Applied ethics, the discipline that translates philosophical principle into practical decisions, has become a consulting category inside the AI industry. Companies have begun recruiting theologians and philosophers as advisers on questions of right and wrong. A mounting critique holds that the questions posed to those advisers are misconceived from the start.
Why the AI industry is calling on moral experts
The appeal is easy to see. Theology and philosophy are disciplines that have spent centuries working through questions about moral responsibility and what humans owe one another. An industry suddenly facing those questions at scale would naturally seek out the people who have thought about them longest.
The recruitment also serves a secondary function. Showing that serious moral thinkers were consulted is itself a form of credibility. Whether the consultations produce genuine guidance, rather than the appearance of it, is a separate question entirely.
The case against the questions being asked
The critique cuts at something structural. When a company defines the question, the expert can only answer within that frame. If the frame is wrong, careful philosophical analysis won't correct for it. The philosopher answers what was asked. What was never asked stays off the table.
This is how a serious intellectual exercise can function, in practice, as a legitimation exercise. The expert's presence signals due diligence. The scope of the questions determines what that due diligence actually examines.
The distinction between answering questions and setting the agenda for what gets asked is old in philosophy. It predates AI by centuries. The argument being pressed here is that the industry has been careful with the first part and inattentive to the second.
What gets lost when the framing is wrong
There is a sequence problem embedded in this arrangement. Theologians and philosophers invited into an AI company's ethics process typically arrive after the products exist and after many consequential decisions are already made. The advice sits downstream of choices that were never submitted for moral review.
That is the specific charge. The experts are credentialed and real. The questions, the argument goes, are the part that is wrong.