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The major objective of this article is to elaborate upon Pellizzoni’s concept of pre-emptive truth as a particular type of post-truth towards what I coin pre-emptive ethics. Adopting the latter can contribute to avoiding both moral absolutism and moral relativism in the post-truth interregnum of knowledge production. Specifically, I examine two types of what I consider pre-emptive sociotechnical imaginaries of “smart” futures: 1) a ‘negative’ model due to which pre-emptive ethics functions as controversial post-ethics that inherits the pitfalls of moral absolutism and moral relativism regarding privatization of morality (Porpora et al., 2013) and 2) a ‘positive’ model broadening the “imagined” publics of “smart” users and democratic decision-making (Ballo and Vaage, 2022) by justifying AI virtue ethics (Hagendorff, 2022) as an illuminative candidate for pre-emptive ethics.