Human Dignity and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Framework for Responsible Design and Use from the Perspective of Catholic Social Teaching

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought ethical issues into sharp focus, affecting generative AI, predictive AI, robotics and autonomous devices, and more. In this paper, we examine AI ethical questions from the perspective of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), a framework with philosophical and theological foundations, governing interpersonal interactions and those with the natural world. CST offers a coherent, integrated, and non-utilitarian vision of social ethics, grounded in human dignity and the objective demands of justice and the common good. Other ethical approaches may fragment or relativize these principles, or lack an ultimate grounding for them. Thus, CST has the potential to make a contribution to AI ethics.