Jordan Baker

We are living through a technological watershed driven by artificial intelligence. Since the arrival of early generative Large Language Models (LLMs) in 2017, billions of dollars, years of research, and instruments of state power have all been used to reshape our world to better accommodate the next generation of AI models. These technologies are often presented to the public as a source of innovation and societal progress; however, there have been notes of concern. Most dramatically, there are the speculative world-ending concerns of some technological futurists, like Nick Bostrom, who warn of the possibility of the creation of malevolent superintelligences. But, there are also more down-to-earth critiques regarding AI safety in health care, economics, environmentalism, and warfare, among many other issues. These ethical worries should trouble Christians insofar as they affect how we might be treating our neighbor by and through using these new technologies. However, not all ethical concerns are harms, understood as the consequences of our actions; sometimes they are wrongs that are internal to our relationships. Indeed, Jesus’s insistence in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 5:21-43) that the scope of the law is broader than his listeners’ usual applications suggests the realm of morality goes beyond the consequences of our actions. I contend that attention to AI technologies in light of uniquely Lutheran commitments about the human will point to this other type of ethical concern. As I hope to show, current AI systems are structured in such a way—and importantly marketed in such a way—that they push users to unintentionally wrong themselves by inviting them into a relationship of what I call evaluative domination between the AI system and the user. I claim, moreover, that this danger is grounded in the very structure of the human will, as we can see by examining Luther’s understanding of how the will functions. Finally, I hope to suggest that once we recognize this process of evaluative domination we can draw analogies to how early Christians talk about demonic possession. Understanding this danger is vital for us as Christians, no matter our vocation, insofar as it pushes beyond large scale worries about AI safety to something more intimately related to us—how is this technology shaping our life together?

Research in AI safety and AI ethics tends to focus on two types of ethical danger: unethical results of AI usage—such as misinformation—and unethical side-effects from AI usage—such as environmental degradation. These dangers are worthy of consideration; however, the literature has not adequately considered non-consequentialist dangers (such as moral wrongs), which might be intrinsic to the relationship between human agents and AI tools. I argue that by contrasting the structure of human agency with algorithmic agency we can identify ethical dangers grounded in a mismatched relationship between human agents and AI agents. Moreover, I claim that by analyzing how humans trust AI agency we reveal an understudied threat, what I call the “diabolical exchange,” which emerges when human agents conform to the structure of merely functional AI-agents. I conclude that since current studies in AI safety and AI ethics do not yet have the conceptual resources to fully articulate this agential wrong, theology may be able to help. This is because the ethical danger intrinsic to the human-to-AI relationship is best captured by analogy to the theological concept of demonic possession as found in early Christian religious texts. I end by briefly considering what the concept of possession might teach us about ethical responsibility under non-ideal instrumentarian conditions.

The current struggles that antiracist activists have faced, though uniquely awful, are also part of a larger tapestry of what one might call spiritual and moral exhaustion. This problem has been recognized and many have called for clear practical solutions, including mental health services and intentional rest, for the suffering of those who work to care and advocate. There linger, however, deeper theoretical questions that have not received wide enough attention: What is the nature of the connection between the kind of psychological suffering that affects caring work and oppression? Why does it seem that those who, by many standards, are the most alive to a life of virtue are also the most at risk for experiencing spiritual and moral exhaustion? In what follows, I hope to show that this connection is not mere happenstance but instead an essential feature of what happens when humans attempt to pursue virtue under certain sorts of nonideal conditions, particularly the conditions of injustice and oppression. To make this connection, I will lean heavily on Lisa Tessman’s concept of burdened virtues, that is, character traits that are fitting and reasonable for fighting injustice but that actually undermine a person’s ability to flourish. My small contribution to Tessman’s insightful burdened virtue account is to take it one step further. Many traditional accounts of virtue ethics—arguably all of Western philosophical ethics—have an individualist structure. It is our flourishing as individual humans that virtue is supposed to contribute to, and it is our flourishing as individual humans that these burdened virtues can undermine. In contrast, much of Christian theology posits a radical interconnectedness—we are, after all, one body. It is this insight that opens a communal possibility for hope despite oppressive and unjust powers. For, although the tragedy of the human condition is that doing the right thing can lead to burdened virtues that undermine our individual well-being, our hope rests in realizing that we do not bear our burdens alone.

Augustine’s account of time is often praised as unique among the philosophical doctrines found in late antiquity, but in the same laudatory breath, commentators almost always reject his ideas. This dual response finds popular voice in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, in which he states that although he disagrees with Augustine’s conclusions, it is a “great advance on anything to be found on the subject in Greek philosophy.” According to this traditional interpretation, Augustine argues for a subjective idealism regarding time wherein time is dependent on the human mind and is upheld by the mental attitudes of expectation, attention, and memory. Philosophers claim that a purely subjectivist conception of time, though intriguing, is unable to make sense of our best scientific theories. And theologians like Robert W. Jenson have even described Augustine’s account of time as a deeply confused artifact of his incompatible commitments to Neoplatonism and Christianity. In contrast, I argue that Augustine’s view of time is both similar to our current scientific understanding of time and theologically useful. Once we understand Augustine’s approach, both in the context of his time and our own, I believe we can find insight about time as such and learn an important lesson about appropriate methodology for Christian philosophers and theologians.

Contemporary philosophers and scientists have done much to expand our understanding of the structure and neural mechanisms of joint action. But the phenomenology of joint action has only recently become a live topic for research. One method of clarifying what is unique about the phenomenology of joint action is by considering the alternative perspective of agents subsumed in group action. By group action we mean instances of individual agents acting while embedded within a group agent, instead of with individual coordination. Paradigm examples are educational bureaucracies, corporations, and nation states. There is a phenomenological difference between agents whose actions are subsumed within a group action (“the university did X”) as compared to agents who act jointly (“we did x”). Attending to this difference clarifies what is phenomenologically distinctive about joint action. Appealing to an Aristotelian account of agency and to the metaphysical concept of weak emergence, we argue that what makes paradigmatic group action distinctive is the relative inaccessibility, un-revisability, and evaluative simplicity of the group agent’s goal(s) from the perspective of individual agents. This suggests that a distinctive feature of joint agency is the maintenance of a greater sense of individual agency. Put simply, joint agency is often experienced as an enhancement of the individuals’ agency precisely because our paradigmatic agential powers are extended intersubjectively as we act together. In contrast, group agency often involves a loss of the sense of agency, precisely because it is the emergent group agent that maintains the agential powers.

In this paper I argue that Pereboom’s empirical objection to agent causation fails to undermine the most plausible version of agent-causal libertarianism. This is significant because Pereboom concedes that such libertarianism is conceptually coherent and only falls to empirical considerations. To substantiate these claims I outline Pereboom’s taxonomy of agent-causal views, develop the strongest version of his empirical objections, and then show that this objection fails to undermine what I consider the most plausible view of agent-causal libertarianism, namely, reconciliatory integrationist agent-causalism. I then strengthen my criticism of Pereboom by responding to three objections to my view. I show that these objections, though initially challenging, fail to undermine my argument. I therefore conclude that, to this extent, agent-causal views remain a viable option in the contemporary free will debate.