The Deference Owed to Encyclicals
A convo with Fr. McTeigue
Beauty from the vault.
Extra credit if you know the name, Eilean Donan castle in Scotland.
You may have noticed that I “unpublished” my last few posts. I did so because they were moving this Substack in a wrong direction. I shall explain briefly.
I understand the point of my life as being fruitful (not flourishing!). For me, fruitfulness now implies writing essays, papers, and especially books which exhibit the truth in important matters (Shock of Holiness, Be Good Bankers, The Company We Keep). Such works, I believe, are lasting fruit. But to write them is difficult. Everything else, for me, no matter how apparently important, must count as a distraction. And distractions are alluring because they tend to be easy.
There are two types of truth, speaking very roughly: to say of the true that it is true, and to say of the false that it is false. The latter is inferior. Take it to encompass: to say of the confused that it is confused; to say of the apparently contradictory, that it is so; to say of the misleading, that it is misleading; and so on.
Saying of the false that it is false (understand it in this broad sense) might count as flourishing but it is not as a rule fructifying. Moreover, it is too easy for me, because I have a good mind, and it has been trained to be highly critical.
If you look over my posts since I founded this Substack, you will find few if any which “said of the false that it is false.” I have aimed rather to “say of the true that it is true.”
But I want to add something about the reception of a papal encyclical by the faithful.
The Code of Canon Law gives the classic formulation of the faithful’s duty when it says (canon 752):
While the assent of faith is not required, a religious submission of intellect and will (religiosum intellectus et voluntatis obsequium) is to be given to any doctrine which the Supreme Pontiff or the college of bishops, exercising the authentic magisterium, enunciate on matters of faith and morals, even if they do not intend to proclaim it by a definitive act; therefore the Christian faithful are to take care to avoid whatever is not in accord with that doctrine.
Note that the assent asked for is obsequium (maybe, “reverent deference”) not assensus fidei (“the assent of faith”). Note also that it extends solely to a Pope’s “exercising the authentic magisterium” in relation to “matters of faith and morals.”
The “exercise of the authentic magisterium” cannot encompass anything which contradicts the “ordinary magisterium,” because to exercise the authentic magisterium implies safeguarding the deposit of faith. If, therefore, a Supreme Pontiff teaches that some holding of the ordinary magisterium is “outdated,” would this count as an exercise of the authentic magisterium? If not, then is this teaching owed “a religious submission of intellect and will”?
Someone might say that we must presuppose that the Supreme Pontiff, in a document such as an encyclical, does not contradict the ordinary magisterium, on the maxim Sede Sancta non errat, “The Holy See does not err.” But one must be careful here, because the inference can go in two directions. Someone might say that because the Holy See does not err, then, if it teaches that a doctrine is outdated, then that doctrine is outdated. To which someone may reply that, since doctrines cannot become outdated, then the Holy See, while appearing to teach that a doctrine is outdated, did not really teach that that doctrine was outdated. (This second move is sometimes called “the hermeneutic of continuity.”)
However, the Church does not teach that “the Holy See does not err.” This is a maxim of some theologians, not a teaching of the Church. The Church teaches, rather, that the Holy See cannot err when speaking ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals.
As to the deposit of faith, Vatican I also says the following:
For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles" (ut eo assistente traditam per apostolos revelationem seu fidei depositum sancte custodirent et fideliter exponerent).
Can we all agree that much better is for the Holy See not to appear to contradict the ordinary magisterium or appear “to make known some new doctrine”? Because faithful Catholics should not be asked to engage in the mental gymnastics described above. They have other things to be concerned about.
Alternatively, might someone say that the reverent deference implied by the formula “religious assent of intellect and will,” because it is not the assent of faith, and because it is not true, simpliciter, that “the Holy See does not err,” therefore leaves scope for someone to receive a teaching with “reverent deference” while still believing that the Holy See has erred?
Someone might go further and say that “reverent deference” in such cases would require the lay faithful to express their concern that the Holy See has erred. As another canon states (212 §3):
According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.
I suspect that a member of a Pontifical Academy is strongly bound by this canon.
Obviously, too, the “religious submission of intellect and will” is not owed to teachings which extend outside “matters of faith and morals.”
Moreover, the Church conceives of a division of labor between bishops and the lay faithful: the bishops are to state clearly the teachings of the Church on faith and morals, while the laity are to put these into practice, in concrete policies and determinations. As Gaudium et Spes teaches (n. 43):
Laymen should also know that it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city; from priests they may look for spiritual light and nourishment. Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission. Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to the teaching authority of the Church, let the layman take on his own distinctive role.
