The movie Apollo 13 immortalized the words, “Houston, we have a problem” to describe the tragic events of the failed space mission. NASA flight logs show the precise quote by astronaut Jack Swigert was akshually in the past tense: “Houston… we’ve had a problem”,
055:55:19 Swigert: Okay, Houston...
055:55:19 Lovell: ...Houston...
055:55:20 Swigert: ...we've had a problem here. [Pause.]
Swigert (Kevin Bacon in the movie) stands a symbol for a distress call between the frontlines and the headquarters, field officers and top leadership. The tension between periphery and center exists in any human institution, from the family (child to parent) to civic, private or government entities.
If we look at the state of Catholic engagement with technology today, we can report from the field: “Rome, we have a (tech) problem.” But Swigert’s original phrase in past tense, “Rome, we’ve had a problem” would apply just as well, if not better, to the problem between Catholicism and technology.
“Rome, we’ve had a problem”
For example, the Catholic laity for decades have been dealing with issues like contraception and IVF, where a new technology creates novel moral questions. Since Saint Pope Paul VI encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV, 1968), the Catholic Church determined that both artificial contraception and IVF are immoral.
Already then the distress call “Rome, we have a tech problem” was sounded from the frontlines, and not only by rebels.
HV did not create a personal dilemma for top leadership who are (for the most part) celibate priests, while the married laity – the great majority of Catholics –wrestled and broadly disobeyed the effective ban (see recent data from ARDA). As you can see below, Catholics’ behavior is indistinguishable from that of other believers who do not profess a faith that sees contraception as immoral.
While I agree with a recent commentary claiming that the Church’s reason for banning IVF and artificial contraception is not the “artificiality” in technical terms, unless one is dialed in to Aristotelian philosophy and Thomism it sure as hell sounds like the technology is what makes it immoral.[1]
My point here is not to question Catholic teaching on IVF or artificial contraception – that debate has continued since the 60’s - but to illustrate how the Catholic Church has struggled to articulate its moral stance on technological innovation in terms that make sense to the average modern person.
I argue below that in practice an essential problem underlying Catholic conflicts about IVF, contraception and now AI is technology ethics. The IVF/contraception problem for the Catholic Church is not about better catechesis (teaching the faith) but about a better way to engage technology.
Polemics concerning faith and tech are both contemporary and ancient, and their roots go deep. To get somewhere within this tech-faith discussion - to understand why the tree has stopped yielding fruits - we must dig up the roots.
Is technology neutral?
The story of the Catholic Church’s engagement with technology is filled with tensions - from abortion pills and IVF today, all highly politicized by present and incoming US presidential administrations - to Nicolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei – the inspiration for this Substack.
Or we can think of the litany of more recent Catholic scientists who have made a positive impact on science and technology: cosmologist Fr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) who proposed the Big Bang theory, groundbreaking geneticistFr. Gregor Mendel, physicist Eva von Bahr-Bergius (1874 – 1962) or the car, combustion engine, fax machine or radio invented by priests.
With so much to talk about, I will focus on one single question which is nonetheless transcendent to numerous other issues at hand: is technology neutral? At its core, the question addresses ethics and technology.
One could write many tomes answering this question and argue reasonably that Catholic philosophy and theology - rooted in biblical exegesis - supports different answers: technology is good, technology is bad, technology is neutral.
This complexity, and confusion, is playing out right now as the Catholic Church engages questions of technology and specifically artificial intelligence (AI). The pope and numerous Vatican and other ecclesial bodies and experts have been engaging AI recently. There’s all sorts of very good stuff out there, but at the same time some confusion and contradiction on the ethics of technology. Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’offered a brilliant assessment of technology and technocracy, and therein he argued that technology is not neutral (quote below).
