Aristotle, Aquinas, and AI

What have a Greek philosopher who lived about 2300 years ago, a Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher who died in 1274 A. D., and artificial intelligence (AI) got to do with each other?  Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.  What I have to say is no joke, however, because if we don't heed the wisdom of these two parties, which has been almost totally forgotten, we are liable to make some mistakes shortly that will be exceedingly costly in terms of missed opportunities, misdirected hopes, and maybe even lives.

 

The particular wisdom I speak of is known by the technical term of scholastic metaphysics.  It was, and still is, a way of viewing the universe, and it dominated the West for over a thousand years.  The Scientific Revolution vigorously uprooted it and threw it in the trash pile, to oversimplify a very complicated history.  And now it is almost completely forgotten except by a few lucky people such as yourself, if you keep reading.

 

The aspect of scholastic metaphysics I wish to explain concerns the nature of things.  Here's an example, taken from an article by journalist Mary Harrington in the June/July issue of First Things.  Take a dog, any dog.  It may be black, white, spotted, or bald.  But none of those attributes change the fact that it's a dog.  The scholastic metaphysical term for the dogness of a dog is its substantial form, also known as essence.  The aspects of a thing that can change without changing its substantial form are called accidents.  That's a weird use of the word, I know, but I'm not going to argue with Aristotle, who came up with these ideas, and Aquinas, who put them in terms compatible with Christianity.  The substantial form of a thing is its organizing principle.  The accidents are characteristics that can change without altering the substantial form.

 

What about people?  We have an organizing principle called the soul.  No matter what accidental characteristics we have—whether a person is fat, thin, from Teaneck, New Jersey, or in a coma—that substantial form remains. 

 

What about computers, and all the systems that are known by the general term of AI?  AI is, of course, artificial—that is, it is a man-made artifact.  Unlike living things, an artificial object has no substantial form that is prior to what its human makers say it is.  We can cobble together a bunch of transistors, call it a computer, and get it to do certain things for us.  But computers, and the AI systems supported by them, are simply assemblies of accidents.  This makes AI systems fundamentally different in kind from human beings. 

 

What emerges from looking at humans and AI from the viewpoint of scholastic metaphysics is this:  human beings are just a clean different kind of thing from AI systems.  And treating AI systems and humans as though they were basically the same kind of thing, simply piles of atoms arranged differently—which is how modern materialistic science encourages us to think—ignores a vital difference between the two.  Human beings have souls as their organizing principle, and AI systems do not.  No imaginable or unimaginable future progress in AI can change that fact.

 

This viewpoint flies in the face of the transhumanist agenda so popular in Silicon Valley, which looks forward to the day when human beings can transcend their messy, disease-and-death-prone meat-cage origins and live forever in an eternal bit-world of computer-borne bliss that will take over the universe.  (I may have left something out in that description, but I think I got most of it.)  Human beings are the rational animals that result from propagation by other human beings.  Anything you might upload from a human being to a computer is not going to be that human being.  And treating it, or any other AI product, as if it were human is a category error that can lead to heinous consequences.

 

In Harrington's words, trying to teach sand to think is not only futile, but if we start treating the result as though it had a soul, we are in danger of losing our own souls.

 

This may sound like just another anti-technology rant, but it's not.  AI can do truly amazing and useful things, but only if its human users keep in mind what it is and don't try to endow it with quasi-human agency.  A tool should be under the control of its human users at all times.  That control may be loose and barely perceptible sometimes, but it has to be there.  If we begin to bow down to AI entities as though they were thinking humans like us, we will soon regret it.  An automobile provides useful service when under control, but if it gets out of control it becomes a dangerous missile.  The same thing is true of AI.

 

Thinking in terms of scholastic metaphysics seems strange to most people unfamiliar with it, and it takes a while to realize that it's just as useful as it ever was.  I have had a passing acquaintance with it ever since I read a book on Thomistic philosophy in the 1990s.  The thing that drove me to that book was a statement by a former theoretical physicist turned pastor, who said that the Catholic Church's notion of transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ was based on an outmoded theory of matter.  I wanted to know more about this outmoded theory, and it turned out to be scholastic metaphysics. 

 

What modern science did to scholastic metaphysics is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  There was a lot of useless bathwater in Aristotle's physics—rocks having a desire to fall downward and so on—but there was also great wisdom in his metaphysics.  The wisdom of scholastic metaphysics can save us from making lots of mistakes that could be avoided if we just keep in mind that however clever and human-like AI appears, it's really just words written in the sand.  And we wrote the words to start with. 

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's article "Thomophobia" appeared on pp. 19-27 of the June/July 2026 issue of First Things.  For those wanting to know more, she refers to Edward Feser's book Scholastic Metaphysics (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, $34 on Amazon).

 

Two Views of the Universe

 

Imagine two little boys growing up in their father's household.  The older boy enjoys the company of his father.  He runs up to his father and hugs him when he gets home from work.  He listens to his father even when he's getting disciplined, or when his father tells him to do things he doesn't want to do.  He'll complain about things to his father sometimes, and even object to discipline, but the connection is always there.

