Liminal Junctions: Spiritual Yearnings and the Pharmakon of Artificial Intelligence

After the second World War, and in the wake of medical atrocities that occurred in Nazi Germany, medical research exploded in volume but also teetered on the edge of a crisis. Many pre-war experiments—suspect in their moral grounding—continued after the war (think Tuskegee). Just as medical advances resulted in ethical questions around research and practice, today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents novel ethical issues to society (Gillon 2003).[1] In moments of possible crisis, there are always appeals for public displays of our ethical pieties.

Some have called for a Social Contract for AI, where signatories promise to abide by certain principles that might be able to manage the creation and usage of AI for good in the world. It has been suggested that the ethics of medicine might serve as a model for the ethics of AI (Hanna et al. 2024). Some have even suggested that something akin to an oath, not unlike that of the Hippocratic Oath, might be helpful in establishing an ethical ground for the usage of novel AI technology. In fact, several oaths or declarations have been created as a means to ensure confidence in data science and developer communities. Most recently, theologians, philosophers, users, and developers of Artificial Intelligence through the facilitation of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion gathered to create the Oxford Oath for AI Professionals. One might even imagine that by swearing allegiance to adhere to some ethical code, professionals might be able to hold themselves accountable for their AI creations.[2]

Taking inspiration from Magnifica Humanitas, I will explore the spiritual impulses that animate these calls for public displays of ethical piety. In fact, a spiritual impulse animated the traditions of medicine that resulted in the practice of oath-making, like the Oath of Hippocrates. Medicine has always been a spiritual endeavor, even if in its contemporary guise it imagines itself a merely naturalistic and technical field. The tools of AI, however, seem different than the tools of medicine. Are there spiritual longings in rapidly writing a letter for application to a job, or other of the menial tasks to which we put AI? It seems odd to think so. I shall argue that medicine—a technoscientific endeavor—has always been tied to human spiritual yearning.

By attention to the spiritual dimension of medicine, we can find something nourishing for our journey with AI. Human death, disease, disability, and frailty require medicine to think in a spiritual valence. Yet, the impulses to use AI seem more frivolous: a student using AI to complete an assignment, an employee using an LLM to write a memo, a scientist using AI to figure out how a protein folds; all of these uses seem far more mundane than sacred. Yet, AI tools do in fact mimic the human—human memory, reason, and agency—in ways that call us to think foundationally about ourselves. In fact, a spiritual valence has always been tied to human tool use; AI is no different in that regard.

The Hippocratic Oath is often imagined to have been a longstanding tradition in medicine throughout the Western world, but in fact it was not used very frequently (Ferngren 2014). In fact, it was only resurrected as a live option in various parts of Europe, usually only when there was a crisis of faith in medicine or medical doctors (Amundsen and Ferngren 1983). Many people feel threatened by AI’s powers, even if many others feel enthralled by its possibilities. Those that feel threatened have suggested that AI has the potential to marginalize or alienate us from our work, to make our work obsolete; others are concerned that AI and the rapid expansion of Data Centers might escalate the ecological crisis (Chen et al. 2025; Duvenaud 2025). Still others worry that AI might escape human control as depicted in many popular, dystopian science fiction-like movies, like The Terminator.

The optimists see all the same potentials but remain enthusiastic about AI’s usage to solve many problems. They remain confident in the human ability to master and control AI. What could be better for society than to free humans from risky or mundane work, opening the possibility that we can pursue more properly human goals? What could be better than to use AI to cure cancers, heal illnesses, overcome human frailties, and expand human cognitive capacities? The optimists imagine that when unsavory things fall out from AI, with transparency we will be in a position to tweak the system, to get the machines of society back on some “ethical” track.

