REACTIONS to the recent papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, have been largely positive (Analysis, 5 June). Most commentators seem relieved that such a weighty global figure has raised some sharp moral questions about a field that has proceeded largely unchallenged thus far.
So, I was interested to see some friendly fire from an American Franciscan, the Professor and Sister Ilia Delio. She took issue with the Pope’s argument that our intrinsic dignity is derived from being made in the image of God, and she cavilled at the “frozen” concept of humans as ensouled beings. Her critique brought me up short: “To anchor global AI governance in one tradition’s account of personhood is not to protect humanity. It is to perform a kind of epistemic colonialism, even when performed with the gentlest of intentions.”
The reason that this shocked me was not because, on the face of it, this argument is wrong. I was shocked because I do not think that we realise exactly what is at stake if we decide that our “tradition of personhood” is just a particular cultural oddity that should now be retired.
What is actually at stake here are the fundamental protections of every single human person. This is because, certainly in the West, our legal protections are based in jurisprudence on the latent and implicit Judao-Christian theology assumed at the time, which defined a person as someone possessing a soul.
If you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the various pieces of legislation derived from it, you will not see any definition of “human” beyond being “born free and equal in dignity and rights”. This means that “being born” seems to be it.
Universal human dignity, as a birthright for all humans, is why Pope Leo advocates against any creeping definitions of humanity concerning efficiency, competence, capability, or any other property that would give some humans more rights than others. For the protection of every person, human rights must be based on our most basic and shared humanity.
But this is extremely hard to define. There seems to be no definition that includes everyone. Even the default and implicit legal definition of “having been born” may need to change with the development of artificial wombs. The answer, of course, is that most Cinderella of concepts: the soul.
THE status of the soul ebbs and flows, both in culture and in philosophical discourse; but its existence as proof of life in a human body has been foundational in theology, philosophy, and medicine for thousands of years.
We may not be able to articulate precisely what we mean by the word soul, but, as an extremely sticky “folk” concept, it is deeply embedded in our day-to-day language.
Confident that we will be understood, we speak about meeting a soul-mate. They might be a gentle soul, or have an old soul; but, when we are soul-weary, selling our souls working in soul-less jobs that are soul-destroying, when we are soul-sick and losing our souls, we bear our souls to them. For lost souls, spending time with them feels good for the soul. We even preserve the language of soul in the Morse Code classic, SOS — Save our Souls — and, when ships go down, we talk about the number of souls that were lost. Soul music, soul food — we all know what we mean by soul, even if we would fail the test on defining it.
Neither can we pin it down materially. Duncan MacDougall tried to do so, in 1901, by weighing a body either side of death, and finding that the soul weighed 21 grams — an experiment that has not subsequently proved verifiable. We do not even know when we get one. Aristotle took the view that the soul “quickens” at 40 days post-conception for a male, and 80-90 days for a female, which has become weirdly relevant, if only as a concept in discussions about embryology.
FOR those of us who believe in a soul, all that we know is that God has given us one, and it is so fundamental to who we are that our language keeps harking back to it whenever something really matters: when our soul aches.
Even that rather sceptical philosopher, Wittgenstein, had to fall back on the soul when he was trying hard to articulate what it is that goes on between people in relating to each other as humans. In Philosophical Investigations, he explains that “my attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.”
This is what the Pope is at pains to emphasise: that if you start relating to people as the algorithms do, in an ontological context that favours transhumanism, amidst a prevailing ethic of utilitarianism, humans quickly get scored. It is only by preserving the highly ephemeral concept of the soul that the dignity of all humans can be guaranteed.
There are as many definitions of the soul as there are attempts to pin down consciousness. Both discourses suffer from a similar problem: that, in a materialist world which has become accustomed to scientific proof, we now seem unable to “prove” something that we all sense but can only touch metaphorically.
And the concept of the soul is not helped by being freighted with unfashionable religious baggage, notwithstanding its antecedents in ancient philosophy. Rather than rehearsing the centuries of efforts that have been made to perfect a definition of the soul, however, it might be more practical to look at its function in our shared lives, in an era when fundamental human freedoms are once again under threat.
For me, the soul as a concept functions rather like the role of zero. Zero is needed as a place-holder for mathematics to work. Our numbers hinge on 0, that magical gap, space, placeholder, and absence, which enables the other numbers to function.
Similarly, our human rights hinge on the concept of the soul and its assumed existence in human persons. The philosopher John Rawls championed the “veil of ignorance” to make us think about putting ourselves in the shoes of those who might lose out before we start making laws about society. It is the notion of the soul that forces this posture in law. The soul is not nothing — and, if they donned the veil of ignorance, I think that even the veriest atheist might well concede that, too.
Dr Eve Poole is Executive Chair of the Woodard Corporation and writes in a personal capacity.