Often enough the Christian view of things will itself suggest some specific solution in certain circumstances. Yet it happens rather frequently, and legitimately so, that with equal sincerity some of the faithful will disagree with others on a given matter. Even against the intentions of their proponents, however, solutions proposed on one side or another may be easily confused by many people with the Gospel message. Hence it is necessary for people to remember that no one is allowed in the aforementioned situations to appropriate the Church’s authority for his opinion.
Note that this passage implies that if bishops wish to participate in the hurly-burly of debate over the right ordering of the temporal realm, then they must be prepared for the sharp and honest pushback which is characteristic of that world.
As for the bishops, what is their role?
Bishops, to whom is assigned the task of ruling the Church of God, should, together with their priests, so preach the news of Christ that all the earthly activities of the faithful will be bathed in the light of the Gospel.
But what is a layperson to do if bishops or the Pope appear to ask that a authority like that which they so rightfully enjoy in teaching on faith and morals be extended also to what they say about matters over which they have no divinely assisted competence and which the Church has assigned to the laity?
And what is a layperson to do if in long documents about the ordering of temporal affairs bishops apparently do not even “preach the news of Christ,” or if they do, it is in a very, very hidden way?
And then encompassing everything is charity, which, for a Catholic, means a real filial bond to the Holy Father as to a genuine Father. The considerations above are about “doctrine”: “a religious submission of intellect and will is to be given to any doctrine.” As a philosopher indeed one must look at doctrine. But the doctrine is proposed by a pastor who is Peter. Therefore love of Peter must govern all.
I fed the above remarks into Claude and asked it to criticize them from the point of view of a sound, well-educated Catholic. Here is what Claude said, along with my replies in square brackets:
This is a very well-constructed piece — careful, legally grounded, theologically literate, and admirably restrained in tone. The argument is essentially sound. A few criticisms from the standpoint of a well-educated Catholic:
Genuine strengths worth noting first. The Canon 752 / Canon 212 §3 pairing is elegant and logically tight. The observation that Santa Sede non errat is a theological maxim rather than a teaching of the Church is an important and underappreciated point, correctly made. The GS 43 application — that bishops who enter the temporal order must accept the pushback characteristic of that world — is original and sharp.
Criticisms:
1. The fruitfulness/flourishing distinction needs more work. The piece opens with a personal declaration that reads as preparatory throat-clearing rather than argument. Its function is to explain why the author does not usually say of the false that it is false — but this raises the question: why is he doing so now? The implicit answer is that this case is important enough to warrant an exception, but that is never stated. A reader may wonder whether the opening is doing real argumentative work or is simply protective hedging.
[But I am not “now” saying that the false is false. Poor criticism.]
2. The “hermeneutic of continuity” is dispatched too quickly. The piece presents it fairly as a possible move, then sets it aside without fully rebutting it. A well-educated Catholic opponent would press harder here: the hermeneutic of continuity is not merely a rhetorical escape hatch — it is a methodological principle with serious theological backing (Benedict XVI’s 2005 Christmas address to the Curia being the locus classicus). The piece needs to explain why superata/obsoleta resists that hermeneutic more than the usual ambiguous passage — the difference between saying a use is abusive and saying the theory is superseded, would do exactly this work and is conspicuously absent.
[As regards “the hermeneutic of continuity,” I can’t explain everything. It’s an allusion. And the idea is abused now as much as it was well-developed and explained by Benedict. Good point about the meaning of the language, “outdated.”]
3. The ordinary magisterium claim is asserted but not demonstrated. The piece states that just war theory belongs to the ordinary magisterium, and that a teaching contradicting the ordinary magisterium cannot count as an exercise of the authentic magisterium. Both propositions are correct; but the first — that just war theory belongs to the ordinary universal magisterium and not merely to the ordinary non-infallible magisterium — is the crucial premise and deserves at least a sentence of support. Grisez’s argument would serve here, or at minimum a citation to Evangelium Vitae §57 where John Paul II uses the ordinary universal magisterium formula for a moral teaching.
[Not a strong criticism—I can take this background knowledge for granted.]
