Contemporary AI ethics emphasizes safety, fairness, accountability, and utility, yet often remains value-thin with respect to human flourishing and insufficiently attentive to how AI systems shape cognitive, moral, and relational capacities over time. This paper argues that love should be taken seriously as a foundational ethical principle for artificial intelligence – one that orients evaluation toward purpose, formation, and care rather than harm mitigation alone. Drawing on philosophical and theological traditions, love is understood not as sentiment but as steadfast care for the good of persons as others. On this basis, the paper develops a love-based ethical framework comprising three contributions: a criterion of purpose, a norm of formative protection, and a standard of non-instrumentality. Applied to recommendation systems, generative AI in education, and AI companions, the framework shows how love-based ethics can guide concrete design and governance choices often overlooked in current approaches.
Octavian Machidon (Thu,) studied this question.