 

The other little boy likes to play by himself in his room.  What he wants is to be in complete control of things.  His father has given him lots of toys, but the toys are all that he's interested in.  He's gotten very good at a number of games that he plays with the toys, but they're all play-by-yourself games, and don't involve either his brother or his father.  When his father tries to get his attention by bringing him a new toy, the kid just grabs it and slams the door closed. 

 

This image came to my mind while I was reading Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics:  A Contemporary Introduction.  Assuming you know nothing about this topic, let me explain it briefly.

 

In the Middle Ages, say 1000 to 1400 A. D., the Roman Catholic Church developed not only theological doctrines, but an entire philosophy that explained to the best of their knowledge what the world was about.  They started with ancient Greek philosophers, primarily Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), and modified his thought to be compatible with Christianity.  Although this work was done by many scholars over centuries, it is generally conceded that it reached its epitome with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A. D.).  Broadly speaking, the philosophy (as opposed to theology) was known as scholasticism.

 

Metaphysics (from the Greek "beyond physics") is the study of being, the most fundamental aspects of reality.  Scholastic metaphysics is therefore what Aquinas and his cohort thought about the fundamentals of reality. 

 

This topic is virtually unknown today except by specialists, and not many of those, either, which is why I've gone to the trouble to explain it to you.  The reason is that, with the advent of modern thought, people like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), David Hume (1711-1776) and others intentionally discarded scholasticism in favor of other ways of thinking about reality, most of which favor the powerful methods of quantitative science, which reduce everything to mathematical models. 

 

Everybody agrees that the scientific and industrial revolutions have made huge differences in our ability to feed, clothe, and care for ourselves—by and large, positive differences.  If tomorrow, all physical signs of scientific advancements since 1700 vanished, the vast majority of people on earth would die within weeks, leaving only a few survivalists and primitive hunter-gatherers. 

 

Modern thought is sometimes summarized under the title of the Enlightenment.  In this view, the West suffered under the repressive domination of the Church, which stifled intellectual progress, until a few brave souls (e. g. Bacon, Hume, etc.) threw off the chains of darkness and led us into the light of knowledge that we didn't have to concern ourselves with God, and that our own intellects can take us wherever we want to go.  C. S. Lewis satirized the arguments sometimes made in favor of the Enlightenment in a book about his intellectual conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress.  His pilgrim, who refers to God as "the Landlord," encounters a Mr. Enlightenment, and asks him, "But how do you know there is no Landlord?"

 

Mr. Enlightenment replies, "Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!"

 

When John asks how this non sequitur applies to his question, Mr. Enlightenment answers "Your people . . . believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training."

 

Whether or not you realize it, everyone growing up in the U. S. has had a "scientific training" simply by existing in the modern world and unconsciously absorbing its assumptions that surround us like the air we breathe.  One of these assumptions concerns what is "real," and I won't stop to define that further, because it means just what common sense means by it. 

 

One commonplace notion in which the scientific worldview diverges from scholastic metaphysics is the question of which is more real:  your body, or the atoms from which it is made?  The modern tendency is to think that atoms, or ultimately quarks, are what physical reality consists of, and everything else is, if not illusion, at the most secondary and not as important somehow. 

 

Feser shows that scholastic metaphysics is not in conflict with scientific knowledge, because modern science is highly limited in the things it can explain using its methods.  Essentially, modern science has no metaphysics, so although it is practically useful, it's no good in discovering the ultimate foundations of reality. 

 

On the other hand, scholastic metaphysics says that once the atoms are in your body, you, as a substantial being, are more real than the atoms, which now have only a virtual existence in you.  To quote Feser, "The level of basic particles is in no way privileged.  The particles are not somehow 'more real' than the substances of which they are parts.  On the contrary, it is the substances that are more real insofar [as] the particles, like every other part, exist only virtually rather than actually in the whole."

 

That little fragment uses scholastic vocabulary that may seem mysterious.  But if you read the rest of the book, you can appreciate the grand intellectual structure that scholastic metaphysics is. 

 

What good is it today, though?  In a word, sanity.  I learned about Feser's book from an online talk by Mary Harrington, who found it invaluable in understanding why modern thought has led to situations such as the transgender movement that previous generations would have considered simply crazy.  Such things are the final workings-out of perverse logic set in motion by the abandonment of the (formerly!) common-sense notions about reality that scholastic metaphysics upholds.

 

You can now guess which little boy is which.  Clearly, the one playing alone in his room should at least talk with his brother—and maybe his Father as well.

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's First Things lecture "Our Crisis is Metaphysical" is available among other locations at https://firstthings.com/our-crisis-is-metaphysical-2026-d-c-lecture/.  Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics:  A Contemporary Introduction (2014) is published by editiones scholasticae and distributed in the U. S. by Rutgers University.  The quotation from The Pilgrim's Regress is from pp. 24-25 of the Wade Annotated Edition (ed. D. C. Downing), published by Eerdmans in 2014. 

