Jordan Joseph Wales

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David J. Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that category, we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives.

In recent decades, compelling voices have charged that the theological category of "sacrifice" has too long valorized suffering and has fostered a culture of violence, particularly through the notion that Christ's excruciating death on the Cross was a payment demanded by God for human sins. Such an attribution of violence to the godhead itself silences victims while eroding our resistance to victimizers, and a sacrificial understanding of the ideal human relationship to God encourages a pursuit of self-extinction that ends in mere dissipation. Of great influence in this wide-ranging discussion is the work of Rene Girard. Beneath the "sacred" violence of sacrifice, Girard discerns a concealed scapegoat-murder driven by a distortion of human desire that itself must lead to human self-annihilation. This paper has gone beyond Girard into the theological territory that he so humbly avoids, yet I hope that its diagnosis of the Satanic and its antithesis, the theomimetic, will be found a faithful development of what Girard has given.

Gregory the Great depicts himself as a contemplative who, as bishop of Rome, was compelled to become an administrator and pastor. His theological response to this existential tension illuminates the vexed questions of his relationships to predecessors and of his legacy. Gregory develops Augustine's thought in such a way as to satisfy John Cassian's position that contemplative vision is grounded in the soul's likeness to the unity of Father and Son. For Augustine, "mercy" lovingly lifts the neighbor toward life in God. Imitating God's own love for humankind, this mercy likens the Christian to God's essential goodness and, by this likeness, prepares him or her for the vision of God, which Augustine expects not now but only in the next life. For Augustine, the exercise of mercy can-when useful-involve a shared affection or understanding. Gregory makes this shared affection essential to the neighborly love that he calls "compassion." In this affective fellowship, Gregory finds a human translation of the passionless unity of Father and Son-so that, for Gregory, compassion becomes the immediate basis for and consequence of seeing God-even in this life. Compassion does not degrade; rather, it retrenches the perfection of contemplation. Reconciling compassionate activity and contemplative vision, this creative renegotiation of Augustine and Cassian both answered Gregory's own aspirations and gave to the tumultuous post-Imperial West a needed account of worldly affairs as spiritual affairs.