Becoming Ethical for Generative AI

A commentary to encourage critical reflection and discussion

Dónal O’Mathúna, Michael Flierl, Elizabeth Trolli

Ethics must be central to how The Ohio State University navigates emerging AI technologies. Rightly, exploring ethical implications of AI is a learning outcome for the AI Fluency initiative. Ohio State has fostered a deliberately integrated approach to generative AI. This views AI neither solely as a productivity tool nor as merely as a problem to solve. Instead, Ohio State emphasizes helping students, faculty, and staff understand how and why to use AI in ways that support the wider aims of higher education, such as learning, inquiry, academic integrity, and civic responsibility. This approach acknowledges that ethical AI use cannot be separated from teaching and learning objectives, disciplinary context, or the type of intellectual and moral growth higher education strives to promote. 

This approach assumes — as with any area of life — that huge differences exist between what we can do and what we should do. Ethics is called upon to provide guidance that helps us determine what is right and wrong in various situations. One of the challenges with AI ethics is that the answers are not black and white. Answers to questions about AI ethics often seem to be, ‘It depends.’ How then should educators and research leaders promote learning about AI ethics? While this is an open question, we argue that principles and guidelines are insufficient to the ethical task at hand. 

We offer this commentary to encourage critical reflection and discussion about how we, as educators and researchers at Ohio State, approach the multitude of ethical challenges AI poses. 

Let’s take a step back from AI and discuss the ethics of mountain hiking! Hiking enthusiasts can be appalled when they reach the summit and find a group of loud, unfit tourists jumping off a cable car that came up the other side of the mountain. ‘That’s not right,’ they mutter under their breath, ‘That shouldn’t be allowed on this mountain.’

The cable car passengers wonder about all the fuss. ‘We just wanted to get to the top. We used one tool, and you used other tools: hiking poles and boots. We’re just using the latest tools to do the same thing.’ 

Analogously, if AI helps us write better essays and grants, what’s wrong with that?

The answer with hiking depends on the purpose of getting to the summit. The purpose could be to learn hiking skills, to develop the endurance to make the climb, to enjoy the changing scenery, and to have the sense of achievement that we did it. Then the training and learning and hard work required to make the climb is necessary. To claim, ‘I did it,’ means you hiked all the way up. It would be unethical to claim ‘I did it’ as you step off the cable car. 

But imagine a different purpose. If you get off the cable car because you are a medic and someone at the top requires medical care, that would be entirely appropriate. A medic who refused to take the cable car because she enjoyed hiking could be said to act unethically if someone needed her medical attention. 

AI ethics requires us to consider and teach about the purposes of higher education. What are students aiming to achieve at the university? What are the faculty here to accomplish? One way that Ohio State addresses this purpose is through curricular efforts that reframe AI as developmental rather than transactional. For example, the General Education Bookends are designed with an AI thread, allowing students to gain early and ongoing exposure to these new technologies throughout their undergraduate experience. This coursework includes reflective learning, the use of response examples and practice, and the evolution of their own opinions and judgments on the use of AI. These goals guide what should happen during education and learning, and they also help us understand how to ethically approach these tasks. 

How then do we practically promote ethics learning in the context of AI? Within the discipline of ethics, virtue ethics is one of the oldest approaches. It aims to develop people’s moral character or their ethical virtues. Renewed interest in virtue ethics has developed because of disconnects between knowledge of ethics and being ethical. Knowledge of ethics is only effective if people have a prior commitment to being ethical. Without that, we have the irony of students cheating on ethics exams (Ariail et al., 2025) and researchers studying honesty being dishonest in their research (O’Grady, 2024). 

Recently, Case and VanderWeele call for greater emphasis on virtue ethics in higher education. They claim that “a university’s success in its core academic goals — and so its flourishing as a university — is intimately bound up with its members’ moral character” (2025, p. 651). This requires a focus on ethical character formation of students and faculty. They make the case for higher education in general, and we believe the teaching of AI ethics cannot succeed without linking it into the virtues. 

Imagine an AI ‘agent’ that can listen to lectures, analyze textbooks, and create any number of homework assignments with a passing grade in such a way that instructors cannot detect the AI. What then? Do we develop an AI code of ethics that stipulates what should or should not be done? Any ethics code only works if people are committed to being ethical. For example, patience is one virtue. Students with the virtue of patience are committed to diligently doing the hard work to learn and not taking short-cuts that AI might offer. Another virtue, humility, allows us to see the value in learning from others and giving them their due credit, not claiming others’ work as our own. 

Developing ethical virtues in modern higher education is challenging. But we should not recede from a challenge because it is difficult. Character formation doesn’t happen easily in large lectures or virtual platforms. It turns to the power of story and narrative, not just abstract ideals. Educators are encouraged to lead by example and not just by content. Virtues address the mind as well as the emotions and our social and spiritual dimensions. Its goal is to produce ethical people, not just people with knowledge of ethics. The difference can be highlighted via Ohio State’s strategic plan, Education for Citizenship. Does this aim to produce graduates who know a lot about citizenship? Or does it aim to promote ethical character development that leads to graduates who are good citizens? 

Let us work together to discover, practice and develop timeless, and new, virtues that help us be ethical in this new AI age. Ohio State can lead the way in creating the next generation of democratic citizens who can create, critique, and ethically use the next generation of powerful AI technology.