Virtue in Virtual Spaces: Catholic Social Teaching as an Alternative

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson published these words in 1841. Born in 1803, Emerson had never experienced a world without industrialized technology: the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution in the United States is said to have begun in 1793 with the opening of a textile mill in Rhode Island. This first wave of industrialization led to significant increases in manufacturing, including the introduction of the power loom to increase textile production and the cotton gin to increase productivity and profits in cotton farming. The shift to industrialization changed the economy from primarily manual labor and handcrafted goods towards factory work and wage labor. There was a pervasive sense that factory work took away from our humanity: does working in an assembly line with assistance from machines take away from our natural human capabilities to craft things on our own? This sentiment is echoed in the passage quoted above. Growing up in a world where human capabilities are increasingly augmented by machines, Emerson saw machinery as violating our human dignity by surpassing our innate capabilities, and yearned for a time when technologies did not exist.

And yet, today we do not bat an eye at the technologies that Emerson found so offensive. Looms? Analog watches? Almanacs? Use of these technologies today feels refreshingly low-tech compared to AI-generated knitting patterns, Apple Watches, and Google Maps. It can be easy to make fun of Emerson for the alarm he raised over such simple technologies: will our descendants feel similarly about us for the alarm we are raising over AI and social media today? Or is there something inherently dehumanizing about all technologies?

I first read Self Reliance in my junior year of high school English class. Similarly to how Emerson was born shortly after industrialization was introduced in the United States, I was born in 1995, so I hardly remember a time before my family had a personal computer or even before my parents had cell phones (I remember my mom getting her first brick-style cell phone in 1998). I never questioned the role of technology in my life until I read Self Reliance. As a high schooler, I spent hours a day texting friends, scrolling through the Facebook profiles of friends and strangers, and watching YouTube videos. My reading of Emerson made me wonder if this was the best use of my time.

Even so, this encounter with Emerson did not immediately change my internet consumption habits. Though it can be argued that spending hours on the internet can be detrimental to one’s spirit, I found that spending hours texting or instant messaging friends, as well as posting on Facebook and Instagram and seeing the posts of my friends, aided in my relationship-building. For example, as a freshman in high school, chatting on Facebook with a girl from school with whom I had not yet talked gave way to an in-person friendship. YouTube gave me access to culture: before unlimited music streaming platforms like Spotify existed, I listened to hours of Taylor Swift music on YouTube, allowing me to experience the beauty and poetry of her lyrics, and participate in a major cultural phenomenon of the past eighteen years. Yet Emerson made me wonder: would we be better off if we just got rid of it all? Or, is there a more satisfying response to technology that acknowledges both its strengths and its risks? These questions would ultimately define my future graduate work, and I would find their answers in my Catholic faith.

I had planned to study neuroscience or psychology when I matriculated at Brown University, but quickly switched to computer science when I discovered the joys of its puzzle-style thinking and the feeling of accomplishment that comes from writing working code. For most of my college career I forgot about my curiosity with Emerson’s ideas: it is hard to think that getting rid of technology is the answer when your course of study is devoted to advancing its development.

In my senior year, I took a class on twentieth-century European intellectual and cultural history. I found myself again immersed in the debates about technology elicited by the Industrial Revolution in a way reminiscent of my first reading of Emerson. Karl Marx and Walter Gropius (founder of the Bauhaus movement) believed that machines could help to liberate humanity from menial tasks, providing more time to pursue higher levels of thought and culture. However, Jose Oretga y Gasset and the intellectuals of the arts and crafts movement were more skeptical. Ortega y Gasset feared the increased wealth from industrialization would lead to an apathetic sense of comfort, and those in the arts and crafts movement worried that machine-made goods would be of lower quality. I was unsure where I stood, finding that both sides made convincing arguments. Though I could not make any conclusions about technology as a whole, I became more mindful of how different technologies impacted society for good or for ill.

Thinking about technologies more critically, I was excited to work as a software engineer for Amazon Alexa after I graduated. Though not everyone agrees with me, I believed that Alexa was a “good” technology. After all, Alexa allows its users to access important information on the internet, like the weather, without using an addictive screen. Alexa also makes the internet more accessible to those with visual impairments.

I enjoyed thinking about technology with a critical lens, trying to determine which technological features lead to positive impacts on our lives, making it in some ways easier to be a human, and which technological features detract from our humanity. As I worked, I realized that software engineering was not the domain where questions of technology design were being answered. I wanted to be a part of designing technologies that would have a positive impact on people’s lives.