However, as an entry point I suggest this excellent article by Louisa Conwill, which along with its intellectual strengths is also practical, landing in reality. For example, Conwill argues that Amazon’s “Alexa” which she helped design is a good technology. I’m not sure if I agree, but I like it that she takes a position. Here is a key quote from the article which also cites the pope,
Our framework hinges on the idea that technology is not neutral; rather, the values motivating a technology’s design can influence its impact on society. Pope Francis highlights this idea in Laudato si’:
We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build (§107).(emphasis in bold my own)
What is curious to me, after following numerous papal comments on AI, is that Pope Francis has pretty much contradicted his Laudato Si’ statement that “technological products are not neutral.” Let’s take a look a the pope’s G9 speech on AI this summer. To be fair, the pope does say an algorithm is “not neutral” in the speech. However, the core framework of his entire address states the opposite.
The essence of the pope’s G9 speech is that technology is a tool, and its moral quality is determined by the ends (telos) towards which they are used. As in, a gun used in self-defense is good, a gun to commit a crime is not. Here are some key quotes,
“artificial intelligence, however, is often perceived as ambiguous”
“makes artificial intelligence at the same time an exciting and fearsome tool,”
“when our ancestors sharpened flint stones to make knives, they used them both to cut hides for clothing and to kill each other. The same could be said of other more advanced technologies..
For Pope Francis, AI is different only due to its complexity…
AI is “still more complex tool. I would almost say that we are dealing with a tool sui generis... artificial intelligence, on the other hand, can autonomously adapt to the task assigned to it and, if designed this way, can make choices independent of the person in order to achieve the intended goal.”
This is all true, but in my mind misses the point in contention. The whole framework of a tool implies that the ethics of technology is about the ends towards which it is oriented. Ultimately (though not exclusively) this is an Aristotelian framework, expressed here:
“The use of our tools, however, is not always directed solely to the good. Even if human beings feel within themselves a call to the beyond, and to knowledge as an instrument of good for the service of our brothers and sisters and our common home (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 16), this does not always happen.”
To summarize, there is a tension between the Laudato Si’ Pope Francis, wherein technology is not neutral, and the G9 Pope Francis, wherein technology is neutral (with a footnote that AI may be different because of its complexity that allows it to make its own decisions). But at the end of the day, the central question about the moral value of technology or specific technologies goes unanswered.
The problem: “Rome, we have a big one”
To me, the AI debate acts simply as a magnifying glass showing the long-standing, underlying and unresolved tension within Catholic theology and philosophy about technology. The tension exists because the Catholic Church (Latin rite) continues to implicitly undergird its moral framework on Aristotelian principles.[2]
For the most part, this is a good thing. Aristotle’s philosophy is perennially valid in many aspects, and the genius of Thomism - Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology - is as brilliant today as he was in the late Middle Ages. However (as I argue in my forthcoming book), the Aristotelian metaphysics which undergirds Catholic ethics has a blind spot when it comes to technology, or to use Aristotle’s own language, “efficient causes”.
Here we must briefly address Aristotelian metaphysics and its ethical implications.
It goes like this. Aristotle posited that every thing is composed of four causes: material, formal, efficient and final. The material cause is what something is made of, the efficient cause is how it is made, the formal cause is the essence (what it is) and the final cause explains the purpose it is made for.[3] It is hard to overstate how important these and other Aristotelian principles, which shaped Thomism, are today for Catholic ontology, sacramental theology and also ethics.
Aristotelian metaphysics emphasizes the formal cause to explain the identity of objects and the final cause to determine ethics. If an act corresponds to the final cause of the object and of the human beings involved, it’s a morally good act. The emphasis on formal and final causes however leads to a certain ‘efficient ambivalence’ baked into the Aristotelian system. This means that efficient causes are not very important for the metaphysics or ethics of things, or to put it another way, efficient causes are morally neutral.
Technology, techne or technique, is all about the efficient cause. Technology is concerned with making things, either new things or old things in a different way. The technological age is an efficient age. That is the world we live in now!
