No Technology Is a Mere Tool
Things Have the Power to Shape Us and Make Us Act (Especially AI!)
Editor’s Note: This post is a part of a series of responses to Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence curated by Alessandro Rovati, the Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Theology Please note that the author composed the article before the recent release of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
Starting with the book Encountering Artificial Intelligence of 2024, the AI Research Group for the Vatican Centre of Digital Culture has raised the issue of the challenges that the age of AI poses to human agency and intelligence in light of the limitations of classical modern anthropologies. Since Immanuel Kant this tradition tends to invert the hierarchy between the holistic features of our insightful “experience of reality” (intellectus, nous), and the subordinate, discursive, manipulative and problem-solving features of human rationality (ratio, dianoia).2 The new book of the same group, Reclaiming Human Agency, shows how the resulting image of who human beings are has shaped disordered habits of life planning and technology design that undermine our technical, moral, and intellectual skills, hollow out our perceptual and epistemic trust, and endanger our freedom to strive for the common good. The corresponding recommendations of the last two chapters then include possible regulatory constraints on AI as well as constructive frameworks of technology design that are suitable to protect and support human agency.
The focal concept of (human) agency reminds us that the responsibility of judicious human agents, whose judgments are drawn by the natural desire for the true, the beautiful, and the good, cannot be delegated to probabilistic classifiers. The conflicting idea that AI can attain human agency is indicative of “dominant ways of understanding human persons” (53), which build on materialist, behaviorist, or functionalist traditions. Yet the latter are incompatible with the “Catholic anthropology as well as other robust anthropologies” (53). The last half-sentence of this quotation could have been deepened in the light of most recent discussions of theoretical biology and neurocognitive science, which confirm the fundamental difference between mechanical ways of motion and the vital agency of ensouled bodies (in the Aristotelian sense of this word), which is mentioned in passing (49f.).3 If we focus on this fundamental difference, the inert movements of mechanical calculating devices cannot even compete with the organismic agency of a simple bacterium. Hence, we can conclude that there is no technical path to creating truly intelligent “Agentic AI’s” (47-63). The idea of a “living machine” is a contradiction in terms, and in this sense symptomatic of a phenomenologically and conceptually confused account of the “gift of intelligence” (53).4
In line with Pope Francis’s statements on the contemporary “Throwaway Culture and the Technocratic Paradigm” (36ff.), the book also engages with the systemic dimensions of technological innovations and related “structures of sin.”5 It exposes, for example, our culture “of greed and pride” and its careless fragmentation of knowledge, which “lead to loss of appreciation of the whole, the pursuit of what is not essential and the disregard of relationships” (Laudato Si, no. 110). However, the authors hesitate to engage with the creative dimensions of systemic technologies that “enframe” our lives in such a way that they alter our view of the world.
The fact that the book puts rather little emphasis on the theoretical side of the “tie between intellect and agency” (20) strikes me as symptomatic of this hesitation. To be sure, in contrast to modern voluntarists, the authors emphasize that virtuous acts of the will are inseparable from our theoretical understanding of the world. They also leave no doubt that this is relevant in terms of the trinitarian character of human personhood and the exercise of “those features particular to the image and likeness of God: intellect and will (…) grounded in human nature” (17, my emphasis). We might even read this quotation as indicative of Augustine’s trinitarian account of the nature of the human mind (mens), which can be characterized as a connatural tri-unity of mind, knowledge, and love, or memory, intellect, and will. Arguably, this triadic structure is essential to the creative potentials of human agency, which empower us to participate “in the creative activity of God” (22f.). Yet the disclosive, intellective dimensions of this creative power remain underexposed in the 2025 book.
As contemporary discussions of the philosophy of technology show, technology is never only a means to the fulfillment of predetermined ends of the will. For example, for millennia our lives have been enframed by writing technologies and related techno-cultural infrastructures, which shaped our practical and cognitive habits and underpinned the evolution of our brains.6 If properly ordered, systemic technologies like these can have a disclosive dimension that transforms our nature and deepens our understanding of the world, including our understanding of unanticipated dimensions of human flourishing that technological innovations invite and afford. The authors rightly emphasize that true happiness is always an unanticipated gift and that the freedom it affords “is not limitless autonomy but a participation in God’s own triune life” (34). Yet this freedom is inextricably intertwined with the gift of our embodied intellect (noûs) as a “revelator of being.”7 Our intellect has the potential to disclose unanticipated dimensions of the world, including the techno-cultural environments that enframe our life, inasmuch as it permits us to participate in the creative power of the Divine Word. For this reason, Saint Augustine already associated the uncreated Word, through which everything is created and given meaning, with an original art (in the sense of τέχνη), the ars ipsa per quem facta sunt omnia.8 Starting with John Scotus Eriugena, this artistic dimension of the Word and, derivatively, the human intellect was later systematically elaborated by thinkers like Bonaventure and Meister Eckhart, culminating in the ars coniecturalis of Nicholas of Cusa. The most recent discussion of trinitarian anthropologies of technology builds on this premodern tradition and deepens it in light of post-phenomenological anthropologies of technology, such as Bernard Stiegler’s, which question the binary anthropologies of classical modernity. 9
The significance of this blind spot becomes particularly evident in chapter 9 on “The Treatment of Technology in Catholic Social Teaching” (133-149). In accordance with the tradition of CST, the authors plead for a concept of progress that focuses on “the integral development of all persons” (139) and aims to overcome the “illusion of total autonomy” (141). This requires us “to accept that technological products are not neutral,” as Laudato Si has pointed out, since “they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities [… ] Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build”(145, no. 107). However, at the end of the day, the tradition of CST, including Pope Frances’s expansion, tends to relapse to an instrumental understanding of technology: “Technology should be a tool: instrumentally valued for its usefulness in achieving other, intrinsically valuable, ends” (146).
