From Abuse to Atrophy: Levering, Ratzinger, and the Algorithmic Crisis of Conscience

Matthew Levering’s The Abuse of Conscience (2021) argues that the dominant trajectory of twentieth-century Catholic moral theology inflated the role of conscience by centering moral life on individual moral judgment rather than on the Eucharistic self-offering – the logike latreia of Romans 12:1 – that Ratzinger identifies as the true center of the Christian moral life. This article argues that the twenty-first century presents a different but structurally related crisis: not the inflation of conscience through existentialist autonomy but its progressive atrophy through the habitual delegation of moral judgment to algorithmic systems incapable of exercising conscience. The article argues that both the abuse Levering diagnosed and the atrophy the present moment produces are expressions of the same fundamental error: the displacement of the person’s constitutive receptivity to moral truth from beyond himself by a substitute that retains the external form of moral judgment while severing its connection to the source from which genuine moral judgment flows. Against both crises, the constructive response is the same: the formation of the person in logike latreia – the eucharistic self-offering through which the anamnesis is cultivated, the moral organism is formed, and the person becomes capable of the genuine moral judgment