Increasingly dissatisfied with utilitarianism and deontology as templates for the creation of “moral machines,” machine ethicists call for Aristotle’s virtue ethics to be the lodestar for the production of such machines. Given that the locus of virtue’s embedment here is artifacts, on what conception of human nature are claims that machines could be virtuous anything other than non-starters? I argue that this commitment seems plausible only if one has wholly embraced core tenets of information theory and “classical” cybernetics, which date to the 1940s and 1950s. Per this “third-person” vantage point, humans and machines are essentially information, whose “behavior” follows the same basic patterns. This view of us is a mismatch with human existence and is itself dehumanizing. My in-principle critique of advocacy of “artificial virtuous agents,” based primarily on Aristotle’s virtue ethics and mounting findings within life sciences, fits with themes of the present volume by bringing together virtue ethics, humanism, and phenomenology, broadly construed. If consideration of how machines might (and might not) contribute to human flourishing is to be availing, the human ontology that it brings to bear must include an irreducibly experiential perspective.