Of course, both the pessimists and the optimists are wrong and right at the same time. AI will not inevitably usher in a new Ben Salem, nor is it inevitable that it will usher in a Terminator-like world. Even with humans in the loop, we must not assume that we will bring the hoped-for good effects without any detrimental effects. As in medicine, a therapy or a preventative not only ushers in the desired effects, but side-effects inevitably fall out from usage of the medication. In fact, it is best not to refer to the undesired effects as “side-effects.” After all, the consequences of the use of any medication or technology do not bifurcate into good and bad effects; to think in this way is too simplistic.

Thus, one cannot simply create social policies that seemingly set technology off on the right trajectory, assuming that all will be well. The morality of AI, then, cannot simply be a social contract, for what is at stake is much deeper.

Liminality and Birth of Medicine

Historically in the West, there have been many healing systems and they were for the most part linked to various metaphysical-moral systems. For instance, there was Pythagorean medicine—not as well-known as Apollonian medicine—which applied numeric and harmonic theorems to medical practice, including cultic practices like singing and dancing aimed at healing (Pesic 2022). Apollonian medicine found its apogee in Asclepian medicine, which often included liturgical practices around drinking substances and engaging in prayers and activities that might induce hypnotic states (Limneos et al. 2020). Cultic practices were continuous with medical practices; no hard and fast line of distinction between them existed.

There were also cultic practices associated with healing outside of the West as well. Mayan and Aztec cultures practiced ceremonial bloodletting believed to enact social goods, not just individual medical goods (Joyce et al. 1991). Ancient Egyptian medicine had practices that today we might call energy healing (Metwaly et al. 2021). Ayurvedic medicine also held to a kind of holism between body and mind and between the natural and the divine. However, it should be noted that in all these traditions, there was a thinner veil between the physical and the spiritual. The natural and the supernatural were flip sides of the same fabric (Harrison 2024).

Put differently, for many of these systems of healing, a conceptual distinction between what we might call the spiritual or supernatural and the physical or natural is already the result of early modern Western philosophical thought influencing how we in the late modern West interpret these ancient healing systems.

In fact, early modern thinkers seized upon Hippocrates because in his work, and in the later works on medicine from Galen, one can see a line that looks very much like the line between the supernatural and the natural, a distinction that is very important for Western thought since the rise of early modern philosophy.

Further, thinkers like Sydenhem and Locke pointed to Hippocrates as an ancient source of naturalism in medicine and thus placed Hippocrates on a pedestal. In fact, “father of Western medicine” is a label placed on Hippocrates in the early modern period. Oddly enough, the Hippocratic Oath itself appeals to the gods and goddesses, including Apollo (god of music, healing, foresight, and reason), Asclepius (son of Apollo and god of medicine and healing), Hygieia (goddess of heath and cleanliness), and Panacea (goddess of healing and universal remedy). Thus, the hard and fast distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” is not quite as tidy as early modern physicians might have led us to believe.

Moreover, the Hippocratic Oath has a similar structure to other oath-making rituals from ancient mystery cults. The cultic gods and goddesses are invoked because the practices themselves brought their users closer to the gods and goddesses, thus they were dangerous. Illness itself was dangerous, and no one could master the work of gods and goddesses. Moreover, the use of the cultic practices might bring one closer to the gods and goddesses, but might also place one in a precarious position of dependence upon the often-fickle gods and goddesses.

Thus, those having been trained in the arts of medicine made an oath as part of their initiation into the mysterious knowledge of the cult. Making an oath binds one to a future way of acting and also binds one to take responsibility for what comes along. The oaths themselves call down judgement upon the oath-maker in the case that the initiand stray far from the path articulated in the oath. One binds oneself to a guild, with reverence for the master-teacher, because it was only those initiated into the mysterious knowledge of healing that could judge the activities of the initiand.

Whether it was the cult of Pythagoras, or the cult of Asclepius, and then the cult of Hippocrates, one bound oneself to the mysteries of the healing arts. The Oath of Hippocrates emerged from this milieu and has been passed down through the ages to us because disease, disorder, death—human frailty—place one in a liminal space. In fact, whenever there have been crises of trust or moral confidence in medicine, there has been a concomitant call for a new commitment to some moral core, often in the form of the Hippocratic oath (Ferngen 2014). The vulnerability of the human animal is the spiritual impetus for the practice of oath-making.

