Contemporary AI systems are increasingly designed to reduce uncertainty, ambiguity, and cognitive burden. This article argues that such systems do not merely expand human capacities but progressively externalize forms of judgment and existential burden that Christian traditions have historically understood as necessary conditions for the cultivation of moral agency. Drawing on the theological anthropologies of Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the article develops a theological-anthropological critique of what it terms optimization culture: the normative logic through which the reduction of friction and existential difficulty becomes a dominant telos of technological design. Contemporary articulations of this logic are examined through the work of Jacques Ellul, Byung-Chul Han, Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and William Davies. The article argues that AI systems shaped by this logic risk progressively externalizing the practices of disciplined attention, existential responsibility, and costly judgment through which mature moral agency has historically been cultivated. In response, it proposes a formative anthropology of technology as a framework for evaluating AI not only according to functional criteria such as safety or efficiency, but according to the kinds of human beings such systems actively help to form.
The present article presents and discusses the foundations of the New Moral Realism proposed by Markus Gabriel in Ethics for Dark Times (2020), a work that extends his New Realism project into the field of ethics. Starting from a metaethical defense of moral realism, Gabriel argues that there are objective moral facts, independent of individual or cultural opinions, yet accessible to human reason and recognizable across all societies. The article examines the three central theses of his system — Realism, Humanism, and Universalism — and his opposition to relativism, pluralism, and nihilism. Gabriel’s critique of “postmodern cynicism” and the contemporary crisis of truth is analyzed in contrast with authors such as Bruno Latour and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is argued that overcoming relativism and nihilism is a necessary condition for global moral progress, which must be understood as a collective endeavor of humanity. Through the recognition of universal moral facts — such as the condemnation of evidently evil practices, like torture for amusement — Gabriel proposes a New Enlightenment that unites reason and morality in response to the ethical challenges of the 21st century, such as nationalism, ecological collapse, and global inequalities. The article concludes that New Moral Realism offers a robust alternative to moral pessimism and cultural fragmentation, affirming the objectivity of ethics without appealing to theological foundations.
The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regime has consolidated as the principal normative architecture of corporate activity in Europe. Academic critique of the phenomenon has been predominantly technical—divergence among rating agencies, agency problems, and empirical ineffectiveness—ethical critique remains pending. This article advances such a critique from the convergence of three traditions: the libertarian ethics of natural law in its Rothbardian formulation; Hayekian spontaneous order theory and its economic correlate in the Austrian theories of dynamic efficiency and synergasia (Ravier); and Catholic Social Doctrine, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate. The principal conceptual contribution consists in coining the analytical category of soft collectivism to name how the ESG regime operates: it subjects the firm through conditioning rather than command, hollowing out the content of rights without altering their juridical form. The mechanics of this subjection operate through soft law, institutional isomorphism, the spiral of silence, and the bootleggers-and-baptists coalition within a state culture that Bagus's counterfactual criterion identifies as indirect coercion. The convergence between Catholic subsidiarity and Hayekian spontaneous order—two formulations of the same formal structure—yields a unanimous verdict against the ESG regime. Against the bureaucratic simulacrum of social responsibility, the article posits genuine entrepreneurial responsibility—voluntary, prudential, subsidiary, and oriented to real service—as the only coherent alternative within the converging ethical demands established by the analysis.
This paper develops a normative framework for expanding moral considerability under conditions of ecological crisis and epistemic uncertainty. Building on The Moral Circle, I begin from the claim that a non-negligible probability of moral status is sufficient to generate moral reasons for inclusion. I argue that the force of Sebo’s philosophical argument is significantly strengthened when situated within the conditions of the Anthropocene. Ongoing biodiversity loss and the risk of irreversible ecological damage introduce an asymmetry of moral error: underestimating the moral significance of nonhuman beings may lead to permanent losses, whereas overestimation typically incurs reversible costs. This asymmetry supports a precautionary expansion of moral concern. The paper then brings this framework into dialogue with anthropological accounts of animism, interpreted not as a metaphysical doctrine but as a relational epistemology in which nonhumans are treated as subjects within networks of interaction. Finally, I examine recent legal developments recognizing rivers and ecosystems as rights-bearing entities, arguing that these can be understood as institutional responses to moral uncertainty. On this basis, I propose the notion of “precautionary animism”: a normative stance that, without endorsing animist ontology, adopts its practical orientation under conditions of uncertainty and ecological risk. This framework aims to integrate moral philosophy, anthropology, and environmental law into a unified account of non-anthropocentric ethics in the Anthropocene.
P. Pecere· Asian Journal of Philosophy· 0 citations
The article demonstrates how attempts to decentre the human often reconstitute new forms of authority in attempts to decentre the human and examines the possibility of surpassing standard anthropocentric approaches in AI while maintaining a critical philosophical engagement with the structurally necessary yet precarious character of organizing principles.
It is argued that contemporary artificial intelligence is best understood as a symptom and accelerator of modern nihilism rather than as a neutral instrument or proto-subject because it allows values to persist as calculable effects rather than contested commitments, thereby insulating human agents from the burden of judgment.
Contemporary theological engagement with artificial intelligence (AI) has been dominated by applied ethics, focusing on bias, surveillance, and governance. This approach often treats algorithms as external instruments subject to moral regulation. This article argues that predictive systems must be understood as formative environments that shape attention, imagination, and desire through patterned repetition and the strategic management of salience. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s account of
habitus and the doctrine of the invisibilis missio of the Holy Spirit
, I propose that certain algorithmic architectures function as rival ecologies of habituation. These systems pre-structure deliberation by compressing the temporal interval between stimulus and assent and reinforcing probabilistic continuity with the past. Against this extractive economy of attention, sanctification is interpreted not as self-optimisation but as the Spirit’s infusion of charity, which reorders love and restores the temporal spaciousness required for mature freedom. By situating AI theology within pneumatology rather than metaphysical speculation about machine agency, the article reframes the central question: not whether AI can think, but how predictive systems participate in the formation of human desire. It offers a Thomistic grammar for discerning the limits of prediction and articulating a theological account of freedom in an age of algorithmic mediation.