Much of the early commentary on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has understandably focused on what he says about artificial intelligence, and on the many ways in which AI has begun to catalyze dramatic changes in all aspects of our social and personal life.  

But in a certain sense, AI is only indirectly the subject of the document. As the subtitle itself tells us, Magnifica Humanitas is about “human dignity in the age of AI.” We can’t understand how Pope Leo urges us to address the challenges of technology without understanding what he is teaching us about the meaning and the demands of human dignity.  

In the long run, for the development of Catholic social doctrine as well as for the good of humanity, the constant horizon of human dignity is much more important than the rapidly changing features of the technological landscape. 

There is a certain temptation to regard the question of human dignity as a settled one, as if we already know what it is and all that is left is for us to apply it properly to the new circumstances we are facing today.  

It is true that human dignity (in what the encyclical refers to as the “ontological” sense, “the dignity that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God”) is given and unchanging, a fixed God-given feature of human nature.  

That does not mean, however, that our grasp of the depths of human dignity, of its contours and dimensions, or of the ethical demands that the recognition of that dignity entails, does not need to develop and mature. Precisely because it comes from our being created in the image and likeness of God, human dignity always remains in important measure a mystery to be contemplated and plumbed more deeply. 

In the mid-20th century, the affirmation of human dignity emerged as one of the cornerstones of our public ethics, politics, and law, in response to dehumanizing political and economic systems that subjugated and pulverized human beings and led to genocide. Thanks in no small measure to the efforts of the Catholic Church (as even non-Christian historians have documented), recognition of the status and principle of human dignity became widely embedded in constitutional systems and international human rights norms.  

It was for that reason that Pope St. John Paul II, in a statement reaffirmed in Magnifica Humanitas, declared in a 1995 address to the United Nations the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be “one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time.” For the last three quarters of a century, this idea that every human being has an inherent, equal, and inalienable dignity has served as the principal foundation for recognizing and defending universal human rights across diverse cultural and legal contexts. 

Today, however, that public understanding of human dignity is under enormous strain. In many quarters the content of human dignity has been reduced to just a fragment of the grandeur and nobility of our being.  

It has increasingly been understood in an extremely limited way, with an emphasis only on an individual’s physical integrity and complete autonomy to make decisions about the direction of his own life. Contemporary advocacy in favor of euthanasia, using the language of human dignity, provides a clear example of how individual autonomy and the avoidance of physical pain have been elevated into a distorted understanding of the human person and human destiny.  

At the same time, algorithmic technologies are generating new kinds of threats and dangers to the essential value of human beings that require urgent attention, calling into question what it means to be human in ways that go well beyond the impoverished notion of dignity that dominates our public discourse.  

Dignity-as-autonomy isn’t sufficient to provide a meaningful basis for critiquing and resisting the datafication of our identities, the waning of embodied experience, the harvesting of our most intimate desires and thoughts for others’ commercial gain, the substitution of machines and screens for authentic human relationships, or the erosion of our capacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood.  

To respond adequately to the dramatic ways in which technology today is exerting unprecedented pressures on human reason, freedom, judgment, conscience, and affectivity, we need to shore up and expand a richer understanding of what human dignity means, and what it demands of us. This is where Magnifica Humanitas truly shines, buttressing the anthropological walls of human dignity so that they can be built higher and bear more of the increasing moral and existential weight of our time.  

For example, Pope Leo emphasizes that the dignity of the human person is inescapably relational. We are made for relationship — with others, for love and friendship and community, and honoring that dimension of human dignity means fostering the development and use of technologies that connect and strengthen our human relationships rather than weakening and substituting them.  

He stresses that the dignity of the human person is expressed in our desire, capacity, and responsibility to seek meaning and truth, and thus demands the renewal of education as directed toward strengthening young people’s relationship to reality. He insists that human dignity pertains to an essential unity of body, mind, and spirit, to decry the contemporary replacement of embodied experiences of beauty and creation with ersatz virtual life. 

The boldest and most beautiful claim that Magnifica Humanitas makes about human dignity comes in its reflections on the relationship between our value as human persons and our limitations and frailty:   

“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others.  Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.”    

In other words, our limits, even our suffering, are not at odds with what makes human beings bearers of irreducible value, but exactly the opposite. In the experience of those weaknesses and dependencies, we discover more truly that the grandeur of human dignity transcends those limits. 

That message is profoundly countercultural in an increasingly technocratic age, where the value of human beings seems ever more pinned to their productivity, their functionality, their capacities, their usefulness.  

Leo draws out that contrast in a short but very pointed passage critiquing ‘transhumanism” and “posthumanism” and contrasting them with a Christian humanism. Transhumanism and posthumanism are vague terms that can apply to an array of different ideologies and movements, but in general Leo considers that  “transhumanism envisions the enhancement of human beings through technologies…  with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities. Posthumanism, especially in its more radical forms, goes further: it challenges anthropocentrism and envisions a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment, even anticipating a threshold where humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage.”  

The encyclical goes on to critique these ideas as, in fact, radically anti-humanist. By making human limitations something to be overcome by technology, they represent the ultimate example of the hubris and presumption of the Tower of Babel, seeking to build by humankind’s own power the structures that will take us beyond this world.  

If that understanding is embedded into the value structure of AI technologies, it would only reinforce a view that those human beings who are weaker, more vulnerable, less efficient and less productive are less worthy, have less dignity. It is not just happenstance that transhumanist/post-humanist ideologies have many strong connections to eugenics.  

Nevertheless, Magnifica Humanitas does not merely critique and reject outright the transhumanist project. Drawing from the exceptional recent document of the International Theological Commission, Quo Vadis Humanitas, Leo also recognizes the structural human longing for transcendence that is the heart of the transhumanist ideal: the desire to overcome the limitations of human life in this world, to destroy sickness, evil, and death.  

That ideal intuits that we are made for wholeness and health, for eternity, for beatitude. Christian humanism understands that same ideal as only reaching its fulfillment in and through the Word Made Flesh, who became man so that we might become God, as St. Athanasius put it. Without directing our desire for transcendence toward its ultimate source and end, it is bound to fail and to lead to a world in which technology suppresses human dignity rather than serving it. 

This brilliant identification of transhumanism as pursuing an authentic human desire through a misdirected inversion of the relationship between God and human beings can be understood as a key to reading and interpreting Magnifica Humanitas as a whole. The encyclical is not a rejection of the technological creativity and genius that impels human beings to direct their energies to improving life and seeking ever greater horizons.  

Rather, it is an exhortation to remember always that technology will only serve the development of the whole person and of all persons if it is kept rightly oriented toward a full and proper understanding of the dignity of the human person. 

 

Paolo Carozza is a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. He also serves as a co-chair of the Oversight Board, an independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.