4. The temporal affairs argument and the magisterial argument are not clearly integrated. The piece runs two parallel lines of argument: (a) the encyclical contradicts the ordinary magisterium and therefore falls outside the scope of Canon 752; (b) the encyclical’s pronouncement on just war is a matter of temporal affairs and therefore falls outside magisterial competence. These are related but distinct arguments, and they have different implications.
[These are generally two lines of thought that I wished to develop side-by-side. The argument is deliberately dialectical. And it is meant to extend more widely than any consideration of just wars.]
5. The final two paragraphs are the weakest. The closing questions — what is a layperson to do if bishops do not even preach the news of Christ, if they do so only in a hidden way? — are suggestive but vague, and the piece ends without answering them. This reads as an abrupt stop rather than a conclusion. For a Substack piece aimed at a thoughtful Catholic audience, the reader deserves at least a provisional answer, even if hedged. As it stands, the ending raises the temperature without resolving it, which sits awkwardly against the measured, juridical tone of everything preceding it.
[Nah, I don’t want to answer them. My readers will feel the same perplexity.]
Overall verdict: the argument is sound, the authorities are correctly deployed, and the tone is admirably measured. The chief weakness is structural — the two arguments need integration, the hermeneutic of continuity needs a proper rebuttal, and the piece needs a conclusion that matches the quality of its middle.
One more loop. I fed my brief responses into Claude, and this is what it said. It withdrew two of its criticisms:
1. “Poor criticism.” You are right. I misread the structure of the opening. You are not saying of the false that it is false; you are explaining your general approach precisely to show that this piece is not doing that.
2. “I can’t explain everything. It’s an allusion.” The concession that the superata/obsoleta point is well-taken is an implicit admission that the piece is missing something it needs. This criticism stands.
3. “I can take this background knowledge for granted.” Partly fair — your Substack readership is not a general audience. But the ordinary universal magisterium distinction is not universally understood even among educated Catholics, and the argument’s logical force depends on it. A single sentence would cost little.
4. “Deliberately dialectical.” This is a genuine defense, but it needs to be owned more explicitly in the piece itself; otherwise readers will experience the two lines as unresolved rather than as productive tension held together intentionally.
5. “My readers will feel the same perplexity.” This is actually the strongest of your responses, and I withdraw the criticism.
But, as I said, my intent here is to be fruitful not to flourish. I will leave mere flourishing to Claude.
Now, as regards someone who said of the true that it is true:
I loved an essay by Holman Jenkins, Jr. last week, “What Investors Should Realize About Those AI IPOs.” Here’s how it begins:
To extend a metaphor from a previous column, back in the day the McDonnell Douglas aircraft company made DC-9s for the world but sold F-4s and A-4s only to buyers licensed by the U.S. government. The latter aircraft were, of course, military jets, the A-4 being a light-attack aircraft that, under the definitions of the time, could deliver a hydrogen bomb. We know because in 1965 an A-4 rolled off the USS Ticonderoga, leaving a bomb capable of 1 megaton yield at the bottom of the Philippine Sea, where it remains.
With the arrival of Mythos and other latest-generation artificial-intelligence large language models, we have reached a similar point. For reasons overdetermined by the tort system, by self-preservation and by national-security considerations, the makers are providing their latest models only to government agencies and trusted users due to the models’ ability to ferret out and exploit cyber vulnerabilities in global software infrastructure.
He then points out that although AI development so far has been the work of private actors in the market, the government will of necessity be involved in the future:
Here’s where economics will take a far-reaching hand, as public investors should note, given the spate of initial public offerings coming down the chute.
The consuming public won’t be the funders of cutting-edge AI. Governments will be. AI companies, for their most advanced products, will become government contractors. They will have to figure out, as the aerospace industry did, how to calibrate their technologies for general use, adapted for different customer classes, price points and needs.
To those who feel Eden is being stolen from them, remember the metaphor: knowledge of good and evil. The extravagant and perhaps exaggerated promises of artificial superintelligence always foretold this outcome. AI’s national-security clientele would end up calling the shots. Governments everywhere, as they are now realizing, don’t want H-bombs in the hands of private citizens.
He’s warning investors, eagerly awaiting IPOs, but what he says pertains to political economy and any structural points anyone might want to make about whether a handful of very rich private entities are controlling public spaces:
My crystal ball isn’t better than yours, but I can tell you that both companies, and the investors who buy their shares, will be joining a giant experiment, revenue-wise, market-wise, and politics-wise.