I determined that obtaining a Masters in human-computer interaction—the study of the design and use of computer technology, especially focusing on the interfaces between people and computers—would be the best course of action to pivot me into a role I wanted. However, at the same time, I felt a desire for ministry arising in my heart. This desire inspired me to serve as a campus missionary with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) for two years before pursuing graduate studies.

I assumed FOCUS would be a fun short detour from my technology career, but it ended up being more crucial for my career in technology than I could have imagined. As part of my theology formation with FOCUS, I learned about Catholic Social Teaching. Although I previously knew a bit about Catholic Social Teaching, in my formation with FOCUS I learned for the first time that it was initially developed as a response to the social and economic challenges that arose from the Industrial Revolution. As I learned about the connection between Catholic Social Teaching and the Industrial Revolution, I was reminded of Emerson and all the other writers responding to the Industrial Revolution whose work I so enjoyed reading. In making that connection, a fire was lit within me: if Catholic Social Teaching had the answers to the societal ills of the Industrial Revolution, could it also help to inform our response to technology today?

This calling to study how Catholic Social Teaching can inform contemporary technology ethics led me to Notre Dame: the only school I could think of with strong enough resources in both computer science and theology to support this work. Through the former Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, I connected with my now-advisor, Walter Scheirer, and began doctoral work in computer science with a focus on how Catholic Social Teaching can inform ethical technology design. At the same time I started my PhD, Walter also began collaborating with Megan Levis, who at the time was a postdoc with the Technology Ethics Center. The three of us, engineers by trade with strong interests in the humanities, dove into the documents of Catholic Social Teaching, spanning from Rerum Novarum (1891) to Fratelli Tutti (2020).

In Catholic Social Teaching, we found a theology of technology that made intuitive sense. Catholic Social Teaching is not shy in calling out the injustices caused by technologies, from the exploitation of workers enabled by factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the anxiety caused by nuclear weaponry of the 1960s, and the alienation caused by social media in the twenty-first century. Although Catholic Social Teaching identifies concerns with technology, it does not conclude that we should completely rid ourselves of technology, as Emerson and Ortega y Gasset desired. Rather, Catholic Social Teaching views the development of technology as an act of co-creation with God, and praises the positive impacts of technology, including connecting the world in greater solidarity and increasing the standard of living. Caritas in Veritate notes that neither “idealizing technical progress” nor “contemplating the utopia of a return to humanity’s original natural state” are a proper response to technology, and that shying away from development or progress indicates a lack of trust in both man and God (§14). In Catholic Social Teaching, I found a way of thinking about technology that acknowledges its dangers—why I found Emerson so appealing—but also praises its potential—why my reading of Emerson could not convince me to give up technology entirely.

Catholic Social Teaching casts a beautiful vision of a better world, but does not provide many practical steps for how to achieve this vision. Megan, Walter, and I are working to fill this gap for technology, coming up with a practical framework for common good-oriented software engineering based on the main themes of Catholic Social Teaching. We outlined this framework in our book Virtue in Virtual Spaces: Catholic Social Teaching and Technology which was recently published by Liturgical Press.

Our framework hinges on the idea that technology is not neutral; rather, the values motivating a technology’s design can influence its impact on society. Pope Francis highlights this idea in Laudato si’:

We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build (§107).

A number of scholars have argued that technology is not neutral in a nonreligious context as well, including philosopher Martin Heidegger[1] and contemporary technology ethicists Shannon Vallor[2] and Cennydd Bowles.[3] Because technology is not neutral, the value system underpinning a technology will influence its design to encourage people to act either virtuously or viciously. We call this way of thinking about design think -> build -> do. The think, or values underpinning a technology, influence how the technology is built, which in turn encourages what people do with the technology. As a negative example, social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have the business goal of making as many advertising dollars as possible at the expense of the flourishing of their users (think), so their platforms are designed with the infinite scroll and other addictive features (build) that cause people to stay glued to the platforms for hours (do). We argue that a more positive philosophy at the think stage would lead to more virtuous actions at the do stage, and that Catholic Social Teaching is an appropriate philosophy to employ at the think stage because of its history as a response to societal injustices caused by technology.

Concretely, our framework consists of software design principles inspired by six of the main themes of Catholic Social Teaching: life and dignity of the human person; call to family, community, and participation; option for the poor and vulnerable; solidarity; subsidiarity; and care of God’s creation. (Rights and responsibilities and the dignity of work and rights of workers also have strong relevance to the modern tech industry, but pertain more to company organization than to software design.) To create the design principles, we considered what each of these themes means in the context of technology. Our framework is primarily for social technologies—any technology with some social component, for example social media platforms, email, or texting. We chose to focus on social technologies because relationships are at the core of what it means to be human. However, our framework could easily be extended to inform the design of any kind of digital technology.

