Chikere Oswalo Ugwulebo

The increasing advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has generated serious philosophical and religious debates about its role in human life and spirituality. In some contemporary discussions, AI is presented as capable of replacing God by providing guidance, moral reasoning, and meaning to human existence. This paper critically examines such claims through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical philosophy, which places responsibility and relationality at the centre of human meaning. Adopting a qualitative approach grounded in critical analysis of philosophical, ethical, and religious literature, the paper explores the nature of AI and its growing influence on religious life. The study traces the history of AI from its early development in the 1950s to the present e a of machine learning and deep neural networks, showing how AI has gradually moved from simple computation to complex decision-making. The study also reflects on the positive impacts of AI on religion, such as increased access to sacred texts, virtual worship, and religious education, while highlighting negative effects, including the commodification of faith, the loss of spiritual authenticity, and the risk of reducing God to a mere functional tool. Drawing from Levinas’ understanding of God as the Infinite encountered through ethical responsibility to the Other, the paper argues that AI cannot replace God because it lacks transcendence, moral depth, and genuine relational presence. This argument rests on the premise that AI operates within finite systems and algorithmic constraints, whereas God transcends all systems and calls humans to ethical transformation. The paper concludes that AI may support religious practice, but cannot assume the role of God to human and other natural existence.

Cryonics is a controversial practice that involves preserving the body of a person who has been legally declared dead, with the hope that future medical science may be able to restore them to life. This raises important ethical questions about autonomy and human dignity, especially given the uncertainty surrounding its scientific practicability. This paper examines whether common ethical objections to cryonics, particularly those based on autonomy and dignity, are justified or not. The study adopts a qualitative philosophical approach based on conceptual analysis and normative ethical reasoning. It evaluates cryonics through established principles in bioethics, including informed consent, respect for persons, and human dignity. The analysis show that autonomy is not necessarily undermined in cryonics, since individuals may still make voluntary and informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It also shows that dignity is not automatically violated, as dignity can be understood not only in terms of bodily finality, but also as respect for individual values and choices. When cryonics is freely chosen and properly understood as speculative, the main ethical objections lose much of their force. The paper concludes that the autonomy and dignity problem in cryonics is largely self-resolved within a framework condition of informed voluntary choice and respect for persons. While cryonics remains scientifically uncertain, its ethical status depends more on the quality of decision-making than on guaranteed outcomes. This suggests that future ethical discussions should focus on refining consent and understanding long-term implications, rather than rejecting the practice outright.

Artificial wombs (ectogenesis) raise sharp ethical questions. Complete ectogenesis is still in development. Partial systems already support extremely premature infants. This advancement raises a fundamental ethical question. We must weigh natural law claims against autonomy and well-being. Critics say ectogenesis disrupts natural reproduction and risks commodification. Supporters argue it can cut maternal death and expand reproductive options. In this article, we examine the issue using Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics. Fletcher holds that agape love is the only intrinsic good. His working principle of pragmatism asks whether an act works to promote love or not. We apply conceptual analysis and critical hermeneutics to test artificial womb use. Our method clarifies key terms. It then interprets Fletcher for today’s biotech context. We find no blanket answer. Ectogenesis is not always right or wrong. Its moral value depends on the situation. When it prevents grave harm, preserves life, and supports just relationships, it embodies agape. When it enables commodification or deepens inequality, it fails. This article argues that Fletcher’s pragmatic situation ethics provides a context-sensitive ethical framework capable of evaluating ectogenesis, without appealing either to rigid moral absolutism or unrestricted technological optimism.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now central to pharmaceutical research and clinical practice across the globe. It promises faster drug discovery and more precise care. Despite heavy investment, the clinical impact of AI in medicine remains limited in both high- and low-income settings. This paper argues that the limitation is philosophical, not only technical. Medicine continues to use disease categories built for 20th century regulation and billing. When AI systems are trained on these categories, they learn and scale the error. Drawing on Nancy Cartwright’s concept of “Evidence for Use” in her The Dappled World and on African and Asian critiques of universalism in medicine, I argue that a treatment’s capacity to work is local. It depends on the specific causal arrangement in which it was established. The paper uses conceptual analysis, drawing on Cartwright's philosophy of science and African and Asian philosophy of medicine, with hypertension as an illustrative case, focusing on salt-sensitive hypertension in West Africa and East Asia. Since AI learns from broad labels, it reproduces mismatch at scale. To make AI work in medicine, we must rethink biological categories. We must move from universal labels to mechanism-based categories grounded in evidence for use. The paper shows that AI bias is rooted partly in biological classification, not only in data quality. It concludes that philosophy is infrastructure. Without recalibrating categories, AI in medicine will be fast but not good, especially for patients in Africa and Asia.

Much of the contemporary discussion on Artificial Intelligence (AI)assumes that AI systems are ethically neutral tools whose moral significance depends largely on how human beings choose to design, deploy, regulate, or use them. This article challenges that assumption by arguing that AI should be understood not merely as a technological instrument but as a moral phenomenon. The central claim is that AI is already morally constituted before it is put to use because human values, assumptions, priorities, and judgments are embedded in its design, training data, algorithms, and modes of deployment. At the same time, AI increasingly shapes the environments within which human moral decisions are made, thereby influencing social practices, institutional processes, and patterns of human interaction. The study adopts a conceptual and philosophical approach, drawing particularly on Jean Jacques Rousseau's account of moral formation. Rousseau's insight that moral order emerges within humanly created social structures provides a useful framework for understanding AI as a system that is itself a product of collective human values and choices. Through a critical engagement with arguments for technological neutrality, alongside perspectives from philosophy of technology, information ethics, and algorithmic governance, the article demonstrates that AI cannot be separated from questions of morality. AI systems classify, predict, recommend, and make decisions in ways that embody normative assumptions and shape human understanding of the world. The article concludes that AI should be regarded as a morally saturated socio-technical infrastructure rather than a neutral computational tool. Recognising this shifts ethical inquiry beyond questions of external regulation toward a deeper examination of the moral constitution of AI itself. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates in AI ethics and offers a framework for understanding the increasingly pervasive role of AI in contemporary society.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved from a computational tool into a system that increasingly shapes human decisions and social life, thereby raising important ethical concerns. Although AI ethics has emerged to guide the responsible development and use of AI systems, insufficient philosophical attention has been given to distinguishing AI ethics from the ethics of AI. This paper develops that distinction by arguing that, AI ethics mainly focuses on practical guidelines and technical principles. While, the ethics of AI, is a broader philosophical inquiry into the moral, social, and human implications of artificial intelligence. Using conceptual analysis, critical hermeneutics, and normative evaluation, the study examines the limitations of current AI ethics frameworks. Particularly, their technical reductionism, linguistic ambiguity, and institutional bias. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language mainly, I argue that ethical concepts such as fairness, accountability, and responsibility depend on social context, and cannot be fully reduced to fixed computational rules. The study also situates the ethics of AI within decolonial discourse. It questions the dominant assumptions fixed in AI systems. The paper contributes to knowledge by defending the importance of philosophy in AI development, AI governance, and AI/computer education. It concludes that philosophy remains necessary for responsible and human-centred AI advancement.