Virtuous narrative ethics for accommodation or refusal of AI for sustainability

AI for good, and AI for sustainability projects, are being developed by often well-meaning innovators across the world, intending to support initiatives in sustainable development. Some such projects have been positioned within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. In this paper, we critically engage with this phenomenon using a virtue-based Ricoeurian narrative philosophy. Through conceptual analysis and normative argumentation, we make a theoretical contribution to scholarship on this topic. We argue that SDGs could be regarded as internationally agreed high-order end-norms that crystallise values considered to constitute the good life. We argue for exercising caution in applying SDGs as end-norms to AI projects as they are of a high order, are not directly action guiding, and threaten to sediment presentist dominant values. We argue for narrative hospitality between AI innovators and community stakeholders to guide reflection on specifying the SDGs to more situated contexts and to support the development of AI systems that may be more contextually appropriate, and more capable of supporting plural visions of the good life. Such narrative hospitality represents accommodation between parties, but refusal or resistance to engagement with AI innovators can be justified when community interests are not respected, and actors within AI industries can also be morally obliged to resist or refuse development or deployment of systems for contextually inappropriate environments that would be incompatible with a critical reading of the SDGs formed in narrative exchange with the other.