Life and dignity of the human person entails prioritizing people over things or profit, so it follows that social media platforms should limit designs that have addictive mechanisms or monetize our attention. The dignity of the human person is also affirmed when we engage in respectful and constructive dialogue, as opposed to the divisive and polarizing speech we often see online. Constructive and respectful dialogue is often encouraged by small-group and private chats that lead to more personal conversations. Moderation can help to ensure good conduct in broader forums, where it may be beneficial to share information or discuss topics more widely, but the less personal interactions run the risk of getting more heated. These designs stand in opposition to the unmoderated free-for-alls that exist on many social media platforms today.

While the option for the poor and vulnerable generally refers to prioritizing the materially poor, we note that the internet can amplify already existing inequalities and make more people vulnerable to trolling and cyberbullying. Additionally, we are all vulnerable to being exploited by companies monetizing our attention for profit. Our proposals for life and dignity of the human person—limiting addictive designs, and promoting small-group connection and moderation—would additionally support the option for the poor and vulnerable.

The call to family, community, and participation promotes strong families and communities, so we want to build technologies that strengthen relationships and promote in-person interactions rather than replace them.

Solidarity calls us to grow in love and care for our global human family. At the XLVIII World Communications Day, Pope Francis praised the internet as offering opportunities for the human family to grow in encounter and solidarity, calling it “a gift from God.” And yet, the social media we see today ends up having a polarizing and divisive effect. Designing technologies to intentionally foster engagement with global issues, for example PeaceTech technologies, can help to foster global solidarity.

Subsidiarity calls for decisions and participation to occur at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary. In government, this means empowering local governments to make the decisions best for their communities, but allowing federal governments to intervene when local government is not enough. In the context of social media, this means prioritizing small group connection: rather than having designs that allow users to amass unlimited numbers of followers, designs should focus on mutual connections that foster relationships. We see more social issues occurring when users connect widely, for example, fighting, polarization, posting content for attention or “likes,” unhealthy comparison with others, and having endless streams of content to scroll through. These issues are not as present in one-on-one communication like email or text messages, or in small group chats. However, there is some benefit to connecting widely on the internet, for example, in discussion forums. In these contexts, platforms should have a very focused functionality. For example, a discussion forum on fixing cars should be dedicated only to discussions on fixing cars, lest the discussion digress into the chaos we currently see online. Moderation should be employed to ensure conduct remains respectful and the focus of the platform is adhered to.

Care of God’s creation encourages us to care for the natural environment. Technologies that employ attention economy business models promote excess use of social media platforms, which leads to overconsumption of natural resources. Excess advertising also promotes a consumeristic culture, which has negative impacts on the environment. Avoiding such profit models would have a positive impact on the environment in addition to the human person.

If the framework feels abstract, one already existing platform can clue us in to what a technology that abides by Catholic Social Teaching might look like. The Buy Nothing Project is a nonprofit organization that uses the internet to connect members of local communities to give and receive items or services for free. Buy Nothing inadvertently follows our framework perfectly in its design.

Participants can only join the Buy Nothing group for their neighborhood, which promotes connections across and strengthens local communities. This promotes the call to family, community, and participation and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is also upheld in Buy Nothing’s moderation structure. The conduct in Buy Nothing groups is moderated to keep the groups in accord with Buy Nothing’s vision and intention. Moderators ensure that goods and services are truly being given away for free, that discussions stay within the intention of the group, and that conduct is respectful. The moderators are participating members of the local Buy Nothing community, which adheres to subsidiarity’s call to prioritize participation at the lowest level. However, the moderators receive training from the overarching Buy Nothing organization, which allows for the training to be standardized and high quality: an appropriate use of a higher level of governance according to subsidiarity. Finally, the purpose of Buy Nothing upholds the option for the poor and vulnerable and care of God’s creation: by encouraging people to give away household items for free, it keeps those items out of landfills and gets them to people who may not be able to afford to buy them new.

Anecdotally speaking, in contrast to the standard social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X), I have heard lots of people rave about how much they love Buy Nothing, especially its positive social impact. These good experiences are a direct result of Buy Nothing’s intentional design. We need not rid ourselves of all social technologies, but rather we should spend more time on the ones that are promoting our good. We can use Catholic Social Teaching as a framework to help determine which these are.

We have found many Catholics respond to today’s technologies similarly to how Emerson responded to the technologies of his day: with a temptation to reject them and to return to some “purer” form of our humanity found in a past with less technology. However, according to Catholic Social Teaching, a more authentically Catholic response to technology is to build responsibly. We hope the Church can lead the way in the development of alternative technologies that benefit all of humanity.

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