Asking the Wrong Question About Artificial General Intelligence

 

An article in the October issue of IEEE Spectrum investigates the status of artificial-intelligence IQ tests, and speculates on when and whether we will see the arrival of so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), which author Matthew Hutson says is "AI technology that can match the abilities of humans at most tasks."  But mostly unasked in the article is an even more basic question:  what do we mean by human intelligence? 

 

To be fair, Hutson has done a good job of surveying several popular benchmark tests for AI intelligence.  One of the more popular tests is something called the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC for short), whose developer François Chollet has made something of a go-to standard, as charts in the article show the scores of over a dozen different AI programs on various versions of Chollets tests.  Engineers like numbers, and standardizing a test is a good thing as long as the test measures what you want to know.  But does ARC do that?

 

The version of the ARC test described in the article consists largely of coming up with patterns of colored figures that follow rules abstracted from examples.  Human beings can score higher than AI systems on these tests, although the systems are improving.  But it's an open question as to whether abstracting patterns from geometric shapes has a lot to do with being generally intelligent.

 

Chollet feels that his test measures the ability to acquire new abilities easily, which he thinks is the prime measure of intelligence.  Whether it actually does that is debatable, but it looks like ARC is to the AI world what the old Stanford-Binet IQ test is for people.  That IQ test was developed over a century ago and is now in its fifth edition.

 

Hutson comes close to the problem when he admits that "notions of intelligence vary across place and time."  The Stanford-Binet test is mainly used to identify people who don't fit in well with the public-school system, which is mainly designed to produce worker bees for the modern economy.  As the modern economy is shifting all the time, what counts as intelligence does too. 

And even if we could perfectly track these shifts, the admittedly infinite array of "tasks" that people perform present an almost insurmountable problem to anyone who wants not only to define, but to evaluate something that could justifiably be called artificial general intelligence.

 

Geoffrey Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner in AI, is quoted in the article as saying that if an AI robot could successfully do household plumbing, that would be a milestone in AGI, and he thinks it's still about ten years off.  I hope I'm around in ten years to check this prediction, which I personally feel is optimistic.  For one thing, humanoid robots will have to get a lot cheaper before people even consider using one to fix a toilet.

 

All these approaches to AGI ignore a distinction in the field of human psychology which was first pointed out by Aristotle.  The distinction has been described in various ways, but the most succinct is to differentiate between perceptual thought and conceptual thought. 

 

Perceptual thought, which humans share with other animals and machines, consists in perceiving, remembering, imagining, and making associations among perceptions and memories, broadly speaking.  Inanimate material objects like computers can display perceptual thought, and in crawling the Internet for raw material by which to answer queries, all AI chatbots and similar systems use perceptual thought, which ultimately has to do with concrete individual things.

 

On the other hand, conceptual thought involves the consideration of universals:  freedom, for example, or the color blue, or triangularity as a property of a geometric figure, as opposed to considering any individual triangle.  There are good reasons to believe that no strictly material system (and this includes all AI) can engage in truly conceptual thought.  With suitable programming by humans, a computing system may provide a good simulation of conceptual thought, as a movie provides a good simulation of human beings walking around and even engaging in conceptual thought.  But a movie is just a sequence of images and sounds, and can't respond to its environment in an intelligent way.

 

Neither can an AI program engage in conceptual thought, although by finding examples of such thought in its training, it can provide a convincing simulation of it.  While having a robot do plumbing is all very well, the real goal sought by those who want to achieve AGI is human-likeness in every significant respect.  And a human incapable of conceptual thought would at the least be considered severely disabled, though still worthy of respect as a member of the human community.

 

The vital and provable distinction between perceptual and conceptual thought has been all but forgotten by AI researchers and the wider culture.  But if we ignore it, and allow AI to take over more and more tasks formerly done by humans, we will surround ourselves with concept-free entities.  This will be dangerous. 

 

A good example of a powerful concept-free entity is a tiger.  If you walk into the cage of a hungry tiger, all it sees in you is a specific perception:  here's dinner.  There is no reasoning over abstractions with a tiger, just a power struggle in which the human has a distinct disadvantage.

 

Aristotle restricted the term "intellect" to mean that part of the human mind capable of dealing with concepts.  It is what distinguishes us from the other animals, and from every AI system as well.  Try as they might, AI researchers will not be able to develop anything that can entertain concepts.  And attempts to replace humans in jobs where concepts are important, such as almost any occupation that involves dealing with humans as one ethical being to another, can easily turn into the kind of hungry-tiger encounter that humans generally lose.  Anyone who has struggled with an AI-powered phone-answering system to gain the privilege of talking with an actual human being will know what I mean.

 

ARC may become the default IQ test for new AI prototypes vying for the title of AGI.  But the concept symbolized by the acronym AGI is itself incomprehensible by AI.  As long as there are humans left, we will be the ones awarding the titles, not the AI bots.  But only if they let us.

 

Sources:  Matthew Hutson's article "Can We Build a Better IQ Test for AI?" appears on pp. 34-39 of the October 2025 issue of IEEE Spectrum.  I also referred to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Aristotle.  For a more detailed argument about why AI cannot perform conceptual thought, see the article in AI & Society "Artificial Intelligence and Its Natural Limits," by Karl Stephan and Gyula Klima, pp. 9-18, vol. 36 (2021).

