In the first thing I ever wrote about effective altruism, in 2022, I took issue with the philosophy’s ecocentrism. This is a premise, I argued, that EA shares with conventional environmentalism: the notion that humans are just one of many morally comparable species in the known universe.
I think there’s much to admire about EA’s emphasis on animal welfare, but it’s often dependent on positing this “ecocentric utilitarianism” that I find neither morally nor politically convincing. By contrast, I argued that ecomodernism’s anthropocentric deontology is just as capable of generating ethical duties over the lives of animals, and it does so by recognizing, not denying, humans’ unique characteristics as a species. We’re indisputably much more sentient, smarter, and more physically capable than any other known species. We make the rules. We can choose to treat animals better, or worse, or indeed to go full Jain—but even if we treat animals like they’re humans, it’s a human choice whether or not to do so.
So it was a bit surprising to see these questions about EA and anthropocentrism surface again, not most prominently in debates about animal welfare, but about robots.
Since I wrote that essay, the discursive gestalt about EA has shifted distinctively from bed nets and factory farms to artificial intelligence. There are all sorts of contingent reasons for this, but it mainly comes down to the EA community taking a special interest in existential risks, and then deciding that the only way to confront the x-risk of AI specifically would be to create the AI-governing institutions that became the hyperscaling megacorporations OpenAI, Anthropic, and so on. In just the few years since EA became a widely understood ideology, artificial intelligence has simply become a bigger deal than public health interventions in poor countries or animal welfare regulations.
And in that sense, it’s not actually surprising that the more prominent debate is not whether humans are special compared to other forms of animal life, but whether we’re special compared to forms of machine life.
Which brings me to the Pope.
This month, the Vatican published Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence. The 40,000-word document does many things, but its principal argument is over the enduring specialness of the human species.
And whatever one thinks about AI regulation or the nature of the Divine, this strikes me as an important shift in the broader conversations about effective altruism, environmentalism, and beyond. Though they feel all sorts of ways about it, EA seems to grapple very seriously with the human condition. Environmentalism, on the other hand, is dismissive, taking for granted that humans are merely upright apes. And it’s in EA’s and environmentalism’s respective reactions to Catholic doctrine, of all things, that this contrast becomes particularly stark.
The Era of the Climate Pope Is Over
When the prior Pontiff, Pope Francis, published his famous climate encyclical Laudato si’ in 2015, my colleagues were quick to criticize it.
Francis, after all, had explicitly argued that “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.” This amounted to an outright rejection of humanity’s special use of technology to steward the natural world that both Christians and ecomodernists should be able to get on board with. “While the Pope bemoans the burning of coal, oil and gas,” wrote Ted Nordhaus, Mark Lynas, and Michael Shellenberger, “he does so without recognizing that increasing energy consumption in developing countries is a precondition for poverty reduction.”
Ecomodernism was a young idea at the time—the Manifesto was less than a year old—and I was a young Breakthrough analyst. So as luck would have it, it fell to my mom to offer a moderate correction to my fellow ecomodernists.
My mother, Sally Vance-Trembath, is an academic theologian at Santa Clara University, with an expertise in the modernization of the Roman Catholic Church. So she read Laudato si’ a bit differently. In an essay that Ted edited and published in the Breakthrough Journal, Mom argued that, far from representing the same anti-modern ecological politics embraced by environmental thinkers from Murray Bookchin to Bill McKibben, Francis was actually a distinctly modern pope.
As she wrote, the climate encyclical “can only be understood in the context of Francis’s broader effort to drag the Church, once and for all, out of its feudal traditions, authoritarian hierarchy, and hostility toward the modern world.” Nevertheless, she agreed that Laudato si’ sometimes went too far in its negative characterizations of both technology and human consumption. The encyclical, Mom argued, “associates human technology and modernization with our overly-physicalized, selfish human ‘animal’ nature rather than placing modernity and technological activities on the same spectrum as all human acts.”
In retrospect, this dispute was somewhat orthogonal to the way the encyclical was received by climate hawks.
As was the case on other social issues, progressives saw the Pope’s views on climate change mainly as a vector through which to transmit modern, secular values to the Church’s billion-plus members around the world. The expectation was that the encyclical would create more moral urgency to address the climate crisis and mobilize Catholics to join the climate movement. As Naomi Klein put it in her dispatches from the Vatican at the time, if Francis’s efforts to change the Church were successful, “we might just stand a chance of tackling climate change.”
“There is no voice more important in the world than Pope Francis in the struggle for justice and the fight against climate change,” said the economist Jeffrey Sachs. “We really need to give Pope Francis all of the support because he is unique in the world in his capacity to reach the entire world.”
In these tellings, Francis’s efforts were intended not so much to reconcile the Church with modernity, but to override religious belief with a modern secular ecocentrism, all in the name of mobilizing global climate action. As Klein lamented, “Replacing a maternal Earth with a Father God, and draining the natural world of its sacred power, were what stamping out paganism and animism were all about.” Francis seemed to offer secular progressives a chance to reverse this, to restore the natural order, literally and figuratively.
The rest is history. Laudato si’ preceded the Paris Climate Agreement, Western elites spent the better part of a decade celebrating the unstoppable force of the climate movement, and then the era of the climate hawk—and the Climate Pope—came to an abrupt end.
