can design toward human flourishing.

Every course, project, and mentoring relationship is an opportunity for students to ask not only can you do this, but should you — and why? The institutions that take that question seriously won’t just produce graduates who are competent and employable, but they’ll also produce the humanist builders the world actually needs.

AI cannot be accountable. It cannot take responsibility. It cannot feel the weight of a poor choice and decide to do better. Humans can.

Humans can practice wisdom — or what Aristotle called phronesis: the moral will to do the right thing, paired with the skill to figure out what the right thing actually is. That’s not a soft concept. It’s the hardest, most integrative character strength to develop.

And right now, it may be the only one that truly matters.

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Dr. Michelle Weise is the chief impact officer of the Kern Family Foundation and author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet. She is also the co-host of the podcast, “A Life Worth Working,” available wherever you listen to podcasts. All thoughts and opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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