The paper delves into the intersection of virtue ethics, postphenomenology, and technology to explore the roles ethical virtues may play in technological design. It employs the neo-Aristotelian praxeological methodology from Alasdair MacIntyre, focusing on the virtues of the moral agent as an independent practical reasoner but also as a socially and biologically dependent animal. It also integrates contributions from Ihde’s and Verbeek’s Postphenomenology, which explore morally and technologically mediated agents. 

Firstly, it examines how ethics extends beyond the individual, challenging the traditional focus on individual moral agents and questioning its applicability to groups, organizations, and institutions. The key concept for this exploration is "practice" according to Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics theory. This concept provides internal moral content to actions involved in all socially defined practices beyond individual ones. Each practice has an intrinsic pragmatic telos that gives intelligibility to human activity beyond the individual and connects it to a network of intertwined practices in the social environment, which derive their normative meaning from an idea of the good life. Virtues play a crucial role in practices by guiding them toward their telos, making excellence the primary value of their activity as part of the ultimate good life embedded in particular and historical moral traditions. Therefore, technological design, understood as a practice in MacIntyre’s sense, is also morally and politically charged with evaluative contents connected to the idea of a good life historically dominant in the social context it is embedded in.

Secondly, the paper engages with the concepts of the individual itself and moral agency, comparing them to supra-individual entities both ontologically and in terms of moral significance. The concept of virtuous design requires grappling with the nature of human agency conceived relationally beyond the traditional approach of the first person. It explores the relational constitution of the individual moral agent already formulated in MacIntyre’s ethical theory, adding the contributions of Postphenomenology regarding the complexities of human agency related to technological practices and designs. This complexity involves viewing moral agency as technologically mediated within technosocieties, which has philosophical implications for defining the moral virtues necessary for a virtuous design.