AI and Ethics I Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on June 10th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., a native of Germany, teaches philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, where he is also currently the chair of the philosophy department. He is also a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modernism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, Neuried: Ars Una 2005). Other works include Thomas Aquinas: De veritate Q. 21-24; Translation and Commentary (Hamburg: Meiner, 2013) and God: Reason and Reality (Basic Philosophical Concepts) (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2014), as editor and contributor. Articles appeared in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Nova et Vetera, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and Angelicum. Areas of research and teaching include Free Will, the History of Philosophy and Philosophical Aesthetics. He has worked on a philosophical approach to Miracles and other topics of the philosophy of religion, and more recently the philosophy of technology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast.
0:05.9	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.3	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.2	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:23.6	visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org.
0:28.6	So we talk this afternoon about AI and ethics.
0:38.8	And so ethics is about what is good.
0:44.7	It's not about what is efficient in terms of what our technologies want to achieve.
0:51.6	It's not what makes the most money, which perhaps the CEOs are concerned about, that run the tech companies.
0:54.8	But it is what is the good thing to do.
1:02.5	And how does making such things fit into what we do and how we live and what we live for,
1:09.1	the purposes of our life, and as I will say, who we should become in using them.
1:19.2	Now, one basic question could be, how should we treat our robots as an ethical question?
1:28.3	Now, with my talk last yesterday, probably I have discarded that question because if there is no mind there, if there's no person there, then perhaps it's not a question whether robots have rights.
1:32.3	On the other hand, there can be questions that arise from the treatment of robots.
1:39.3	For example, people have said we shouldn't build cute AI.
1:45.4	What's the danger?
1:48.1	Let's say you're on a sinking ship, right?
1:55.2	And so you have this cute little robot and, hey, so much nicer than this naughty child next to that streaming and so forth.
1:56.5	Who are you going to save?
2:07.6	So if you make that so cute that we must take real people and robots, that could be a problem, and it's an ethical problem.
2:16.6	There are also problems, I'm talking about rights, with the rights of God.
	...

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