This paper contends that Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realist approach, developed in response to the emergence of nuclear weapons and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, offers a valuable framework for understanding and addressing the ethical concerns of both nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence (AI). While distinct in nature, both threats demand nuanced approaches that acknowledge our limitations, promote responsible action, and strive for a future guided by love and justice. This requires ongoing dialogue, national and international cooperation, and the development of ethical frameworks to ensure these powerful technologies serve humanity's flourishing, not its destruction.
This paper mines Hans Jonas’ response to the ‘existential’ risks posed by nuclear technologies, The Imperative of Responsibility, in order to account for why humanity’s extinction ought be resisted in the first place and to argue that something like Jonas’ mode of responsibility is necessary to generate the types of moral relationships with future generations that would prompt us to take such existential risks seriously. This paper will argue that Jonas’ path toward caring about future generations does not arise from intuitions about the need to create happy people or the final value of humanity. Rather, he begins with a concept of responsibility that is iterative which grounds a responsibility to perpetuate the existence of the race. Such an account has a number of advantages over contemporary efforts to defend the value of future generations, which this paper will elucidate.
Before the rise of the medicalization of death, more often than not, death is thought of as a sort of darkness that claims its victims. Borrowing from Christian theology, death is considered the final curse to be broken. “Oh death, where is your sting?” the Scriptures taunt as they envision the final resurrection and the ushering in of everlasting life. “Oh death, where is your victory?” In a paradoxical turn of events, the legalization of “Medical Aid in Dying” gives those who are willfully choosing to die the opportunity to taunt death, despite death's inevitability. Why is this the case? In this paper I will argue that medical aid in dying acts as a perverse ars moriendi, engendering a false sense of control as it relates to the uncontrollable, i.e. death.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han claims, “The smooth is the signature of the present time.” The social imperative to reduce resistance and struggle in human life is so ubiquitous as to be nearly imperceptible. It is present in trivial ways (e.g., the aesthetics of the iPhone, the experience of Amazon Prime delivery) and non-trivial ways (e.g., the rapid rise of GPT as a substitute for the writing process, the prospect of widespread biomedical moral enhancements). This paper draws on the work of environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III–specifically the evolutionary biological concept of “dialectical stress”--to provide a positive account of the role of struggle, resistance, and friction in the intellectual and moral life and an alternative ethico-aesthetic paradigm for our age.
What is the future of human labor in an increasingly digital workplace? The data make abundantly clear that if we continue measuring our work chiefly in terms of efficiency, then we will begin displacing ourselves in the workforce. In response to this crisis, this paper attempts a renewed vision and corresponding criteria for measuring the value of human labor by turning to Simone Weil. Weil critiqued Taylorism for divorcing thought and action in factory labor, but her solution is somewhat obscure. I argue that, by reading it alongside her theological-mystical writings, her analysis of liberated labor emerges as fundamentally analogical, imitative. I apply this theological reading of Weil’s philosophy of labor to today’s “Digital Taylorism,” arguing that, to respond to the labor crisis posed by AI, we must reckon with the fact that labor is imitative and thereby, above all else, valuable as a kind of identity formation.
