In technological societies where excessive screen use and internet addiction are becoming constant temptations, the valuable yet intoxicating pleasures of digital technology suggest a need to recover and repurpose temperance, a virtue emphasized by ancient and medieval philosophers. This article reconstructs this virtue for our technological age by reclaiming the most relevant features of Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s accounts and suggesting five critical revisions needed to adapt the virtue for a contemporary context. The article then draws on this critical interpretation, along with empirical research analyzing the value and dangers of digital technology, to construct a normative account of digital temperance, a virtue that finds a mean between “digital insensibility,” the vice of deficiency, and “digital overindulgence,” the vice of excess. We conclude by showing how this virtue of digital temperance can help to promote human flourishing in a world saturated with tempting technology.
In this chapter, we explore how the virtue of digital temperance can help us navigate today’s attention-driven technological environment. Drawing on Homer’s Odyssey, we compare contemporary encounters with digital distraction to Odysseus’s struggle to resist the allure of the lotus and the Sirens. Just as temperance helped Odysseus stay oriented toward his homeward goal, cultivating digital temperance can help us steer between the vices of digital overindulgence—the excessive and disordered use of technology—and digital insensibility—the imprudent rejection of its benefits. We frame digital temperance as an extension of Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of temperance: a virtue that regulates digital pleasures in the right ways, contexts, and amounts. We propose selecting circumstances as one practical strategy for habituating digital temperance. By becoming aware of our technological tendencies, making precommitments, and controlling contextual cues, we can shape environments that support healthier digital habits and orient our technological lives toward human flourishing.
Forthcoming in Improving Character: Moral Virtues, Strategies, and Questions, Wiley-Blackwell