What Could Go Wrong With Engineered Life Forms?

 

That question left the hypothetical realm for reality when Michael Levin, director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University, and Josh Bongard, professor of computer science at the University of Vermont, teamed together to turn frog stem cells into robots.  During the robots' seven-day lifetime, they can move, collect small particles into piles, and even reproduce after a fashion.  Developed with the essential assistance of an artificial-intelligence supercomputer, the new entities—called "xenobots" after the Latin name of the frog species from which the cells were taken—are the first step in a long-anticipated field that has up to now existed only in the realms of dystopian science fiction.

 

Starting with knowledge of what frog skin and cardiac cells can do, the scientists tried billions of different combinations of cells in the computer to see which ones could do interesting things.  The computer eventually came up with recipes for the assembly of hundreds of cells, which the scientists then carried out in the laboratory in a finicky process like assembling microscopic Legos, only the Legos are incubated frog stem cells.  The resulting robots did indeed move around, carry small objects in custom-designed pouches, and a Pac-Man-shaped version could even reproduce, spitting out a smaller version of itself every now and then. 

 

Asked about the ethical implications of their research, Levin said, "When we start to mess around with complex systems that we don't understand, we're going to get unintended consequences."  Bomgard added, "There's all of this innate creativity in life. . . . We want to understand that more deeply—and how we can direct and push it toward new forms."

 

Levin and Bomgard are working scientists, not philosophers, so when they talk out of school, so to speak, addressing not the technicalities of AI-driven biological multicell-organism fabrication, but the wider implications of their work, they tend to say things that are not particularly profound or original.  Anyone who has had trouble driving an unfamiliar rental car has learned that messing around with complex systems that we don't understand can have unintended consequences.  The question is not whether unintended consequences will happen—they will—but what you do about them if they do, and how you keep the bad ones from hurting yourself or others.

 

What Bomgard said encapsulates three streams of philosophy and religion that have been flowing since prehistoric times.  The first stream is the wonder one feels at the awesome abundance and variety of life on Earth.  "Innate creativity" implies that it's simply there somehow, a brute fact of existence that Bomgard uses the passive voice for ("There is . . . creativity.")  This ignores the fact that in every other area of human endeavor—music, art, literature, and science itself—creativity appears to arise only from human intelligence.  The elaborate architecture of termite nests, in which somehow thousands of individually unintelligent creatures cooperate to build sophisticated towers and walls, is sometimes called "creative," but is more realistically categorized as instinct.  No termite colony has ever built a Corinthian column.  It takes human ingenuity to do that.

 

No reasonable scientist can deny that there is a creative spirit or principle in life, but the universally-observed prohibition on talking about God in this connection forces them simply to say it's out there without saying where it came from.  But a failure to acknowledge the source of all that creativity may lead to something worse than unintended consequences later on.

 

The second great stream of philosophy is the human desire to know, as Aristotle points out in the first words of his Metaphysics:  "All men by nature desire to know."  Bomgard echoes this when he says "We want to understand that more deeply," meaning the creativity of life.  Up to the time of Sir Francis Bacon, philosophers sought wisdom as the highest secular good.  But since Bacon, the unadulterated desire simply to know something has been subordinated most of the time to the third great stream of philosophical inquiry:  how can we use this knowledge to, in Bacon's words, "better man's estate"? 

 

In more prosaic terms, the difference between the two streams is the distinction between pure and applied science, although the distinction is often more hypothetical than real.  Ask any mathematician who has spent years pursuing a theory simply because it was beautiful and interesting, and then turns around to discover that the National Security Agency has made it an essential part of their latest encryption technology.  The fact is, pure science can turn into applied science at any time, and a lot of applied science has accidentally led to advances in pure science as well.

 

But that ignores the question of intent, which is the critical question that so far has remained unanswered, at least by Levin and Bomgard.  I will admit that the first thing I thought of when I read about what they were doing is a phrase first used by Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation, a half-science and half-fiction speculation on the future of nanotechnology.  Gray goo is what the world would turn into if we managed to develop a type of bacteria that could live and multiply by consuming almost anything.  Readers will recognize the xenobot as possibly a first necessary step in making gray goo.

 

Levin and Bomgard say there is no chance their modified frog embryo cells will escape the lab, as they can't live outside the specially prepared soup that they were incubated in, and when they die they are as harmless as the thousands of skin cells each of us shed from our bodies every day.  Well, maybe so.  But the same curiosity and "if we can do it, we must do it" attitude that drove these researchers to make their xenobots can (I don't say will) lead to the kind of disasters that we've seen in the last couple of years.  We may never know whether COVID-19 originated in a lab accident in Wuhan or by natural means.  But even the remote possibility that it was man-made should make us all take very hard and long looks at efforts to manipulate living things in a way that could lead to harm, even if it is accidental.

 

Sources:  CNN carried the article "World's first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say" by Katie Hunt on Nov. 29, 2021 at https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/americas/xenobots-self-replicating-robots-scn/index.html.  I also referred to the University of Vermont press release on the research at https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/team-builds-first-living-robots, and the Wikipedia article on gray goo.