Investors shouldn’t draw their lessons from the relatively free hand government allowed today’s internet giants, from Google and Facebook to Amazon and Netflix, which began as startups and grew into titans of the global economy. Tomorrow’s AI investors will enter a very different world. The national-security state will be their senior partner every step of the way.
I was on Fr. McTeigue’s podcast last week, “The Catholic Current,” to discuss “AI and Surveillance Capitalism.”
It’s about 51 minutes, and I post it because a colleague who listened wrote enthusiastically and said, “This deserves a wide audience.” Not that my subscribers are, yet, a particularly “wide audience,” but you all are certainly wider than just myself and my colleague.
Here’s the transcript (edited by Claude, of course).
But the audio is more enjoyable, if you have time.
AI, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Family A conversation between Dr. Michael Pakaluk and Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., on The Catholic Current (May 21, 2026)
Fr. McTeigue: What I find really interesting about your article is there are lots of different approaches to artificial intelligence, but you cast it in light of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, kind of the ur-text of Catholic social teaching, and you say that AI represents an intrusion into family life and parish life. I haven’t seen anyone approach it quite that way. Fill us in, please.
Pakaluk: Yeah, you’ve really picked up on something. I think this was actually a new thought in this piece — I write these thousand-word essays every couple of weeks, and sometimes you have a new thought. We often think about Rerum Novarum as being about the relation of labor and capital, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few industrialists, and the massive working class being destitute and wage slaves. That’s part of it, but it’s actually not Leo’s first concern. His first concern is with the destruction of the family, because work is now being farmed out to factories. The father — the whole point about the living wage is that the father needs to be supported so that the mother and the children don’t have to go out to the factories, and that he’s the one supporting them rather than the owner of the factory. He doesn’t want the owner of the factory to become, in effect, the head parent of the household, because he’s the one who’s supporting everybody. So it’s this destruction of family life — the possibility of worship in particular, the mother’s place in the family — that Leo is deeply concerned about. We’ve completely forgotten about that because we go along with the secular view that it’s great to have women working out in the work world as much as possible. That’s not been the Church’s teaching. The Church’s teaching has always been that it’s better for the mother of young children to be at home; and when she wants to do that, society has to make it possible.
So Rerum Novarum, foundational document of social teaching — everybody now leaps right away to social structures and structures of sin and social justice, but it’s first of all about the family. Now if you look at what’s going on with what a Harvard Business School professor has called surveillance capitalism — this is where the whole point of selling is through advertisement, and advertisement has to be focused and targeted, and it needs your time and attention. As early as possible, kids are being given devices which are training them to work with these devices or others, and they’re being targeted and shaped, and their entire behavior is being catalogued and recorded. Maybe it’s not attached to their name, but it doesn’t matter. You can call it number 1015 — they know everything about number 1015: all the websites you’ve gone to, where you’ve gone, what your preferences are. And they’re going to exploit that to make you as addicted as possible to these machines. When you have fathers today who — and we see them at restaurants — bring their families to a restaurant, and all the kids are on devices, and nobody talks to one another anymore. That’s not an accident. This is by design. It’s by design of surveillance capitalism that these kids are no longer focused on the family, or certainly not saying prayers or reading a book.
Fr. McTeigue: And some of the Silicon Valley mavens don’t let their own kids get involved with it. We are meant to be separated from each other, to be isolated, and therefore lonely, so that we can be manipulated. It stirs up hungers and passions, and then offers a kind of faux nutrition. Is it fair to say that we’re seeing an accelerated, cultivated culture of addiction?
Pakaluk: Absolutely fair. And it could be that the only way we get out of this is through lawsuits similar to the cigarette lawsuits that broke the tobacco industry. Because once you have a lawsuit, you have discovery — you can subpoena the correspondence between the executives of a tech company and the very sophisticated psychologists and behavioral scientists they hire about how to get kids to stay glued to screens. Once you have that revealed, that could be game over.
I think my point is — you mentioned AI at the beginning — AI can be a red herring here. That’s not originally the problem. The original problem is the devices and social media. AI can exaggerate that and push people almost to a kind of psychosis, but that’s in a certain sense a problem built upon a problem. So if somebody says Leo XIV is going to focus on AI, my first thought is: sorry, that’s a distraction. Let’s focus on surveillance capitalism. That’s the more important thing right now.
