Predictive AI, Manipulation, and Human Freedom According to Aquinas I Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P.

Sep 8, 2025

Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., a philosophy professor with deep expertise in Aquinas, dives into the complex relationship between AI, free will, and manipulation. He explores how AI's predictive power challenges traditional notions of personhood and choice. The discussion also includes the impact of predictive technology on human freedom, drawing on thinkers like Adorno and Skinner. Ramelow highlights the moral implications of statistical predictability in our behavior, urging awareness in an increasingly manipulative digital age.

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INSIGHT

Prediction Enables Manipulation

Prediction enables manipulation because knowing likely choices lets agents push choices toward ends.
Fr. Anselm links AI predictability to older technologies of control like propaganda and surveillance.

ANECDOTE

Historical Warnings About Social Control

Fr. Anselm recounts historical thinkers from Skinner to Adorno showing longstanding worries about manipulating humans.
He cites Walden II and The Dialectic of Enlightenment as examples of technological social control narratives.

INSIGHT

Statistics Don't Erase Individual Freedom

Statistical predictability of behavior does not imply individual necessity; collective trends differ from individual freedom.
Aquinas and Jesuit debates treat probabilities like dice rolls: collective regularity but individual indeterminacy.

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Fr. Anselm Ramelow explores the tension between predictive artificial intelligence and human freedom, drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas to argue that while AI and social systems can influence and predict behavior to a certain degree, genuine free will and moral responsibility remain grounded in rational deliberation and virtue.

This lecture was given on June 12th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speakers:

Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., a native of Germany, teaches philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, where he is also currently the chair of the philosophy department. He is also a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modernism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, Neuried: Ars Una 2005). Other works include Thomas Aquinas: De veritate Q. 21-24; Translation and Commentary (Hamburg: Meiner, 2013) and God: Reason and Reality (Basic Philosophical Concepts) (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2014), as editor and contributor. Articles appeared in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Nova et Vetera, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and Angelicum. Areas of research and teaching include Free Will, the History of Philosophy and Philosophical Aesthetics. He has worked on a philosophical approach to Miracles and other topics of the philosophy of religion, and more recently the philosophy of technology.

Keywords: Algorithmic Manipulation, Autonomy, Behaviorism, Free Will, Human Freedom, John Paul II, Prediction, Rational Deliberation, Surveillance Capitalism, Virtue Ethics