 

Aristotle Questions Innovation

 

Innovation—the introduction of new technologies, systems, and ways of doing things—is such a fundamental part of modern engineering, and life in general, that we rarely stop to question it.  One person who has, however, is Gladden Pappin, a professor of political science at the University of Dallas.  In the December issue of First Things, he describes how innovation has become an automatic part of modern Western civilization, and why this is not necessarily a good thing.

 

Pappin is no Luddite (the Luddites were allegedly followers of nineteenth-century Ned Ludd, a weaver who protested job losses to factory production).  Pappin recognizes the benefits of modern sanitation, medicine, electric power, and other technologies that were largely in place by the end of the 1900s.  But he sees our continual fascination with, and enslavement to, constantly new things as unthinking and possibly harmful. 

 

He uses Uber as an example of an apparently novel enterprise which is really just a variation on the well-known theme of taxi companies.  Uber managed to outgrow conventional taxi firms by cutting pay and benefits to drivers in order to beat the established firms' prices.  As a result, you have a lot of overstressed gig workers who try to hold down two or three jobs in order to survive, and a company that has never yet made a profit.  Pappin claims that this kind of "creative destruction" (in Joseph Schumpeter's phrase) is far more destructive than creative.

 

Although Pappin doesn't mention social media in detail, it is another example of an innovation that is essentially a repackaging of a prehistoric idea:  gossip.  But social media put gossip on steroids, enabled key gossipers to gain a worldwide audience, and profits mightily thereby, but at an unknown and probably negative net cost to the body politic.

 

Pappin looks to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle for guidance about how a regime should treat innovation with a mind toward self-preservation.  It turns out that Aristotle gave a lot of thought to political change, devoting an entire chapter of his book Politics to it. 

 

As you might expect, Aristotle starts out with some common-sense notions.  Before a regime permits a change, it should consider whether the change will truly improve things, or whether it's just a change for change's sake.  Admittedly, that is sometimes hard to tell in advance.  But keeping in mind the ultimate goal—the preservation of the regime—it only stands to reason that things that might tend to harm it should be restricted, or even not allowed in the first place.

 

One of the boldest recommendations Pappin draws from this general principle is that "[w]e should, for instance, consider state actions to limit the destructive 'innovations' of modern firms."  For example, brick-and-mortar stores have suffered or disappeared as a result of online retailing.  A suitably-scaled tax on online shopping could fix that.  Social media companies have thrived by staying several steps ahead of the sluggish democratic legislative process.  An energetic legislative and executive effort to get ahead of them could work wonders in alleviating the distortions, vindictiveness, and even deaths from bullying-inspired suicide that social media now is responsible for. 

 

Pappin is rather short on ideas about how we could get from here to there.  Part of the problem is that the very innovations we would try to regulate have crippled the democratic process by which we would regulate them.  Nevertheless, there is hope in discussions about how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act could be modified or even eliminated.  Currently, it protects social media companies from being sued because of what third parties put on their websites.  As the recent success of the Texas "fetal heartbeat" law shows, passing laws allowing private citizens to effectively enforce laws rather than making the government do it can, at the least, throw a monkey wrench into corporate and governmental attempts to counter them.  So that might be one of the best methods to approach the problem of social media outlets whose operations do more harm than good.

 

There is of course the danger of going overboard with such regulation.  My standard example of overweening government control of technology is Cuba.  When Castro took over in 1959, he installed a top-down micromanaged regime that essentially froze large sectors of the economy in place.  The fact that no imports of foreign automobiles were allowed eventually made Cuba one of the largest repositories of working vintage cars in the world.  But as the former owner of a 1955 Oldsmobile, I can say that this situation is probably not what the vast majority of Cubans prefer in the way of transportation. 

 

My point is that freezing all innovation can be just as harmful, if not more harmful, that allowing all innovation.  And Aristotle himself would probably agree that the optimum situation lies somewhere between the extreme poles of total government control of anything novel coming into the economy, and complete passivity in the face of unbridled competition manipulatted by an oligarchy of the wealthiest few, which is pretty much what we have now. 

 

As a Christian, Pappin ends his piece with a call for family-friendly innovations that would go so far as to pay cash to people who want to raise larger families.  But there's nothing exclusively Christian about this idea.  In another article in the same issue, an economist points out that the West in general is entering a period of demographic decline that could be extremely destabilizing.  Again, simple common sense says you can't have a nation of urban singles forever, even if you open the immigration floodgates and hope everyone will get along. 

 

Pappin's call to take a second look at our unthinking "innovation-is-good" attitude is something that goes counter to most corporate policy statements and the can-do engineering state of mind itself.  But just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.  Asking whether an innovation is really going to help society is a different question than asking whether it will help a given company's bottom line.  But the ethical engineer considers both.

 

Sources:  Gladden J. Pappin's "Advancing in Place" appeared in the December 2021 issue of First Things on pp. 25-30, and can be viewed online at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/12/advancing-in-place.