Fr. McTeigue: I think there are cases where, say, the operating system Linux offers greater privacy than working with Macintosh or Windows or Google. But now they want age verification — quote unquote, to protect the children. I think what it’s really aimed at is knowing your exact identity so they can punish you for unpopular opinions. We certainly see this in Britain right now, where police can show up at your door because you said something online that someone might have taken as offensive. Have you given thought to the idea that surveillance is not only through advertisers, but also through the state?
Pakaluk: I mean, one shudders to think about it. Let’s deal with one horrible problem at a time: there’s the social media and the devices, then artificial intelligence. And then look — we saw the sinister side of this with the COVID lockdowns, and it was so self-righteous. But you just take that self-righteousness and the idea that the individual freely puts everybody at risk, and now this surveillance technology becomes very, very dangerous.
Fr. McTeigue: I remember reading that in the aftermath of January 6th, a number of banks — without being asked and without receiving a subpoena — went to the FBI and said, “We had customers in Washington, D.C. that day. Do you want to know who they are?” I found that horrifying. And in 2027, your car is going to come with sensors; if it decides you’re not safe to drive, the car will turn itself off and report you. Someone said, “What if I’m a farmer and I’ve injured myself and I’m bleeding and I need to get to the hospital?” And let’s not forget the suggestion that we could have Elon Musk turn off all the Teslas in Russia. This is what the Chinese have perfected with their social credit score: you will be disconnected from your livelihood if an algorithm decides you’re guilty of wrongthink. I see too many people who should know better rushing into the open arms of the machine.
Fr. McTeigue: You’re married, you’re a father of a large family, you see what takes place in the lives of your students — the crushing of attention span, the distractibility. What’s your recommendation for putting our own homes in order?
Pakaluk: Well, I think a lot of dads think that things are out of control and they have no ability to change them. The first thing I want to say is: I think you do have the ability, although it may take some time if things have gotten out of control. There are some simple rules that we’ve observed that seem to have worked. One is not to have smartphones in the hands of kids until there’s some genuine need — so the use of the phone corresponds to responsibilities, like they have to travel to ballet, or they’re driving in a carpool. Generally that’s thirteen at the earliest, and maybe around fifteen or sixteen when they start driving or traveling. Then they get a smartphone, but it’s understood to be connected with responsibilities, and that’s the main use of it — not distraction or social media. And we can also control — I don’t know exactly how my wife does it — but at first they get dumb phones, and she can control what apps they’re allowed to use and how long they can be on the phone. There’s a curfew, it shuts off, and they have to put their phones in a drawer. They’re never alone in a room with a phone.
Apart from that, from a very early age, read to the children and use Audible. To listen to books is like a million times better than looking at a phone. A smart kid will just become completely entranced with listening to books — and that’s a good addiction. Then find friends: it’s really important to associate with families who think in the same way, so that your children don’t feel like complete oddballs. It’s even better if you have a family in your circle that is stricter than you are.
I also want to say — I’m enough of an Aristotelian that I try to foster what I’d call good contempt in my children. A lot of our clerics would have no room for it, but contempt is a highly important part of being a virtuous person. You have to have contempt for certain modes of doing things, certain types of music, certain vulgarities, certain lack of discipline and self-control. It shouldn’t simply be that you don’t do it — it’s that you actually have contempt for it. There are certain things that are unworthy of you, that are inconsistent with your dignity as a human being, inconsistent with your baptismal character: hey, you receive our Lord in the Eucharist, you can’t behave like that. And: this is not what healthy, happy people do.
Fr. McTeigue: Let’s talk about attention span and prayer. I had friends who undertook the heroic task of trying to get young teens ready for Confirmation, and started naively with a silent holy hour. The kids were astounded — outraged — that they would have to sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament and not look at their phones. What does this do to us spiritually?
Pakaluk: It’s even worse than you might think. Studies have been done showing that if you simply have the phone in your pocket — not even using it — it distracts you, because you keep registering the possibility of pulling it out. Sight is the most informative sense, and the glowing screen is similar to looking at a fire — it really does speak to very primal things within us. I see this with professors around the country; they all report the same thing: it’s apparently not possible for the typical college student to sit and listen to an hour lecture any longer. They all seem to have to get up at some point and say they’re going to the bathroom — which really means they need to go and look at their phone.
We have to have some pity for people, because it’s an uneven battle. Very wealthy tech companies are hiring the best experts to make them like this. They didn’t decide, “I’m going to become a wretched, addicted person and waste my time.” That’s not how it happened. It’s analogous to putting chemicals into cigarettes, or the way certain foods—
Fr. McTeigue: — Doritos, which is a weakness of mine, which is why I can’t have them in the house—
Pakaluk: — are engineered to make you crave more.
