Diagnosing Dignity in the Era of AI – Prof. Paul Scherz
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Prof. Paul Scherz argues that AI-driven precision medicine and genetic risk prediction can undermine human dignity by turning health into an endless management of risk, increasing anxiety, weakening prudence, and subordinating both patients and clinicians to institutional control.
This lecture was given on March 26th, 2026, at New York University.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Paul Scherz is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology. His work examines the intersection of theology, science, medicine, and technology. His interests in ethics center on the role of virtue ethics, especially Stoic virtue ethics, in moral theology. He has published articles on many topics in bioethics, such as human enhancement, genetic technology, and end of life ethics. His books analyze issues like the moral formation of scientists, the role of risk in contemporary practical reason, the ethics of precision medicine, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
He began his career in science with a BA in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley (2001), a PhD in genetics from Harvard (2005), and a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF. He then received an MTS and a PhD in moral theology from the University of Notre Dame (2010, 2014). His previous teaching positions were at the Catholic University of America and the University of Virginia. He is currently working on projects on the ethics of artificial intelligence and the historical influence of Stoicism on moral theology.
Keywords: AI, Automation Bias, Clinical Judgment, Dignity, Explainable AI, Genetic Risk, Precision Medicine, Prudence, Risk Reduction, Surveillance Capitalism
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:06.0 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.0 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. |
| 0:19.0 | To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
| 0:21.6 | to mystic institute.org. We're currently seeing explosion of interest by governments, |
| 0:27.6 | technology companies, and healthcare systems and genetic testing. They want to use genetic sequencing |
| 0:32.6 | to predict individual health risk. Precision medicine, as this model of health care is called, uses AI-based |
| 0:40.3 | techniques to combine information from genetics, medical charts, demographics, other data sets like your Fitbit, |
| 0:46.3 | to predict the risks facing an individual so that they can be managed. |
| 0:50.3 | As former NIH director Francis Collin described it in selling this program, the techniques |
| 0:55.8 | of precision medicine will, quote, allow a considerably more useful estimate of your future |
| 1:00.7 | risks of illness than is currently possible, enabling a personalized plan of preventive medicine |
| 1:06.1 | to be established. |
| 1:08.8 | Now, precision medicine is a very popular term for granting agencies and venture capitalists. |
| 1:13.6 | So like all such terms, a number of very different research programs have become attached to it. |
| 1:18.6 | There's precision oncology, which is kind of treating tumors through sequencing and various kinds of AI-based kind of analysis of the sequence. |
| 1:29.7 | Pharmacogenomics, which is simply tying your genotype to the dosing of medication, and the |
| 1:34.5 | diagnosis of rare diseases, which is all coming around and I think having significant impacts |
| 1:41.1 | in medical treatment in positive ways. But I'm focusing on this idea of diagnosing risk and the role of AI in it. |
| 1:50.0 | Now to succeed, precision medicine relies on our genetic information. |
| 1:55.0 | For example, direct-to-consumer sequencing companies like the now bankrupt 23 and me |
| 2:00.0 | offered consumers' knowledge of their increased |
... |
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