Against Cartesian Dualism

 

Every now and then, it's useful to look at the philosophical underpinnings of current thought and what implications they have for engineering ethics.  In a recent post on the website of the journal First Things, professor of biblical and religious studies Carl Trueman noted that Cartesian dualism—a way of looking at the human person promulgated by René Descartes (1596-1650)—is enjoying a comeback in the popular mind, although modern philosophy has long since discarded it as an inadequate model.

 

If you know anything about Descartes, you will probably recall his most famous saying:  "I think, therefore I am."  He arrived at that conclusion after discarding everything he could think of that might possibly not be true—the evidence of his senses, things he knew on authority, and so on.  Whatever else might be false, he reasoned, he couldn't help thinking that he was still thinking, and therefore there must be a thinker somewhere.  He was so impressed by this idea that he developed a whole philosophy around it, which came to be known as Cartesian dualism.

 

Descartes believed that the soul—which in modern terms pretty much amounts to what we would call the mind—was a "spiritual substance" that was immaterial, without dimensions or location.  And the body he believed to be completely material, an entirely separate substance from the soul, consisting of the brain, the nerves, the muscles, etc., all of which operate under the control of the immaterial mind and will.  As to exactly how the immaterial controlled the material, Descartes wasn't sure.  But he thought the point of contact might be the pineal gland, a small pine-cone-shaped gland near the middle of the brain.

 

Modern science has discovered that the pineal gland, far from controlling the entire body, mainly secretes melatonin, which affects sleep patterns—but that's about it.  And modern philosophy has discarded Cartesian dualism, because nobody after Descartes was ever able to show how a completely immaterial thing like Descartes' hypothetical soul could affect a physical thing like the body.

 

But this news evidently hasn't reached a lot of women athletes who submitted an "amicus" (friend of the court) brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, urging the court to uphold abortion rights in the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, in which the State of Missouri is seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal in the U. S.

 

As Trueman observes, the women in the amicus brief speak of their bodies as nothing more than sophisticated tools or instruments, operated by their minds and wills.  They say that they "depend on the right to control their bodies and reproductive lives in order to reach their athletic potential."  If we stop with only that quotation, we can see that (a) the operative verb is "control" and (b) the purpose of controlling the body is to "reach their athletic potential." 

 

In other words, for these women, their body is a means to the end of achieving success in athletics, just as a fast race car is a means to achieving success in the Indy 500.  And prohibiting abortion is like compelling a race-car driver to give a ride to a 300-pound hitchhiker during the race. 

 

Cartesian dualism shows up in lots of places these days outside of law courts.  The whole transhumanist movement, of which famed entrepreneur Elon Musk is a proponent, is based on the idea that the real you is basically a software program running on the wet computer called the brain.  The phrase "meat cage" that some people use to describe the body partakes of this same idea—that we are not our bodies, but that we use our bodies in a way not much different in principle than using a car or a computer. 

 

Perhaps the most pernicious feature of Cartesian dualism is the temptation to assess the humanity or non-humanity of other people based on our judgment as to whether they have a mind worthy of the name.  I would imagine it is easier to contemplate an abortion if you believe the fetus in question has not developed a mind yet.  And the same goes for people who are mentally disabled, suffer from Alzheimer's disease, or are otherwise incapacitated to the extent that their minds no longer control their bodies adequately.  Perhaps it's just as well to sever the connection between the mind and the body if the mind can't do its job controlling the body any more.

 

Well, if Cartesian dualism isn't true, how should we think of the relation between the mind and will (or soul, to use the more old-fashioned term) and the body?  The model of the person Descartes was trying to displace is called hylomorphism, originated by Aristotle.  Philosopher Peter Kreeft explains that Aristotle's theory considers the body to be what the person is made of, and the soul as the form or molding and patterning influence of the body.  So matter (Greek hyle) is "informed" by form (morphe) to create one integral thing with two aspects or causes:  the material cause, namely the body, and the formal cause, namely the soul.  But the human person is one unique thing, not two.

 

If hylomorphism was more popular than Cartesian dualism, I think we would see a lot of salutary changes in everything from attitudes toward the life issues (abortion, euthanasia, etc.) to medical and surgical procedures (sex-change operations, transhumanist initiatives) and even tattoos.  If you thought you were hiring a tattoo artist to burn an image of some hip-hop star on your very being, instead of just some piece of machinery you happen to be living in now, you might think twice before doing it. 

 

But the spirit of the age favors Cartesian dualism.  As consumers, we are urged to treat the rest of the world as a selectable, disposable warehouse of products and services—why not treat our bodies the same way?  I'm glad that my university is a rare holdout among public institutions of higher education for continuing to require that all its undergraduates take at least one philosophy course.  In such a course, they stand  a chance of hearing about Cartesian dualism and why it is no longer respectable.  And they might even take what they hear in class seriously, and apply it to their lives.  Such a hope is all that keeps some educators going.

