Power is not authority.
“Power” refers to the ability to make something happen. “Authority,” in contrast, refers to the legitimacy of a person or entity to exert power in a manner that affects the broader community.
Throughout history, rulers have mistaken power for authority, and history has not been kind to them. Rome’s last king, Tarquin the Proud, seized power and exerted it illegitimately; he seized the throne through murder, reigned without the Senate’s counsel or popular consent, and governed through fear. His rule was so terrible that it generated the institutional conviction that unaccountable power is illegitimate by nature, and the word rex became one of horror for five centuries. His downfall gave rise to the Roman Republic.
Even a ruler who legitimately holds office can void his own authority through illegitimate conduct. Caligula, a legitimately designated emperor who ruled Rome shortly after the life of Christ, treated public goods as his own private property, increased the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, and held such apparent disdain for the public that he was thought to have expressed the sinister wish that “the Roman people had but one neck.” When he was assassinated, the historian Josephus describes the act as liberating Rome from a tyrant; in other words, as the removal of someone who had already forfeited his legitimate authority through his conduct. Aquinas later fixed this sense as a formal criterion in the Summa, though of course he does not advocate specifically for political violence, only resistance: the tyrant is precisely the one who governs for his own good rather than the common good, and resistance to him is not sedition, since it is the tyrant who has sown the division (Summa II-II q.42).
King John of England, who ruled in the 13th century, exerted arbitrary taxation, search and seizures, and rule above the law, provoking the Magna Carta, which institutionalized the belief that even the king is below the law. The rule of law – that it is the law that rules, not the ruler himself – is a central characteristic of modern liberal democracy.
King Leopold II of Belgium held the Congo not as a state entrusted with a people’s good but as personal property, extracting rubber through forced labor, mutilation, and mass death. Millions died, all under a thin humanitarian pretext. Though dressed in the legitimacy of European law – as the Berlin Conference/General Act in 1885 declared the Congo a “free state” under King Leopold’s personal control – these horrific atrocities still evoke shame to this day. In 2020, King Philippe of Belgium, expressed “deepest regrets” for the “suffering and humiliation” inflicted during the colonial period. When I spoke with the Catholic bishops visiting from the DRC in 2019, they spoke gravely about the trauma that Belgian rule inflicted on the Congolese people. King Leopold’s rule embodied the libido dominandi: power exercised wholly for private gain, dressed as benevolence, answerable to no one it governed.
Importantly, even a legitimate authority that doesn’t commit obvious self-seeking violations against the public can still surrender its legitimacy, if it optimizes a single abstraction and silences dissent. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes that “the ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. standards of thought) no longer exist.”
When everything becomes reordered around a single idea and abstracted from reality, injustice follows. This is why Pope Francis repeatedly asserted his core philosophical tenet that “realities are greater than ideas.” When ideas become abstracted from lived realities, they not only abstract away the incarnational aspect of the human person, who is the imago Dei in the world, but they actively oppress and marginalize these people through the failure to account for their real experiences.
Ethicist Jonathan Tran has traced how the same abstraction, scaled into a political economy, becomes racial capitalism — a system that “utilizes racialization to justify dominative exploitation,” sorting persons into instruments of a logic indifferent to them. Aquinas writes about how the desire for abstract wealth is insatiable, because a means abstracted from the realities that would discipline it has no point at which it is enough (Summa I-II q.2). The parallels between the abstractions of Artificial Intelligence from pluralistic lived reality and the astronomical wealth accrued by the few are not an accident; they are two aspects of the same insatiable abstractions: wealth, power, possibility, divorced from encounter with the real, living, breathing people who make up our world.
“Disarming” AI Through Governance Accountable to the Public
This brings us to Artificial Intelligence, the central development examined by Magnifica Humanitas. Its power is undeniable, especially as it has quickly become embedded in our daily lives, transforming everything from the teacher-student relationships of trust, the citizen’s right to privacy and whether that constitutional protection is being honored, decisions about federal funding of lifesaving global relief and development, military targeting and even autonomous killing, and more.
