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Ethics Initiative

  1. Professor shares insights on ND and the church’s role in conversations of AI and dignity

    October 28, 2026

    Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor and director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, is one of three laypeople who were appointed to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Task Force on Preserving Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

    In an interview with The Observer, Sullivan explained this task force is a byproduct of Pope Leo XIV’s first papal encyclical published earlier this year titled “Magnifica humanitas.”

  2. Do machines have feelings? AI has philosophers and tech leaders rethinking consciousness.

    October 27, 2026

    Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, participated in one of these meetings and left “skeptical that an artificial agent could attain actual moral virtue,” she wrote in a Substack post.

  3. To make AI morally good, tech companies turn to religion. Some say it's not so simple

    October 26, 2026

    Paolo Carozza, a member of the independent Meta Oversight Board and a legal expert who studies Catholic social thought and technology, worries that in the quest for accumulation, there is potential for a given tradition's defining characteristics to be lost — in effect, homogenized into something that pulls toward the middle or even favors Western religions. “Any living, sophisticated tradition over time is capable of interacting with others outside of it and absorbing some new knowledge and growing. But it does so in this organic way," he said. “What AI, I think, often does and potentially does, is not in an organic way, but in a way that just throws it all together, mixes it all up, and therefore makes sense of none of it.”

  4. Religious Colleges See AI Boom as a Teachable Moment

    October 20, 2026

    The religious aspect of the DELTA project is intentionally low-key. “The events we’re doing are not religious revivals where we stand up and say accept Jesus — that is not our jam,” stresses Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame who leads the DELTA network.

  5. AI, migration and Church renewal on bishops’ fall meeting agenda

    October 20, 2026

    On Oct. 16, the USCCB announced the full list of the committee’s eight episcopal members, who include Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago, and its three lay consultants: theologian and ethicist Charles Camosy of The Catholic University of America, philosopher Meghan Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame, and Kim Daniels, director of Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.

  6. 5 ways Pope Leo says AI could warp humanity

    May 26, 2026

    "Pope Leo has announced himself as one of the leading figures in AI ethics now with this document," Meghan Sullivan, director of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, tells Axios.

  7. To Understand Pope Leo’s Efforts on A.I., Look at the Man Shaking His Hand

    May 26, 2026

    Meghan Sullivan, director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, said she often hears a concerning view when she meets with A.I. developers in Silicon Valley — “that only a few hundred people on earth actually matter right now: the ones building frontier models and the politicians powerful enough to regulate them.” “This encyclical is a direct rebuttal to that worldview,” she said.