 

Sources:  Carl Trueman's article "The Body Is More Than a Tool" appeared on the First Things website at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/10/the-body-is-more-than-a-tool.  Elon Musk's promotion of transhumanism is described at https://futurism.com/elon-musk-is-looking-to-kickstart-transhuman-evolution-with-brain-hacking-tech.  Peter Kreeft demolishes Cartesian dualism (and a lot of other false philosophical ideas) in his book Summa Philosophica (St. Augustine's Press, 2012).  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on hylomorphism.

Two Logics and Engineering Ethics

 

Though most of us never give a second thought to philosophers, we live in cultures which have underlying philosophical assumptions that are rarely examined.  Just as some things are hard to say in certain languages, some thoughts are hard to think in certain philosophies, including certain kinds of thoughts about ethics and morality.

 

Logic can be considered as a sort of language of philosophical thought.  It turns out that over the past century or two, there has been a revolution in the type of logic that has been taught and accepted by most philosophers, and as a result this revolution has insinuated itself through most Western cultures.  But there are a few philosophers who think this almost unnoticed shift has had profound effects that almost nobody understands.  And I'd like to take the rest of this space to explain why.

 

You might think that logic is just logic, but if you look a little deeper you will find that philosophers have come up with basically two different kinds of logic.  Historically, the first philosopher to take a disciplined academic look at logic was Aristotle, who lived from about 384 B. C. to 322 B. C.  His book on logic sets out various ways to argue from premises (things you believe or know are true) to conclusions, which are things that must be true if the premises are true.  One of these ways is the syllogism:  "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man;  therefore, Socrates is mortal."  The first two phrases are the major and minor premise, respectively, and the third phrase is the conclusion, which must be true if the premises are true.

 

Philosopher Henry Veatch calls this classic Aristotelian kind of logic "what-logic," because it is based on an intuitive, common-sense notion of what things are.  Aristotle believed that people could look at things and determine what they were essentially, at least to some degree.  Most people can tell apples from oranges, for example, and Aristotle would say that's because the essential makeup of an apple is different from the essential makeup of an orange. 

 

Aristotelian logic reigned until philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) began to question things that up to then were thought to be obviously true.  The details are complicated, but basically, they began to say things like, "When you see an apple, the only thing you can be sure of isn't the apple itself—it's the idea of an apple in your mind."  Grossly oversimplified, Hume and Kant and their followers began to treat human thought and language as the only things we could be sure of, and tried to work outwards from thoughts to things in the outside world.  They believed that we could never really know what a thing is, and there was no point in trying.

 

In the centuries since then, among most philosophers Aristotelian what-logic has been replaced by what Veatch calls "relating-logic."  Another name for it is symbolic logic.  Electrical engineers have encountered it in the form of Boolean algebra, and it is embodied in all digital computers in the form of logic gates that perform logical functions like AND and OR. 

 

While symbolic logic has proved to be extraordinarily useful—computers excel at it, naturally, and philosopher Peter Kreeft compares the change from what-logic to relating-logic to the shift from Roman to Arabic numerals—it has some basic shortcomings.  The most serious is this:  it can never tell you what a thing is; it can only say how things relate to each other.  Here is Veatch on this defect:  "To take the case merely of human actions . . . since there is no such thing as a human nature that can be appealed to in a relating-logic, there is no way in which one can determine what man's function is or what sort of activity a characteristically human life must consist in."  For the purposes of ethical reasoning, these are major problems.  If you can't answer the question, "What is human nature?" you can't very well say this aspect of human nature or this action is better than that one. 

 

Kreeft, who has taught philosophy at Boston College for four decades, says that symbolic or relating-logic has taken over so thoroughly that it is beginning to disable his students from understanding aspects of reasoning that depend on what-logic:  analogies, for example.  After Kreeft had published a criticism of certain aspects of computers, a well-known expert phoned him and predicted that as society began to think more exclusively in the relating-logic computer mode, ordinary intuitive understanding would atrophy and the SAT (Scholastic Achievement Tests, formerly used for college admissions) would drop its section on analogies as fewer people could figure them out.  This actually happened a few years later.  Kreeft dusted off some old logic exams from 1962 and gave them to his current 21st-century students, and they failed spectacularly, especially when it came to analogies.  For example, in the sentence, "He pointed with his right hand to the hands of a clock," the word "hands" is used analogically.  But only three out of 75 students understood that.

 

Kreeft claims that losing the ability to do what-logic is tragic, and may be either a result or a cause (or both) of everything from the rise of utilitarian ethics ("the greatest good for the greatest number") which is a favorite of engineers, to the sexual revolution, which does not recognize anything like the natural form or "nature" of human sexuality. 

 

While relating-logic is great for making things work, it fails to tell us what anything really is.  And to the extent that modern thought and discourse increasingly exclude types of reasoning based on what-logic, we seem to be dumbing ourselves down to act more like computers and less like human beings.  In The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis said, "Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."  In leaving Aristotelian logic behind, the Western world may be doing exactly that.

 

Sources:  Peter Kreeft's article  "The Social, Moral, and Sexual Effects of Symbolic Logic" in his How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas From the Cultural Abyss (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2021) contains a reference to Henry B. Veatch's Two Logics (Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press, 1969) and explains this situation a lot better than I did.