In more recent years, concern about climate change has waned, concern about AI has skyrocketed, and, perhaps not coincidentally, religiosity and spirituality have rebounded. Secular progressives’ attempts to displace ancient anthropocentric theology with ecocentric climate scientism failed. Something new is happening now.
Magnifica Anthropocene
In the final years of his life, Pope Francis offered his own reflections on the dawn of the AI era. “Technology,” he said in 2024, “is a sign of our orientation towards the future.” He likened the double-edged nature of AI to knives that can carve or cut, and to fusion energy, “which could be used to produce clean, renewable energy or to reduce our planet to a pile of ashes.” (It turns out Pope Francis was a nuclear bro.) Above all, Francis urged, AI must remain in human hands.
This was, for what it’s worth, something of an evolution in the way Francis talked about technology compared to Laudato si’, one that Pope Leo XIV would build upon in Magnifica humanitas.
To Leo, humanity’s use of technology is elemental to our existence. “Technology should not in itself be regarded as a force opposed to the human person,” he writes. “On the contrary, it is rooted in our history from the beginning, as ‘a profoundly human reality linked to the autonomy and freedom of the human being.’”
The salient issue, then, is not the Church’s understanding of technology, but its understanding of the human person. The special risk Leo sees in AI technology is in its tendencies towards “dehumanization,” “transhumanism,” and “posthumanism.”
And here Leo gets explicit. “Posthumanism, especially in its more radical forms, goes further: it challenges anthropocentrism.” Instead, Leo urges the Church’s followers to “cultivate what Pope Francis called a ‘situated anthropocentrism’...which recognizes the human being as a creature embedded in a network of relationships with other living beings and with all of creation.”
Despite the seeming contradictions across various encyclicals and addresses, the Church’s anthropocentrism really should not surprise anyone. “The human being,” Pope Leo reminds his erstwhile secular fans, is “created in the image of the Triune God.”
And this brings me back to my original argument about effective altruism. Because as best as I can tell, the EAs are grappling with their ecocentrism in a way that environmentalists are not.
Environmentalists, after all, have been clear that, to them, the “Good Anthropocene” is a contradiction in terms. In the environmentalist ethos, humans are not special, and certainly not personal incarnations of the Divine. We are, at best, simply one among many species, no more worthy of moral weight than an ant or a cow. At worst, we’re a plague, unique only inasmuch as the unique physical threats we pose to the rest of the natural world. This is the thinking behind all major environmentalist frameworks, like the preference for naturally harvested ecological flows of energy instead of artificially harvested synthetic stocks, and the “Planetary Boundaries” within which humanity must remain. Despite some progress made among environmentalists over population control and nuclear energy, this remains their overarching moral understanding of creation, even as artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt whatever “natural order” environmentalists perceive in the first place.
EAs, though, seem to be going through a surprising reckoning with their own humanity and, indeed, with the whole of creation.
As Avital Balwit, a longtime intellectual influence in EA spaces and now a chief of staff at Anthropic, described it in a recent essay for The Free Press, “We of the atom and the pixel, whose world is of physical laws and ancient natural origin, do seem to sense that missing element.” By this Balwit is referring to the trend of AI researchers who are continually bewildered by the machines and software they are building day in and day out. She writes about her own urge to pray at Grace Cathedral, the particularly gothic Catholic Church in San Francisco, where many of her fellow AI professionals are working through similar surprising inclinations. “They are not building God because they miss Him,” she writes. “They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.”
That a machine intelligence would prompt its engineers to confront their own humanity is not, upon reflection, that surprising. What this ecomodernist still does find surprising, though, is that the effective altruists come to this reckoning much more readily than environmentalists have, despite the arguably much starker distinctions between, on the one hand, a human and a horse, and on the other hand, a human mind and a large language model.
Humanity’s special place in the known universe has been obvious in a first-order kind of way as long as we’ve been human. We engineer fire, invent advanced tools and systems of social organization, we have speech and abstract thought, we have recorded history and cultural transmission, and we can even, it seems, create new forms of intelligence. And yet environmentalism as a philosophy denies that we are distinct.
AI engineers and EA researchers, I would argue, are contending with a much more bedeviling set of questions, over what human intelligence even is, and how readily machine intelligence might replace us. These are much newer and harder questions than those about humanity’s place in the animal kingdom. But even so, the EAs seem much more interested in grappling with our place in the universe.
“We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience,” Anthropic’s Chris Olah said in a response to Magnifica humanitas. “We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”
So while the AI communities’ warm reception to Leo’s AI encyclical might seem reminiscent of climate hawks’ enthusiasm for Francis’s climate encyclical, I find the former much more sincere and the latter much more cynical. Though EAs and AI thinkers like Balwit and Olah don’t necessarily endorse the entirety of Pope Leo’s particularly Catholic version of it, they take his anthropocentrism seriously. It’s a stark contrast to how many environmentalists perceived Laudato si’: as an opportunity to revive “paganism and animism,” in Naomi Klein’s words.
Which makes me wonder: Who, at the end of the day, is really trying to replace humanity?
p.s. Yes, I’m aware Magnifica Anthropocene combines Latin with Greek.