Artificial Intelligence and the Common Good

A Preliminary Reading of Magnifica Humanitas from a Constitutional Theory Perspective

René Tapia (University of Barcelona) is Research Fellow and Associate Programme Director, and Asanga Welikala (University of Edinburgh) is an editor at the New Digest and Senior Research Fellow and Programme Director, of the CPA-ECCL Programme on Comparative Constitutional Studies and Practice.

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas is, on its face, an encyclical “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence” (title). Its deeper significance lies in treating AI not simply as a regulatory challenge, nor even as a new field of applied ethics, but as a transformation in the structure of power itself.

The encyclical begins with a stark theological image (para. 7-10). Humanity stands between Babel and Jerusalem. Babel is the city of self-sufficient power: technically impressive, unified in method, ambitious in scale, yet ultimately incapable of communion. Jerusalem is the city rebuilt through shared responsibility, ordered plurality, memory, prayer, and a common task under God.

The digital age, in Leo XIV’s reading, places this same choice before us again. The encyclical’s claim is therefore not merely that AI must be regulated, but that technological power must be judged, limited, and directed according to an adequate account of the human person and the common good. Its constitutional significance lies in foregrounding how AI reveals forms of power that are increasingly shaping social life while escaping the categories through which modern constitutionalism has traditionally sought to discipline power.

1. Human Dignity and the Digital Revolution

At the heart of Magnifica Humanitas lies a claim that is at once theological, anthropological, and constitutional: human dignity is the red line against which AI and the broader digital order must be judged. Leo XIV grounds it in the traditional Christian understanding of the persona humana as created in the image of God. The human being is therefore not reducible to data or optimisable capacity. No machine, however sophisticated, can replace the grandeur of human intelligence as such. AI can only simulate those features (para. 99).

Ordinarily, technology has been described as an instrument. The encyclical stresses that current technologies embody decisions about what counts, what is ignored, what is measured, what is optimised, what is rewarded, and what is made invisible. They reflect the assumptions of those who design, finance, train, regulate, deploy, and profit from them (para. 9; 100). Leo XIV therefore rejects a naive instrumentalism. AI cannot be evaluated exclusively on the intentions of the user. Some anthropology of the person and society is inherent to the design of a system (para. 111).

This is why the encyclical is best read within the natural law tradition, even when its language is pastoral rather than scholastic. It assumes that the human person has a given nature, an intrinsic worth, and a moral vocation that precede complex tech. Across the document, the Pope puts the common good–in its classical sense–as a key category to redirect the new power, that is already here.

2. AI as Constitutional Problem: The New Power and Technocracy

Since the Second World War, human dignity has occupied a central place in constitutional language. Yet, as is well known, its use in rights adjudication and political discourse has increasingly been detached from any grounding in objective moral order. In many contexts, dignity has consequently been transformed from a principle that affirms the intrinsic worth of the human person into a flexible justificatory device for balancing incommensurable goods. Rather than serving as a substantive limit on power, it is often invoked to authorise the sacrifice of some rights in the name of another right presented as overriding all competing claims.

Leo XIV pushes the dignity principle further. Human dignity its portrayed as a meta-constitutional standard for socio-technical systems. This is a serious challenge to mainstream constitutionalism, to the extent it has assumed that the principal threat to rights came from the state. The encyclical observes that the digital revolution has shifted much of the effective power of social ordering toward private and transnational actors, that is, the opaque companies or groups who control platforms, infrastructure, data, visibility, access, computational power, and the conditions of participation in digital life (para. 5; 71; 95).

This is why AI is a constitutional problem in the strongest sense. It concerns the transformation of opaque transnational-private power into public authority. The questions that modern constitutionalism once sought to stabilise through written constitutions–who governs, by what right, through which procedures, under what limits, and for what ends–are increasingly being displaced into socio-technical systems that operate beyond the traditional constitutional frame. AI exposes the current inadequacy of a constitutional imagination built around state action alone. Many of these new issues lie outside the ordinary categories of legislation, administration, adjudication, and coercion.

The Pope’s most pointed criticisms are aimed at a technocratic paradigm of social order, portrayed as an inhumane system of dependency (para. 92; 95; 172). Leo XIV warns that AI intensifies the danger, since it gives technocracy a new tool for automating decision-making. The consequence is that political responsibility can be dispersed and bias can be hidden behind statistical complexity (para. 103; 105). Political choices can be presented as technical necessities. Those excluded by algorithmic systems may find no identifiable person to confront, no reasons to contest, and no institution capable of offering redress.

The encyclical therefore reframes the constitutional question. The issue is not only whether AI systems are efficient or accurate. The issue is what they do to human agency, authorship, responsibility, individuality, accountability, and public reason (para. 100). Who is the one acting when an AI system makes or shapes a decision? Who is responsible when harm occurs? Can a person meaningfully appeal a decision in such an opaque system? Can democratic government survive if the conditions of public communication are increasingly shaped by private systems optimised for attention, manipulation, or profit? (para. 103-106).

Facing this landscape, the classical state-centred model of fundamental rights becomes fragile when the real infrastructure of power is held by algorithmic systems, data markets, and global technological actors. A constitution that disciplines only the state may leave untouched the systems that increasingly govern everyday life. Magnifica Humanitas brings foregrounds this problem and insists that the response must be political, legal, moral, and spiritual, all at once.

3. Teleology and the Common Good

Much of contemporary debate about AI proceeds within a reactive grammar. Liberal approaches tend to ask whether individual rights have been respected (privacy, autonomy, non-discrimination, freedom of expression, due process, etc.). Neo-Marxian approaches tend to ask who owns the infrastructure, who controls the means of digital production, who benefits from extraction, and who is exploited. These are serious questions, but Leo XIV asks something prior and more comprehensive: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves?” (Para. 6) “What are we building?” (Para. 90) Toward what common end should technological power be directed? And, most dramatically, who is the public authority now?

This question marks the encyclical’s departure from the dominant vocabulary of modern constitutional thought. Liberal constitutionalism often hesitates before substantive accounts of the good. Its central concern is to secure procedures and zones of autonomy. When common purposes appear, they are frequently translated into a managerial category. The encyclical speaks in a different register. For Leo XIV, the common good is the condition in which freedom becomes genuinely human. A person flourishes through relationships, duties, institutions, communities, truth, work, worship, care, and responsibility (para. 60; 148). A society flourishes when its structures make such forms of life possible. Technology must therefore be judged by the kind of human and social order it helps to create.

Speaking on democracy, the Pope emphasises that truth is a crucial element of the common good: “democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole” (para. 134).

4. Conclusion: The Constitution of the Digital Age

Magnifica Humanitas should be read as a major intervention in Catholic social thought. It should also be read as a contribution to constitutional theory.

Its central insight is that AI changes the structure of power. It alters the relation between public and private authority, between persons and systems, between truth and communication, between work and production, between freedom and dependency, between law and technological infrastructure. The encyclical therefore invites a constitutional response wider than courts, rights, and regulation.

That response begins with anthropology. If the human person is only a bundle of preferences and data points, then AI will be judged by efficiency, prediction, and control. If the human person possesses an inviolable dignity that is created for communion, and is ordered toward truth and the good, then AI must be placed within a moral and constitutional architecture adequate to the realisation of that dignity. The encyclical’s deepest question is therefore architectural: what are we building?

Babel remains possible: a digital order of transnational domination in a homogenised language with opaque systems that instrumentalises persons. Jerusalem also remains possible: a shared construction in which technology serves dignity, authority is disciplined by justice, plurality becomes communion, and the common good, illuminated by Christian social thought, gives direction to social life. The future of AI will depend on which city we choose to build.