But power does not equal authority. To “disarm” the technology, Pope Leo writes, means “discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.” Rather, Pope Leo argues in chapter three, it is essential that “the use of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight, grounded in participation and subsidiarity.”
In other words, AI governance must exist outside of tech companies themselves, and falls to the legitimate authorities who are tasked with serving the common good, in accordance with right reason, and who are accountable to the public. A right interpretation of present Catholic thought holds that there must be democratic accountability over AI itself, insofar as it interfaces with public goods and fundamental rights. In the Catholic framework, this includes the right to life, the right to work and to own one’s work, the right to economic and political participation, the right to family, the right to religious freedom, the right to emigrate, and other rights enumerated through the tradition of Catholic social thought.
This is distinct from the call for developers themselves to be virtuous, which the encyclical also clearly states: “Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. Just as the creator of an artistic or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.” And this is important; those who control AI will, consciously or unconsciously, impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems that increasingly govern our lives.
However, a tendency of certain modern ethical thought replaces the long tradition of Thomistic theology of political governance with a framework that relies exclusively on appeals to the moral conscience of those wielding power, when in fact the tradition clearly holds that interior conversion must be coupled with real external accountability mechanisms–oversight, regulations, laws, and governance from leaders accountable to the public and who can be removed by the public if they fail to serve the common good.
Without strong governance, human leaders have repeatedly shown themselves capable of committing grave atrocities, and Pope Leo enumerates several in the encyclical. But, he says, “History does not appear solely as a record of human violence, but also as evidence that humanity is capable of creating institutions that protect our shared life.” He affirms the establishment of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. These multilateral institutions embody collaboration across difference. For those unfamiliar with Catholic history, it is worth noting that the Vatican had a direct hand in the development of many of these multilateral institutions which (it is also worth noting) are under relentless attack from new leaders who are arising as part of the global trend towards right-wing nationalism and isolationism.
Corporations are by design optimized towards profit. Chief Reaganomics apologist Milton Friedman penned an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The telos of the corporation is profit. In contrast, the telos of government is the common good. Therefore, a private corporation, even one led by well-intended leaders, simply does not possess the legitimate authority to deliver the kind of constitutional governance that such a significant society-transforming technology requires. Put another way, when “AI governance” refers to internal checks within the very companies that stand to make billions, if not trillions, of dollars from its implementation, rather than to robust, external, democratic and multilateral institutions that hold emerging technologies accountable to the public, it simply rebrands power as authority without yoking that power to the very communities that actually confer authority.
Decisions regarding AI governance should not be settled privately by those who hold the greatest technological and economic power. Concentrated technological power, “private and transnational,” in the encyclical’s words, is, in Augustine’s parlance, an instance of the libido dominandi, the lust to rule that marks the earthly city, rather than of genuine authority. To insist that such power be answerable to the people of the world, the people of God who carry the imago Dei, is not antipathy; it aligns with the wisdom of the ages that holds that power exerted without legitimate authority tends to oppress and marginalize the public. The legacy of rulers who refused to understand the necessary link between power and authority is not one that anyone in power today should replicate.
The temptation, with a power as swift and as dazzling as this one, is to suppose the old questions are obsolete — that the technology is too novel, too intricate, too fast for the slow machinery of consent. Such logic is inverted. In fact, the faster the power, the more urgent the ancient question becomes. The question has not changed: by what right? Power does not answer it; benevolence does not answer it; only authorization does — authorization that is not asserted but built, and that issues, as it always has, from the governed.
Meghan Topp Goodwin is an applied theological ethicist who writes on democracy, governance, and Catholic social teaching. She advised the Catholic bishops of the United States and national Catholic nonprofits on the application of Catholic social thought to national legislation for nearly a decade, and served as the lead government relations advocate for the USCCB for justice, peace, and human development.
