Last Sunday I set the stage for my next several posts by engaging with a lecture by Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan on the topic “Ethics, AI, and Human Flourishing.” During that lecture she introduces a framework for thinking about AI in the context of Christian values and virtue ethics that goes by the acronym “DELTA,” ans described in the following short video:
Over the next few posts I’ll be exploring the various parts of this framework. Up first: “D” is for Dignity
Sullivan notes that in the Christian worldview, every single human being is created in the image of God; accordingly, each human being has inherent worth and value. So what is it about being human that reflects the divine? One of the most common answers, particularly since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, is that it is our possession of reason that makes us unique–“Godlike,” if you will. Logical thought, problem solving–these are signs of our rationality and specialness.
The problem is that AI can do that better that humans can. If there is something sacred about us, it cannot simply be our rationality, since AI can out produce our rational output with ease. Whatever reflects the divine within us, it must be something more sacred and more basic than that. But if we are going to protect human dignity from AI specifically and technology broadly construed, we need to have a better sense of what exactly such dignity amounts to.
I frequently run a rough draft definition of “human being” past my students early in the semester. “A human beings is a physical thing plus something more.” Virtually every hand goes up to indicate intuitive affirmation of that simple definition. Or I might ask “How many of you believe that every human being equally possesses something of profound moral value simply because they are human?” Just about all hands go up for that one too. Roughly speaking, the “something more” and “something of profound moral value” are pointing to the same thing.
It is not surprising that I have consistently received these responses over the years from my students, given that I teach at a private Catholic college. But believing in human specialness that depends simply on what we are, not what we do, does not require an exclusively religious foundation. Such a belief is at the heart of a commitment to the “certain inalienable rights” that are highlighted at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. If human rights are inherent rather than gifts that can be given or taken away at whim, then there must be something at the heart of being human that endows us with such rights. All of the above is gathered together under one umbrella that we call “human dignity.”
What exactly is the “something more,” the “something of profound moral value” that is at the heart of human dignity? To use what seemed to be my favorite word this past semester, such phrases point toward seomthing “ineffable.” Something “irreducible” that excapes definition and logic. This is when I always turn to stories and analogies.
Simone Weil lived and worked in the middle of the horros of both World Wars of the 20th century. She believed that attentive listening, what she calls “attention,” is the first step to bringing those who are “afflicted,” persons whose identity has been stripped from them either by chance or deliberately by others, back toward healing and a restoration of their humanity. This has much to do with both the existence of and respect for human dignity.
Think of the emaciated, skeletal prisoners of Auschwitz on the day that Allied soldiers liberated the death camp. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures or film footage. These are people from whom every shred of dignity, identity, and humanity has been stripped. They are the walking dead. And, to use Simone Weil’s word, they are “afflicted.” The temptation, of course, is to seek to address the most obvious physical needs of such persons—food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and so on. But, Weil suggests, there is something more profound and immediate than physical help that those who are afflicted need. She writes that
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle . . . The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.
How do I begin to restore the humanity and dignity of one from whom those things have been violently stripped away? Not by addressing their physical needs as one would solve a mathematical equation, but rather by saying “tell me your story.” In this way, Simone Weil argues, I tell the afflicted person—to use a current popular phrase—“I see you. At the core of this starving, filthy, corpse-like creature in front of me I recognize a fellow human being. What are you going through?” And in that way, through the simple but profound recognition of another’s personhood, the restoration of human dignity begins.
One of my favorite tales of respect for human dignity comes from the gospel of John in the New Testament. It is the story of of a crippled man who has been waiting by the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem for thirty-eight years for someone to help him into the healing waters of the pool when they are “stirred up.” Jesus aproaches the man–those famliar with Jesus wait with expectation for the healing miracle they are sure is to come. But instead, Jesus asks the oddest question: Do you want to be made well? Why does Jesus ask this? Perhaps Jesus wants to know if the lame man is truly prepared for the consequences of no longer being lame. How will he support himself if he can no longer beg for money as a disabled person?
But I think something deeper is going on. Jesus is exhibiting the attentiveness described by Simone Weil. By asking for the man’s consent, Jesus shows that he does not consider the lame man as a problem to be solved, a disease to be cured, or another opportunity to perform a miracle, but considers him rather as a person, a human being with dignity, whose permission is needed simply because he is a human being equal in dignity to the one who is asking him the question.
The scene is striking in its simplicity. Jesus asks the question because he wants the man to know that, despite his affliction, his poverty, his bitterness, and his pain, Jesus recognizes in him the beauty and dignity of a human being. And Jesus will not presume to invade this man’s world without his consent. There is nothing more profound contained in the story of Christianity than that God became human—and that this was not so much a reflection of how far God had to descend, but rather of how infinitely valuable human beings are.
Human dignity has nothing to do with output, productivity, or anything a human being does. Human dignity points toward the ineffable, sacred core of what it means to be human, to be a bearer of the image of the divine. The fact that we struggle to put our finger on exactly what this sacred aspect of being human is should tell us something. Not everything is reducible to data or measurable productivity. Some things are more valuable than what can be measured.
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