From correction to formation: toward a character-based approach to AI ethics education

Abstract

This paper asks how AI ethics education should respond when technologies do not merely extend professional activity but participate in reshaping the practices through which professional identities are formed. It argues that AI ethics literacy, while necessary, is not enough under these conditions and develops a formative, character-based approach to AI ethics education centered on professional identity formation. The paper adopts a conceptual and philosophical approach. It reconstructs and evaluates an extensionist account of technological change, develops the concept of constitutive power and brings this account into conversation with professional identity formation, character education and technomoral virtue. Drawing on the philosophical work of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi, the paper then develops a character-based framework for AI ethics curriculum design. The paper offers practical implications for AI ethics curriculum design in higher education. It proposes a staged, character-based framework that moves beyond stand-alone AI ethics modules toward longitudinal, formation-oriented curricula. Educators are encouraged to design learning environments that cultivate technomoral virtues through reflection, repetition and engagement with technologically mediated professional practices. This paper uses a conceptual and philosophical approach. The proposed character-based framework is therefore not evaluated through classroom implementation or longitudinal assessment using empirical research designs. The paper focuses primarily on professional education in higher education and may require adaptation for other educational or cultural contexts. Future research could empirically examine how character-based AI ethics curricula shape professional identity formation across disciplines and how such frameworks operate within specific institutional contexts. The paper offers practical implications for AI ethics curriculum design in higher education. It proposes a staged, character-based framework that moves beyond stand-alone ethics modules toward longitudinal, formation-oriented curricula. Educators are encouraged to design learning environments that cultivate technomoral virtues through reflection, repetition and engagement with technologically mediated professional practices. By reframing AI ethics education as a formative practice, this paper highlights the broader social stakes of professional education in technologically mediated societies. Professionals formed without sustained attention to moral cultivation may reinforce technological systems that reproduce injustice, exclusion or harm. A character-based approach emphasizes responsibility to the common good and situates professional practice within its social and civic consequences. The framework advanced here underscores the role of education in sustaining ethically responsible professions amid ongoing technological transformation. The paper introduces the concept of constitutive power to explain how technologies reshape core professional practices, norms, roles and identities. It develops a novel character-based model of AI ethics education by bringing medieval Islamic philosophy into conversation with contemporary accounts of technomoral virtue and professional identity formation. In doing so, it offers a distinctive contribution to AI ethics education and shifts the educational focus from correction toward formation.