Paul Scherz

"AI ethics must move beyond the instrumentalist model." — "Notes Toward an Ethics of AI" (Journal of Moral Theology)

Why he matters

Scherz is the contemporary Catholic moral theologian most directly engaged with the questions this site exists to make legible. Trained in both molecular biology (PhD, Harvard) and moral theology (PhD, Notre Dame), he writes from inside both the practice of contemporary biological science and the traditions of Catholic virtue ethics. His central claim is that the dominant approach to technology ethics — treating ethical questions as add-ons to morally neutral instruments — is no longer adequate. The technologies in question, especially AI and biotechnology, do not just have ethical consequences; they form the character, agency, and dispositions of the people who build and use them. Ethics that does not engage formation will keep getting flanked by the technologies it tries to regulate.

He matters here because he is doing, in real time, the work that the Dessauer–Guardini–Francis trajectory needs done if it is to extend into the twenty-first century with categories sufficient to the new technical reality.

Who he was, and is

Scherz holds doctorates from Harvard (molecular and cellular biology) and Notre Dame (moral theology) and has taught at the Catholic University of America and at Duke Divinity School. His central books and articles for the present argument are Science and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Tomorrow’s Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance (Georgetown University Press, 2022), the essay “The Challenge of Technology to Moral Theology,” and a series of articles in the Journal of Moral Theology and Theological Studies on the virtue requirements of working scientists and on the ethical structure of AI development. He is not yet a household name in the broader public conversation on AI; in the academic Catholic ethics literature he is one of the most cited current voices.

The position

Scherz’s argument has three moves.

First, the commodification of science is itself a moral crisis. In Science and Christian Ethics he argues that the contemporary research economy has reorganized scientific work around grant capture, publication metrics, intellectual property, and entrepreneurial productivity in ways that quietly corrode the virtues — truthfulness, patience, candor, generosity, attentiveness to reality — that the scientific vocation classically required. The crisis is not only that scientists sometimes behave badly. It is that the institutional formation of contemporary science actively cultivates dispositions at odds with the practice’s own deepest goods.

Second, AI ethics has to move beyond instrumentalism. The standard framing — “AI is a tool, ethical questions concern its uses” — misses what AI systems actually do. They shape the perceptual and cognitive environment of their users, they delegate moral judgments without making the delegation visible, they reconfigure what counts as an action and who counts as an agent, and they reproduce, at scale and at speed, the structures of sin already present in the data and the institutions that built them. Catholic ethics needs to engage AI as an environment of formation, not as a value-neutral object of use.

Third, prudence is the master virtue for technological agency, and prudence is harder than it sounds. Drawing on Aquinas, Scherz argues that the disposition that allows a person to act well in the presence of risk, uncertainty, and delegated decision is not the same as risk-management technique. Prudence is the integrated capacity to recognize the moral shape of a situation, deliberate honestly, and act under conditions of imperfect knowledge. The contemporary risk-and-anxiety apparatus, including the algorithmic systems that increasingly mediate it, can substitute for prudence without supplying its goods.

Where he sits on the maps

On preserve-limits versus accelerate-transformation, Scherz is near the center, slightly to the limits side. He is not a Luddite, not anti-research, not against AI as such; he is a working scientist who became a moral theologian because the practice he loved was deforming under institutional pressures he wanted to name and resist.

On idolatry concern, he is high, but in a particular register. The danger he most names is not direct worship of technology but the quiet substitution of technical procedure for moral discernment — the way a sufficiently elaborate compliance regime, risk score, or decision-support system can make ethical attention seem unnecessary. He is closer to Illich’s structural diagnosis than to Ellul’s totalizing one.

The best case against him

Scherz’s work is still in formation. The conceptual framework is strong; the casuistic application is uneven. The detailed Catholic ethics of recommender systems, platform labor, agentic AI, autonomous weapons, robotic care, large-scale predictive medicine, and synthetic biology that the framework calls for has not yet been written. Scherz himself is among the people most likely to write it, but the books that would settle the case do not yet exist.

A second critique is that Scherz’s virtue-ethical register, while powerful, can be hard for non-Catholic interlocutors to engage with. The categories — prudentia, fortitudo, temperantia, iustitia — are precisely the right ones, and they have to be reintroduced into a conversation that has mostly forgotten them. That work of reintroduction is a long task.

The honest reading is that Scherz is the bridge figure: he is the place where the Dessauer-to-Guardini-to-Francis trajectory crosses into the categories that contemporary AI and biotech ethics actually need, and the page where the strongest current Catholic response to the technocratic paradigm is being assembled.

Primary texts

• Science and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• Tomorrow’s Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance (Georgetown University Press, 2022).
• “The Challenge of Technology to Moral Theology” (Theological Studies).
• “Notes Toward an Ethics of AI” (Journal of Moral Theology).
• “Reclaiming Human Agency in an Age of AI” — recent essays in journals and edited volumes.

Secondary sources

• The Journal of Moral Theology special issue on artificial intelligence (2022) — central context for Scherz’s AI ethics work.
• Brian Green and others in the AI ethics literature working in adjacent registers.
• Cambridge University Press companion volumes on theology and science.

Related thinkers

• Francis — the magisterial frame inside which Scherz’s virtue and agency analysis is positioned.
• Illich — the structural-monopoly diagnosis that Scherz inherits and adapts.
• Guardini — the personalist-sacramental tradition Scherz extends in a contemporary key.
• Boyle — the deep historical model of the Christian scientist whose virtues Scherz is trying to recover in updated form.
• Dessauer — the constructive theology of the engineering vocation that Scherz’s virtue-ethical framework could integrate but has not yet fully integrated.