When one falls ill, one finds oneself at several mysterious liminal junctions: 1) between health and disease; 2) between community and isolation; and 3) between life and death. Those who suffer are in an asymmetric relationship between what they desire—health—and their ability to return or stay healthy.

Disability, disease, and disordered function often leave people alienated from their own bodies. Numerous phenomenological descriptions of persons suffering disease describe this uncanny form of alienation. S. Kay Toombs describes the uncanny loss of the ability to move a limb as a paradigmatic example of alienation from one’s own body (1992). Havi Carel describes the way that she loses her community when she is unable carry out the simplest of tasks (2018). Thus, disease, disability, and disordered function highlight the in-between state of illness. A person who desires to move her body but cannot due to paralysis experiences something odd—a disruption between the desire/idea/spirit to move and a body that cannot move. A person who is ill cannot fully participate in community, sometimes due to the limitations of their body and sometimes because the community ostracizes them, at times unintentionally and at other times intentionally. The spiritual feeling of belonging is disrupted. Thus, there is a kind of “in-betweenness” experience of health and disease and experience of belonging to a community and isolation. Each is a harbinger of death and loss. The suffering person finds herself in a situation suspended between the living and the dead.

It is into this space that doctors, nurses, and other health care providers step, placing them in a space outside the normal and mundane space. Practitioners of medicine step into these liminal spaces, with a kind of power that places them above those suffering. Those with power to heal must step into the breach to aid those who are powerless before their own human frailty.

In fact, the appeal to something like the Oath of Hippocrates requires the submission of those in power to the practices of the community. In binding oneself to the traditions of healing (the past), one also binds oneself to a future that the practitioner herself has only a modicum of power over. Thus, the act of professing an oath—of making the oath—is an act of acknowledging one’s place not as master of the liminal spaces, but as someone who has tools to navigate these liminal spaces with vulnerable patients.

There is a fourth liminal junction that the practitioners of medicine enact. Medical interventions are always both remedy and poison. Thus, practitioners of medicine and health care often find themselves as intermediaries in the liminal spaces—between life and death, community and isolation, and health and disease—deploying tools that become both remedies and poisons. Disease, disorder, and disability are echoes of death; and even our remedies are poisons. It is no wonder that ancient medicine committed itself to cultic practices, including the practice of oath-making.

Comparing Modern Medicine and Modern AI Technologies

There are some similarities between modern medicine and modern AI technologies. The complexity of modern medicine and its need for ethical research and practice guidelines resulted in a new form of ethics ushered into the West in the late 1970s. This new approach to ethics was called principlism. In fact, the Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence (cited above) doubles down on principles—formalized rules of thumb that should guide action. The idea behind principlism is that without commitment to a universal moral theory or to specific metaphysical moral traditions, medicine can, by appeal to four ethical principles—respect for autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence—adjudicate any ethical issue (Beauchamp and Childress 2019). These mid-level principles—midway between high-level theory and particular, low-level practical content—are in need of specific content. Filling in the content is referred to as a process of specification. Likewise, one must adjudicate between the different principles, a process referred to as balancing.

Thinkers like Raanan Gillon suggested that these four principles should be the guiding principles for all social ethics of technologically advanced countries (2003). Thinkers Luciano Floridi and Josh Cowls have suggested that Beauchamp and Childress’s four principles provide a strong foundation for the ethical guidance of ethical AI in society, adding a fifth principle of explicability (2019). By explicability, Floridi and Cowls mean something like epistemic and ethical transparency, such that AI can be evaluated openly and with an eye to modification. Still other thinkers, like Brent Mittelstadt, note that medicine is a very different sort of enterprise than is AI, and thus the principles governing medicine are not translatable across other domains (2019). Mittelstadt notes that medicine has historically derived professional norms that are highly particular to its domain of knowledge and practice (2019). It also has practical methods to specify and balance the principles relevant for particular kinds of situations (Mittelstadt 2019). There are also long established legal norms and mechanisms of professional accountability, unlike AI (Mittelstadt 2019).