My point is that Aristotelian metaphysics and ethics have a blind spot when it comes to technology and ethics.[4] I still think Aristotle’s framework is helpful for some aspects of technology ethics. Yes, the common good is an important orientation for any ethics, and also technology ethics. Yes, what a technology is used for - good or ill - will be often crucial for the moral evaluation of a technology or action which involves technology. Yes, objects themselves are morally neutral in the abstract.
But the efficient ambivalence of the Aristotelian framework is also blind to the essence of a technology. The inability for Catholicism to articulate nuance about efficient causes has already got the Church into trouble, precisely with the advent of new technologies.
For a deeper read on the debate between tech neutralists and tech moralists check out Stephanie Hare’s Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics. I am firmly in Hare’s camp, where I see that
“tools and technologies are instruments and expressions of power. To build them responsibly, we must consider the intent behind the creation of tools and technologies, the entire cycle from idea to execution, and the context in which we introduce them so that we can foresee the consequences – intended and unintended – and address them.”[5]
Landing back on earth
How do we get from the moon of ethical tech confusion back to the earth of pragmatic decisions about technology?
I argue that the Catholic Church needs to develop a better framework that squarely addresses the question: is technology neutral? To me, as for Conwill, the answer is a clear no – but whatever the answer is, Catholics need a better articulation of tech and ethics that builds upon but also transcends the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework.
A new framework will not settle all questions. With a framework, each technology will still need to be evaluated and context/nuance applied case by case. I also think the common good or final cause framework of Aristotelian inspiration must, for Catholic social teaching, continue to be applied to all tech ethical questions. And in the common good sense, yes, the neutrality or ambivalence of a technology will always come into play.
But first and foremost, contrary to Pope Francis’ G9 speech on AI, the primary framework for tech ethics must address whether a technology is good or evil, and not waffle about neutrality and tools. The answers will not likely be black and white, but nuanced and complicated.
A great example of how to approach tech ethics is Hare’s engagement with the nuclear bomb and the ethics, science and tech behind it:
“Where does responsibility for its creation and use lie? No one was trying to build a nuclear weapon when neutron-induced nuclear fission was first discovered by German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938 and then explained theoretically by Austrian scientists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch.
… the four scientists who discovered neutron-induced nuclear fission took the following ethical positions during the war.
- Neither Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery, nor
- Fritz Strassmann worked on Germany’s atomic bomb effort.
- Lise Meitner, who fled Germany for Sweden in 1938 after the Anschluss, refused to work on the Allies’ atomic bomb project.
- Otto Frisch did work on the effort to create an atomic bomb, but not for Germany; he was one of the many scientists who escaped continental Europe and worked on the United Kingdom’s nuclear research programme before joining the United States’s Manhattan Project in 1943.
Responsibility for the creation and use of the atomic bomb originates with Leó Szilárd, who first had the idea and then worked doggedly – often to the irritation of other scientists and US civil and military officials – to transform his idea into reality.”[6]
These are the kind of questions - about who created what and with what purpose - are what Catholic ethics should be asking about AI. What is really AI, is it machine learning and advanced computation or is it the lethal human-ending hype proposed by Nick Bostrom? What commercial, economic and political advantages are different actors and institutions proposing/seeking with different AI models? What is Sam Altman about, is he the Otto Hahn or the Leó Szilárd of AI?
These questions arise, and are sharpened by a framework that does not enter the conversation with the idea that technology is neutral. The motivations and outcomes of different aspects of AI will do harm, good or combinations of both.
A sharper, more critical Catholic framework is needed to come to pragmatic and ethical decisions about the technologies of today and tomorrow. The pope has some work to do.
Rome, we’ve had a problem.
