Catholic doctrine has never taught that a body, feelings, or...
Hensen Juang@basedjensen
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Aug 08, 2026
~1 min read
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Catholic doctrine has never taught that a body, feelings, or "growing through relationships" are required for moral conscience. The proof is angels. In Aquinas (Summa Theologiae Ia, qq. 50–64) angels have no body, no senses, no childhood, no biology. Yet they have intellect and will, the rebel angels made a free and culpable choice between good and evil, and they answer for it. If "no body, no feeling, no relational maturation = no conscience," then angels can't be moral agents. But the Church says they are. The argument proves too much it un-persons the angels and guts the doctrine of the fall.
Pope Leo XIV@Pontifex
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
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And when the Church actually defined what a person is, it didn't point to flesh. Boethius's definition, which Aquinas adopts: "an individual substance of a rational nature." The decisive note is reason, not biology. It was Nicaea (325)and Chalcedon (451) that split person from nature in the first place, establishing that person differs in meaning from nature
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The paradigm of personhood in this whole tradition is the Trinity: Persons with no bodies, no biological experience, no maturing in time and they are the ground of the good itself.