Virtue ethics in everyday interface design

How wording, hierarchy, and moments of friction can support considered action.

One thing that troubles me about designers is how readily some treat public expressions of moral conviction as evidence of sound ethical judgment. They announce their commitments to causes they regard as worthy, speak confidently about responsible practice, yet fail to examine their own biases or the ethical tensions within their decisions.

Virtue signaling is not a substitute for reflective ethical judgment.

Claiming the moral high ground does not demonstrate the judgment needed to question one’s assumptions, recognize competing values, or explain why particular priorities should guide someone else’s experience.

As designers, our convictions carry weight because we make decisions for other people. We determine what an interface makes visible, which actions it encourages, where it asks someone to reflect, and what it handles automatically.

These choices can support one value while limiting another, such as protecting someone from harm while restricting their autonomy. People encounter these decisions whether or not they or the wider society share the designer’s values, and good intentions alone cannot tell us whether we have exercised that authority well.

Examining that authority requires asking what our work ultimately serves. Human flourishing, understood broadly as living well, offers a shared aspiration toward which design can contribute, even when we disagree about what living well involves. That aspiration extends beyond satisfaction with an experience or success at an isolated task.

Both creating an experience and engaging with it offer opportunities to exercise ethical judgment. Beyond addressing user needs, we might ask what these activities allow designers and the people who encounter their work to exercise, learn, or become.

Virtue ethics provides a way to approach this question because it connects human flourishing with the development of character and practical wisdom. Virtues are qualities such as honesty, justice, and courage, while practical wisdom, or phronesis, involves discerning what constitutes good action in particular circumstances.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains that moral virtues develop through repeated action. We become disposed to act justly by acting justly, though he also emphasizes that acting virtuously requires knowledge and choice, not merely reproducing outward behavior.

Thomas Aquinas develops the Aristotelian tradition within a theological account of human life, distinguishing virtues acquired through human action from virtues received through divine grace. His account of acquired virtue helps clarify how repeated actions can cultivate dispositions that shape how we approach later situations. This shifts attention from an isolated interaction to the habits participation may help sustain.

For designers, this raises two connected responsibilities. The first concerns how we exercise virtue in our own work—through careful deliberation, consideration for others, and acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of our decisions. The second concerns the opportunities our designs provide for others to do the same.

A designer may act conscientiously while producing an experience that gives users little room to deliberate or develop judgment. We therefore need to consider both the ethical quality of our own practice and how the resulting experience supports the ethical development of those who use it.

Before considering how design might support these qualities, it is reasonable to ask why we should regard them as good in the first place. In Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that our vulnerability, dependence on others, and capacity to reason help explain why we need virtues. We rely on relationships through which we receive care, learn, and develop judgment.

Honesty, justice, and generosity help sustain those relationships and the human goods they make possible. Their value, in this sense, rests on what human beings need to live and develop well. This offers reasons for valuing these qualities without settling every disagreement about what living well means.

For designers, the connection lies in how people participate in those relationships and activities through the interfaces we create. Communicating, learning, and working together involve opportunities to exercise judgment, honesty, and care for others. Interfaces cannot make someone virtuous, but their wording, available actions, and visual hierarchy can make these considerations more prominent or easier to overlook.

Consider a hypothetical social platform where someone has clicked Share on an article. Figure 1 compares two possible sharing dialogs.

In Option A, a dialog headed “Share this article?” displays the article’s source and headline, followed by a solid blue “Share now” button and a “Cancel” action. The interface asks the person to confirm whether they want to share, without drawing attention to whether they have read the article.

Option B retains the same heading and article preview but adds a message: “You haven’t opened this article. Would you like to read it before sharing?” A solid blue “Read article” button appears above an outlined “Share now” button, with “Cancel” beneath both. This version changes the wording, adds an action, and gives reading the strongest visual emphasis. The person can still share immediately, but the interface explicitly invites them to consider reading the article before passing it along.

As designers, we are often trained to reduce friction and help people accomplish their goals efficiently. If someone wants to share an article, the familiar response is to make sharing as straightforward as possible. Yet sharing information also affects the people who encounter it, which gives designers a responsibility to consider what the interface encourages along the way. The immediate task is to circulate an article, but completing it efficiently does not determine whether the experience supports responsible participation.

The concern extends beyond whether a particular article contains misinformation. An interface that consistently encourages circulation without examination may also encourage a passive relationship to knowledge, in which people pass along claims without considering their meaning, evidence, or credibility.

A virtue ethics perspective asks what habits such interactions invite people to develop. Does the experience give someone an occasion to exercise intellectual honesty and care for others, or does it make those considerations easy to overlook in the pursuit of immediate action?

Seeking to support these qualities also carries a danger. Designers may take this as permission to decide how others ought to behave, imposing a narrow account of proper behavior, particularly when users have little ability to question or refuse it.

Designers therefore need humility about the limits of their knowledge and power, together with a willingness to explain and examine the goods their decisions serve. Supporting ethical agency requires attention to the user’s capacity to understand, deliberate, and act, including circumstances in which the user reaches a different conclusion from the designer.

Human flourishing gives this discussion a broader purpose, but invoking it does not settle what a particular design should do. Practical wisdom requires contextual judgment that considers the people, circumstances, and competing goods involved — a general principle alone cannot determine the appropriate response.

We still have to explain which human capacities an experience supports, why those capacities matter, and how the design contributes to their exercise. Character develops through relationships and circumstances far beyond any individual product, and users do not need a moral lesson in every interaction.

Designers shape some of the conditions under which people learn, communicate, work, and make decisions. That responsibility calls for ethical judgment in our own work and attention to the opportunities our designs give others to exercise judgment themselves. Alongside asking whether someone can complete a task easily, we should ask what their participation allows them to practice, and whether that practice contributes to living well.

We must also continually examine what we understand as good, articulate why we believe it is good, and remain open to questioning those beliefs. Our understanding of how design contributes to living well is part of an ongoing conversation, and participating in that conversation is part of our responsibility.

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Virtue ethics in everyday interface design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.