The authors concede that, in the time of autonomous cars, machines “stop being tools; they cease to be means to an end but start to shape the ends themselves” (182). And they respond to this challenge by calling on programmers to “resist attempts to anthropomorphize the machine” (183). Yet, while the last point is consistent with the second of the “Ten rules for a digital world,”10 which build on the ten commandments, the first point might raise serious doubts. Has it ever been possible to draw a clear demarcation line between “mere technical tools” and cultural artifacts that have a disclosive, inherently symbolic or even sacramental value, such as the “Diesel engine” in David Jones famous essay Art and Sacrament?11 It seems to me that the tradition of CST is at this critical point still under the influence of the binary anthropologies of classical modernity, which can be traced back, via “critical” thinkers like Kant, to the Reformation era. The innovators of this era turned sacred spaces into preaching halls, chalices into cups, altars into tables, and icons into propagandistic tools.12 This was the starting point of a cultural upheaval that incrementally turned every sacred object into an object of manipulation in the hands of homo faber – with the exception of the modern “fetish of autonomy,”13 which the authors rightly expose.
Yet we are relational beings. Things have the power to shape us and make us act! This power might be the manipulative or benevolent medium of human-centered intentional acts (154-165). However, due to the systemic character of technological innovations, they ultimately escape our intentional control, both for the better and the worse. Hence, technical artifacts appeal to our responsibility in a more traditional way: They appeal to our ability to discern between demonic and eudemonic innovations – innovations that either lead to the divinization of man or the dystopia of Dante’s Inferno.
When secularized experts in the field compare ecclesial statements on artificial intelligence, such as Antiqua et Nova, with secular statements such as those of the German Ethics Council, it seems evident that this is where the blind spot of tradition-oriented (if not “pre-critical”) church statements lies.14 Yet, if we want to face the most severe challenge of our time, we must delve even deeper into the premodern tradition. Only an uncompromising Ressourcement can inspire us to overcome the instrumental understanding of technical artifacts that shaped the modern homo faber. Rather than seeing this lacuna of the book as a fatal flaw we should treat it as a place where CST can be further developed and enriched.
Endnotes
1. Paul Scherz and Brian Patrick Green, eds., Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture, Pickwick 2025. Page references in the text refer to this volume.
2. See Johannes Hoff, “Enlightenment Now! Overcoming the Functional Cognitivism of the Kantian Tradition,” in Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 11 (2024), 181-207, 192-204 DOI 10.1628/ptsc-2024-0015; and Iain Mcgilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press 2009
3. See Johannes Jaeger; Anna Riedl; Alex Diedovich et al., “Naturalizing Relevance Realization: why Agency and Cognition are Fundamentally not Computational,” in Frontiers in Psychology (25 June 2024), 1-25; Jelle Bruineberg; Julian; Kiverstein,Erik Rietveld, “The Anticipating Brain is not a Scientist: the Free-Energy Principle from an Ecological-Enactive Perspective,” in Synthese 195 (2018), 2417-2444; and Johannes Hoff, “Die Wiederentdeckung verkörperter Menschlichkeit: „Künstliche Intelligenz“ als Wendepunkt christlicher Anthropologie,” in Internationale Zeitschrift Communio (2026), 147-162.
4. See also Antiqua et Nova, no. 1; and Johannes Hoff, “The Gift of Intelligence and the Sacramentality of Real Presence. Overcoming the Dataist Metaphysics of Modern Cognitivism,” in Modern Theology 40/4 (2024), 921-947 DOI:10.1111/moth.12940.
5. John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, December 30, 1987, nos. 36–40; John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, nos. 11–24.
6. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press 1976; and Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The fault of Epimetheus, Stanford UP 1998.
7. Bruno Bérard, “Unmasking AI,” in Philo-sophia (2018), https://philos-sophia.org/unmasking-ai/.
8. Augustine, “De Libero Arbitrio, Libri Tres: “ in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Brepols 1956, Vol 74, Section 76, Part 73, III 15.42; similar yet less explicit: Augustine, “De Trinitate: “ in The Trinity, transl. by Edmund Hill, O.P., New City Press 1991, IV, 1.
9. See Johannes Hoff,Oliver Dürr, “Umrisse einer trinitarischen Technikanthropologie,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie. Sonderheft Trinitarische Technikanthropologie 147/1 (2025), 7-43 and the other contributions to this special issue; Enrico Grube; Johannes Hoff, “Imago Dei: Trinitarian Anthropology in the Age of Technology,” in Zimmerman, Jens; Moyse, Ashley; Burdett, Michael (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Theological Anthropology. Oxford, 2026 (forthcoming), and Johannes Hoff, Verteidigung des Heiligen: Anthropologie der Digitalen Transformation, Herder 2021, 70-83, 218-225, 290-298, 356-380.
10. https://www.thefuturefoundation.eu/en/10-rules
11. David Jones, “Art and Sacrament: “ in Epoch and Artist. Selected Writings, ed Grisewood Harman, Faber and Faber 1959, 143-179, 153.
12. Johannes Hoff, “The Eclipse of Sacramental Realism in the Age of Reform. Re-thinking Luther’s Gutenberg Galaxy in a Post-Digital Age,” in New Blackfriars (2018), 248-270.
13. James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition, Oxford UP 2010.
14. Kerstin Schlögl-Flierl,Armin Grunwald, “Der Mensch in der Maschine Ethische Beurteilung der Künstlichen Intelligenz,” in Stimmen der Zeit 6 (2025), 451-460.
Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.
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