Mittelstadt’s point is that the social place of AI is very different from that of medicine and thus, he suggests, a bottom-up approach is necessary because AI is typically aimed at very specific problems, the ethical dimensions of which are highly specific and particular. Attention must also be given to the social and political spaces within which AI develops. This bottom-up approach will require the private sector to acknowledge its role in the creation of ethical AI and require it to take on responsibility for the problems that inevitably will arise. The problem is, of course, one cannot see clearly into the future and taking responsibility for unforeseen problems is not something that business developers like to do.

While I find Mittelstadt to be correct, his interventions ignore a very prominent feature of AI, namely that any technology, however simple it may be, inevitably results in novel problems that fall-out from the usage of the technology itself. These unexpected consequences were often not even imagined and thus could not have been prevented. This problem of the uncontrolled fall-out of any technology is described in the very earliest writings we have about technology.

Take the Phaedrus as an example; Socrates points to the fact that the technē of writing is a pharmakon. Plato’s Phaedrus engages the novel technology of writing, which is both a memory aid and at the same time destructive of the human’s ability to memorize. Thus, as Jacques Derrida noted, a pharmakon is a tool that is both remedy—and it is desired as a remedy—and a poison—and it is undesired for this reason (1981). The point is that technology cannot be controlled completely. Once unleashed, it becomes an actor in the world, even if it has no agency of its own. It can still result in many unknown, undesired, and nefarious effects, the problems of which arrive too late to forestall them. Thus, a technology as powerful as AI creates liminal spaces: the space between the good foreseen and imagined, and the ill effects unforeseen and unbidden. And, as I noted above, oath-making binds one to an unknown and unknowable future set of commitments.

Covenant and the Spiritual Dimension of AI

Thus far I have shown that medical interventions arise from the alienation one feels in disease, disability, and disordered function, and a deep desire to return to flourishing. These liminal states—the in-betweenness one feels when faced with life-altering disease—prompt one to seek wholeness. This desire to once again flourish prompts medicine and healers to step into that marginal space with those that suffer. Medical practitioners and the technologies and tools that they create mediate between community and isolation, disease and health, and even life and death. These medical practitioners held certain beliefs about the nature and meaning of bodies, their moral duty to care for those suffering in these liminal states, and the mysterious knowledge they needed to mediate between life and death for the sake of the sufferers.

Thus, medicine has always been a discipline that sits and mediates between the sacred (set apartness) and the profane (everydayness). I have also suggested that the very use of the knowledges and tools of medical practitioners and the spiritual practices that guided the use of this knowledge and these tools is not fully mastered. Our knowledges and tools have a myriad of effects over which we have only a modicum of foreknowledge and control.

When we deploy the tools of AI, we typically are not doing so because we are trying to alleviate the existential angst that accompanies the liminal states between health and disease, in-group (health) and outgroup (disease) dynamics, and life and death. While AI devices are not always deployed into a liminal, sacred space in the way that medicine often is, there is something deeply spiritual about it.

Our tools are the linkages between our desires and the objects we imagine will sate those desires in the future. At their most basic level, our tools are relational devices. While they are sometimes mere afterthoughts, tools bind our desires to the objects of those desires. They are part of our commerce and conversation with the world around us. While our attention is mostly on the subject or the object of the subject-object relation, the tools themselves are the hyphen in the relation. Thus, they are never merely tools, and never merely means to achieve some goal. They participate in our subjectivity in that our tools sometimes shape our desires. They participate in the objectivity of the object of our desire because in the use of the tool, we gain something that is outside ourselves that may or may not sate the desires.Tools are the means by which one reaches beyond oneself to that which one needs or wants. But the pharmacological effect—the poisonous effect that one does not hope for, or that one does not foresee—still flows from the use of the tool. It is the stuff of tragedy. Our tools are never merely neutral, nor are they merely dormant. They are active in the way that a baseball (or cricket) bat stirs in one the desire to play the game, or the way that a letter (a primitive tool of communication today) from a loved one is revisited with anticipation and joy. The tool mediates relation.