Sentiment, Calculation, and Prudence

 

Some engineers eventually become managers, and managers not only of engineering projects but of entire companies or even public organizations.  The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a spotlight on the question of how those in charge should allocate scarce resources (including technical resources) in the face of life-threatening situations.  And so I would like to bring you a brief summary sketch of three ways to do that:  two that are widely applied but fundamentally flawed, and one that is not so well known but can actually be applied successfully by ordinary mortals like ourselves.

 

None of this is original to me, nor to Robert Koons, the philosopher who describes them in a recent issue of First Things.  But originality is not usually a virtue in ethical reasoning, and in what follows, I'll try to show why.

 

In the 1700s, the Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and David Hume devised what Koons calls a "difference-making" way of coming up with moral decisions.  The way this process works is best described by an example.  To properly assess an action or even the lack of an action, you must figure out the net difference it makes to the entire world.  Koons uses the example of a homicidal maniac who, if left to himself, is bound to go out and kill three people.  Suppose you know about this maniac: you can either do nothing, or choose to kill him.  If you do nothing, three people die; if you kill him, only one person dies.  Other things being equal, the world is a better place if fewer people die, so the logic of difference-making says you must kill him.

 

That's an extreme example, but it vividly illustrates the rational basis of two popular ways of making moral decisions involving public health.  Let's start with the commonly-heard statement that every human life is of infinite value.  Few would dare to argue openly with that contention, yet if you try to use it as a guide for practical action, you run into a dilemma.  Even something as simple as your driving a car to the grocery store exposes other people to some low but nonzero chance of being killed by your vehicle.  If you take the infinite value of human life seriously, you will never drive anywhere, because infinity times (whatever small chance there is of running over someone fatally) is still infinity.

 

Koons calls one way of dealing with this dilemma "sentimentalism."  He's not talking about people who watch mushy movies, but the fact that the sentimentalist, in the meaning he uses, abandons logic for emotion and settles for life more or less as it is, but feels bad whenever anybody dies.  Such people exist in a constant state of deploring the world's failure to live up to the ideal that every human life is of infinite worth, but otherwise derive little moral guidance from that principle in practice.

 

The more hard-headed among us say, "look, we can't act on infinities, so if we put a finite but large value on human life, at least we can get somewhere. " Applying the difference-making idea to human lives valued at, say, a million dollars, allows you to make calculations and cost-benefit tradeoffs.  Engineers are familiar with technical tradeoffs, so many engineers find this method of moral decision-making quite attractive.  But one of many problems with this approach is that it requires one to take a "view from nowhere":  there are no boundaries to the differences a given decision makes, other than the world itself.  Again, if we try to be truly logically consistent, calculating all the differences a given life-or-death decision makes is practically impossible.

 

At this point Koons calls Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to the rescue.  Operating under the umbrella of the classical virtue called prudence, Koons asks a given person in a given specific set of circumstances to judge the worthiness of a particular choice facing him or her.  He sets out four things that make a human act of choice worthy:  (1)  whether the human is applying rational thinking to the act, rather than random chance or instinct; (2) what the essential nature of the act is; (3)  what the purpose or end of the act is; and (4) what circumstances are relevant to the act. 

 

Unlike the difference-making approach, which imposes the impossible burden of near-omniscience on the decider, judging the worthiness of an action doesn't ask the person making the decision to know everything.  You simply take what you know about yourself, the kind of act you're contemplating, what you're trying to accomplish, and any other relevant facts, and then make up your mind.

 

In this process, some decisions are easy.  Should I kill an innocent person, a child, say?  Item (2) says no, killing innocent people is always wrong. 

 

Here's another situation Koons uses, but with an example drawn from my personal experience.  You walk outside your building past a bicycle owned by a person you really hate (call him Mr. SOB) and would like to see out of the way.  You notice that someone who hates Mr. SOB even more than you do has quietly disconnected the bike's brake cables, so that unless Mr. SOB checks his brakes before he gets on his bike, he will ride out into the street with no brakes and quite possibly get killed.  If you decide to say or do nothing, you have not committed any explicit act; you have simply refrained from doing anything.  But item (3) says your intentions in refraining were evil ones:  you hope the guy will get killed on his bike.  In this case, not doing anything is a morally wrong act, and you are obliged to warn him of the danger. 

 

And in less extreme cases, such as when public officials decide how to trade off lockdown restrictions versus spending money on vaccines or public assistance, the same four principles can guide even politicians (!) to make decisions that do not require them to be all-knowing, but do ask them to apply generally accepted moral principles in a practical and judicial way.

 

Of course, judiciousness and prudence are not evenly distributed virtues, and some people will be better at moral decision-making than others.  But when we look into the fundamental assumptions behind the decision-making process, we see that the difference-making approach has fatal flaws, while the traditional virtue-based approach using prudential judgment can be applied successfully by any individual with a good will and enough intelligence to use it.

 

Sources:  A much better  explanation of these approaches to moral reasoning can be found in Robert C. Koons's original article "Prudence in the Pandemic" which appeared on pp. 39-45 of the October issue of First Things, and is also accessible online at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/prudence-in-the-pandemic.