COGNITIVE ETHICS AND ETHICAL CHOICE: REFLECTIONS ON ETHICAL LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE AGE OF AI

Ethical Literary Criticism, founded by Chinese scholars, is a critical theory and methodology for reading and interpreting literary works from the perspective of ethics. Its central concept, ethical choice, operates under new conditions in the age of artificial intelligence. AI systems intervene deeply in human cognition and affect ethical choice by altering its cognitive conditions. Cognitive ethics is a critical concept advanced within Ethical Literary Criticism to examine the internal connection between cognition and ethics. Viewed through the lens of cognitive ethics, AI systems intervene in all three stages of ethical choice. At the stage of perception, the information a person relies on has already been filtered by the systems. At the stage of weighing, ethical considerations that resist quantification are either converted into numerical values or excluded. At the stage of decision, ethical choice no longer occurs in the concrete situation but has already occurred at the point of system design. Ethical choice accordingly takes on new characteristics, namely mediation, the dispersal of responsibility, and task-orientation. Ethical wisdom therefore comes to include metacognitive capacity, and it reaffirms ethical choice as a practical activity that advances moral cultivation.