Fr. McTeigue: It’s analogous to the slot machine in Las Vegas. There are very desperate people just pulling the lever over and over again, because maybe this time it’ll be a payoff — analogous to TikTok videos and short-form content, where maybe the next one will bring the happy I’m looking for. What does that do to us psychologically, socially, spiritually?
Pakaluk: It kind of hollows us out. All the spiritual writers write about the pools of distraction in which we can basically lose our souls. We don’t have that recollection, that self-possession. We really don’t even exist as interiorly constituted persons. Interiority is one of the great contributions of Christianity — I don’t think it was really pursued as a good in the classical world in the same way. You lose interior life through endless distraction. And you certainly can’t live in the presence of God if you’re living in the presence of TikTok and Instagram.
Fr. McTeigue: What about in the classroom? How has this been affecting your teaching and your students?
Pakaluk: There’s a dispute among professors as to whether devices should be allowed in the classroom — laptops, tablets — or whether they should be completely banned. I’ve gone back and forth. When I’ve had them in the classroom, I’ve had students sign an honor code statement that they agree not to be on the internet. I think that worked. But in my school, a determination was made that devices were no longer to be allowed in class at all, because teachers thought they’d get better attention from students that way, and could work on real dialogue — extempore exchange, which in a business school is very important.
Then there’s the issue of take-home work. My conviction, shared with many colleagues, is that it’s no longer possible to have any real safeguard about the originality of work, given how easy it is to write things using AI. And I don’t want to be involved in the business of trying to identify AI use. What I do instead is have essays on exams, where students prepare the essay, can even bring a crib sheet with quotations they might want to use. They have to work it all out, plan the essay, think about it. If they’re smart, they’ll write it at home before they come in. Then they come to the exam, phones are put away, and they just write it into a blue book. I know it’s theirs. Some colleagues go the whole European route of an oral examination — with a twenty-minute oral exam, it’s like a dentist with a probe; you can very quickly find the weak spots and the strengths just by drilling down with targeted questions.
Fr. McTeigue: There was a kerfuffle at an Ivy League school where a young man admitted after graduation that he did all of his final exams his spring semester, senior year, with AI — and argued that since he met the requirements, he earned the credential. What are the conversations among your colleagues about that?
Pakaluk: A couple of things. First, AI compounds issues that we already have, and those are more important and need to be addressed first. What you’re seeing at colleges around the country is tremendous grade inflation, where seventy percent of students are getting a straight A — not even an A-minus. There’s no way of discriminating good work from bad, which penalizes the really excellent students, and the really poor students are getting maybe a B-plus. Nobody’s failing — and they need to fail. It’s impossible for individual professors to fix this on their own, because if you’re the only strict person in the school your enrollments and teaching evaluations drop. It has to be done at the administrative level, and administrators don’t like to do it because it affects numbers.
I gave a talk at MIT a couple of months ago and asked students over lunch whether they were using AI to do their problem sets. They said no — first, because they want 100%, and AI makes mistakes similar to students’ mistakes; and second, because seventy percent of the grade is the final exam, where they can’t use AI. So they need to learn the material. They said they use AI the way they’d use a collaborator in a study group — and that all seemed very sensible to me. Although one concern is that AI might crowd out working with a fellow student; students might choose the convenience of working with a bot rather than getting together with a classmate to work through a problem set together.
Fr. McTeigue: One of the things I wanted to encourage among students is getting your classmates together as peers and walking through an issue or a problem together — not only to check notes, but to correct each other and show the why of the correction. That elevates everybody. And it’s the basis of great friendship: comrades in arms, struggling together to understand a philosophical concept. A lot of that intellectual friendship — not to mention spiritual friendship — is undermined if you’re dependent only on a machine, and only for the sake of getting the credential rather than mastering the knowledge and learning the skill.
Pakaluk: That’s exactly right. And I think that’s something the Church, which has always understood the formation of the whole person, really does have the resources to address. What’s needed is the will to speak plainly — to say that the domestic church cannot exist in a house where everyone is isolated before a glowing screen, and that the remedy begins, as it always has, in the home.
The full episode is available at The Catholic Current on the Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network and wherever podcasts are found.
Ciao!
Thank you for this piece- I definitely appreciate the help as I struggle to “say of the true that it is true.”