[1] The Catholic rationale for banning contraception and IVF is very similar - and somewhat difficult to articulate outside of an Aristotelian and highly rational framework – in that both acts constitute a violation of final causes. Contraception violates one of the ends of the sexual act, procreation. IVF fulfills the end of procreation while violating the other end of sexuality, union between spouses. The ethical problem, allegedly, is not the artificiality involved in IVF or artificial contraception, but that the artificiality is an indication of the intent to violate one of the final causes (Kampowski and Muller 2022). As such, artificiality (efficient cause) is merely a ‘coincidence’; the determinant cause with ethical import is the final cause. Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain was famously unpersuaded by the Catholic ban on artificial contraception by his friend Pope Paul VI (Levinovitz 2020) as are some contemporary theologians sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life (Kampowski and Muller 2022).
[2] Catholicism in the Latin/Western tradition has paid particular attention to the “Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of substantial form” (Storck, 2020) wherein the material and formal integrity of things is critical. While the Council of Trent and contemporary articulation in the Catechism do not explicitly use Aristotelian concepts, Thomism offered a rationale for the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood, and for all Catholic theology, that is in practice part of the collective Catholic conscience (Pelikan 2018).
[3] As an example, the causes that explain what a cup is are the following: the material cause is clay, the formal cause is the shape that the clay takes as a cup, the efficient cause is the process by which the artisan crafts the clay into a cup and the final cause is the cup used for drinking. This is a simple example, Aristotle intended the causes to explain metaphysical realities above all, not physical one’s.
In book two of Physics (and also in book three of Metaphysics), Aristotle develops hylomorphism further to distinguish the four causes of every substance, which respond to the question of ‘why’ they exist (Charlton 1983). The first two causes correspond to form and matter. The material cause refers to the physical matter that makes something. The formal cause is about the form which gives a thing it’s essence. But there are two other causes, closely related to the formal cause, sometimes indistinguishable or identical to the formal cause (Falcon 2006). The third cause is the efficient cause, which explains the way something came into being – for example a carpenter and his saw is the efficient cause of a table, or a baker and heat are the efficient cause of bread. The fourth cause is the final cause which explains what something is made for, it’s purpose. Returning to the example above, between the plastic gun and the metal gun, the final cause helps make an important distinction – the plastic gun is for playing and the metal gun is a weapon, which in turn inform the material cause and efficient cause. In some cases, the final cause is also the formal cause – such as a fork, which has the form of an eating utensil, and its final cause is for eating.
While Greek thought influenced the early Christian Church, and even late Judaism (Ratzinger 1970), Aristotelian philosophy was integrated into Christianity in the Middle Ages through Scholasticism and especially by Thomas Aquinas, creating a remarkable synthesis of philosophy and theology. Aquinas’ application of Aristotelian concepts is in full display on his account of eucharistic transubstantiation in the Summa theologica where the substantial form of bread is changed into the body of Christ: ‘art “produces the substantial forms of bread, by the power of fire baking the matter made up of flour and water”’ (ST III.75). In this case bread has baking as its efficient cause, flour and water it’s material cause and the form of bread makes up the substance of bread. The form is the fundamental cause that gives a being it’s essence.
[4] For the science and energy nerds like me, when I say “blind spot” I mean something that a framework (whether conceptual or mathematical) can’t see or measure. Here’s a good analogy: Lazard’s metric for calculating the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) measures the cost per unit of output of an energy technology – gas, coal, wind, solar, etc. – and is a great tool for energy comparison. While LCOE reveals something, it also conceals something: the hidden cost of intermittency (solar and wind need backup systems that cost money). Therefore, as the Energy Bad Boys explain, “ LCOE values estimated by Lazard are extremely low, ranging from $27 to $73 per MWh for onshore wind, $74 to $139 per MWh for offshore wind, and $29 to $92 per MWh for solar. As we have shown, the true system cost of wind and solar in New England is at least three times the high-end values listed above, and up to twelve times more expensive than the low-end values.”
[5] Hare, Stephanie. Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics (Perspectives) (p. 35). London Publishing Partnership. Kindle Edition.
[6] Hare, Stephanie. Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics (Perspectives) (pp. 36-37). London Publishing Partnership. Kindle Edition.