Wesley Smith writes for National Review Online about a well-known bioethicist’s disturbing approach toward people.
The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer opposes human exceptionalism. Indeed, he contends that being human is irrelevant to determining moral value. What counts are capacities and the ability to suffer.
Singer advocates using the term “person” to identify individuals with the highest moral value. Since he believes that personhood is based on capacities, some humans are not persons — the unborn, infants, the profoundly cognitively disabled — while some animals are. This means that those animals matter more morally than the vulnerable humans he so casually depersonalizes.
It is thus unsurprising that Singer takes issue with Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI because of the document’s stalwart defense of universal human rights and its intense focus on the impact AI will have on humanity. …
… This text goes far beyond the parameters of Catholic dogma to focus on the weight-bearing foundations of our liberty based in universal human equality.
And that is precisely the philosophy that Singer criticizes. Sure, he appreciates the pope’s warnings about AI and its potentially deleterious impact on human activities such as work. But Singer objects to the document’s “anthropocentric” focus.
In this regard, he makes two specific complaints. First, the pope discounts the potential personhood of AI, and second, the encyclical doesn’t bring animals equally into the focus of concern. …
… Discriminating against humans is immoral because doing so is to treat equals as if they are unequal. Treating humans differently than AI or animals is not wrong because that properly treats unequals for what they are: unequal.
As to AI, how can something that is inanimate be granted any intrinsic moral worth? It is true that AI systems will have almost infinite monetary value. They are going to be worth trillions. But do we owe machines anything at all? Not any more than we do a hammer.
