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.

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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. From Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (citations omitted; my emphases):

55. Human rights are inviolable, since they are “inherent in the human person and in human dignity.” Consequently, they are universal and inalienable. Precisely because they are grounded in the common dignity of every man and woman, they have practical consequences and legal effects, for “it would be vain to proclaim human rights if, at the same time, everything were not done to ensure the duty of respecting them, respect by all, in all places and for all.”  Among these rights, the first is the right to life, from conception to its natural end, without which it is impossible to exercise any other right. When this fundamental right is denied — as in the cases of induced abortion, killing of the innocent and euthanasia — we are faced with choices that the Church considers gravely wrong. 56. Looking at our own time, we cannot ignore the fact that the protection of human rights has been exposed to two particularly serious dangers. The first is that these rights are declared in a purely formal sense, while technological progress continues alongside covert or overt violations of human dignity. The second, which is in fact the root of the first, is the inability to recognize the foundation of their universality, since we have abandoned “the search for the solid foundations sustaining our decisions and our laws.” Pope Francis urged us not to underestimate this last issue. He pointed out that when reason seriously........

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