Book Review: Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV

Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence by Pope Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical teaches on a very timely topic--how to understand and incorporate Artificial Intelligence into human living. Like many technological inventions (dating back at least to the printing press), new challenges and opportunities arise as culture changes. The Catholic Church has a font of wisdom two thousand years old. While Catholics naturally take notice of what Leo has to say, other Christians, people of good will, and people from other faith traditions can benefit from the teachings of the Bishop of Rome.

Leo makes two moves immediately. First, he situates the problem in the social teaching tradition of the Church, which started explicitly with Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, an encyclical from 1891 dealing with the relationships between labor and capital as well as between governments and citizens. Leo XIV identifies five principles of Catholic social teaching to apply to the current situation: the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice. The common good is, put simply, the well-being of society in general, providing an environment for human moral flourishing. The universal destination of goods is the idea that all material goods are for the benefit of all humans, though the principle does not specify the mode for distributing those goods. Subsidiarity is the idea that a social problem should be dealt with at the lowest social level possible--for example, a pot hole should be taken care of by the city or town government, not the national government. Solidarity is the brotherhood of people, specifically workers or "labor." They should not look on each other as competitors but as co-workers, thus engendering mutual support. Social justice is a subdivision of the virtue of justice, focused on obligations to our fellow men and women.

Second, he draws a comparison with two human construction efforts in the Bible: the construction of the Towel of Babel (Gen 11: 1-19) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian Captivity (Neh 2-6). The Tower of Babel was a project of human egotism designed to show how great man is, practically an equal with God. By contrast, the Jews returning to Jerusalem worked together to restore the city's wall, each family being assigned a portion of it and everyone working together to provide materials and construction. Clearly Leo wants people to follow the latter example.

He then applies these principles to common problems generated by the latest technology. Vigilance is required to defend human dignity and truth. We have tools that can present almost anything imaginable, regardless of its relationship with reality. The goals of transhumanism and posthumanism assume that human nature is malleable or a limit that can and ought to be surpassed by technological achievements. These underlying philosophical assumptions lead one up the Tower of Babel, hoping to be creators or remakers of the natural world rather than the caretakers of it. Decision-making also becomes accelerated to a point where human judgment is disregarded or too late to guide the evaluation of the choices. 

One especially controversial claim that Pope Leo makes is the assertion that just war theory is now outdated. In paragraph 192, he says, "Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated." The principles of just war theory are too broadly applied, legitimizing most aggressions. Leo emphasizes the use of "dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness" [para. 192] to resolve conflicts rather than going straight to war. He subsequently recommends criteria for the use of force in paragraph 199: personal responsibility for the overall decision to go to war and for individual acts of force; having an adequate time frame to make moral decisions, a problem exacerbated by technology's ability to deliver a partial picture very quickly; identifying and protecting civilians. His ideas about just war are more complicated than a clickbait headline reveals and are easily paralleled to the principles of just war theory.

The encyclical makes for interesting and timely reading. I felt at points that Leo was straying more into sociology than theology but the discussion regularly came back around to the deeper theological understanding implied by the Church's social teaching. It's challenging in a good way, an opportunity to grow in love with God and with your neighbors. Even your cyber-neighbors.

Recommended, highly for Catholics.