Thus, there is something altogether spiritual about tools. AI in particular mimics so much that is human. It mimics memory and it mimics anticipation; it mimics reason and it mimics our logic. It both is and is not human. Thus, AI sits in and even creates that which crosses over a liminal space. While most of our tools are part of the everydayness of our lives, AI has the potential to be the most expansive of our tools in that it is imagined that AI can intervene in every problem of human existence. It promises to sate not only every human desire for wholeness, but also every human desire to know or master the world. Moreover, something of the will of the makers of technology linger in the tools that they create. The hammer carries the memory of its creators and users in the very shape of its head and in the shape of its claw. Thus, something of the memory and will of human users linger in even our dumb devices.

AI is a memory device, as well as a processing device (even if not itself thinking), and it is a device that presents future solutions to problems. It carries the past, the present, and a possible future in its machinations. And just as writing, a memory device, both enables memory, it also disembodies memory and makes it possible for the human to forget.

Thus, we can say with both Socrates and with Derrida, that the most obvious feature of AI is that like all technologies, it is pharmakon (1981). It is remedy and it is poison. And as with all pharmakons, we should not valorize its pretension to remedy all the ails humankind, nor should we demonize it for the potential poisonous effects on society.

What I think this means is that the social contract model of thinking about AI and the deployment of principles that imagine that we can keep the guardrails up, is itself part of the valorization of the remedies that it promises. We desire the promised future so much that we think we can maintain our mastery over it, such that we can minimize the detrimental effects that inevitably fall from its use.

In the 1990s, the conversation around medicine had focused on the contract model of medicine, where the goods and services needed by suffering patients are exchanged for money (Veatch 1972). Money is imagined to be the bond, the glue of the social contract. It was imagined that market values would be able to make the partners in the contract equals. Patients who are suffering can trade money for health. (In this model, money is a kind of technology.)

William F. May stepped into this space with his book, The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics (1983). May argued that the social contract metaphor of the doctor-patient relation is not apt to what medicine is really about, or to what medicine is actually doing. May returned to thinking about medicine in more covenantal language—where the bond between the patient and the doctor (and other health care providers) is a bond of unequals—suggesting it was more apt to the asymmetry of the relationship. Drawing on the language of covenant, May argues that the relationship between God and the Hebrew people is not a quid-pro-quo contract. It is a covenant between non-equals, where one party has more to offer the other party than can be bought. The relationship is not transactional, but gratuitous.

The same holds for the relational dimension of patient and physician. It is a relationship of unequals. The physician has a kind of power that exceeds the patient’s capacity to enact, and in extending the tools of her trade to those who sit in liminal spaces—those that desire to once again be whole—the relationship is asymmetrical. But even the power of the physician’s tools is not one of absolute control or mastery over the patient’s illness or life, or even one of absolute power over her tools. For all technologies are pharmakons. They are both remedies and poisons, at one and the same time. At best what medicine has to offer is a gift, but it is a gift that can turn dark very quickly.

The tool of AI is no different. We ought to think of it in spiritual terms for several reasons. First, the all-too-human creators of these powerful tools only have a modicum of control over them. AI devices are powerful in satisfying many of our desires, but when ordered to desires for power and mastery, they can enact poisons in society, even while promising every possible remedy. The power to fulfill human desires means that it has a spiritual dimension. Second, while we imagine that we can keep the poisonous outcomes at bay, we also know that even the remedy can become poisonous, just as a cancer medication can cure the cancer, but leave the patient diminished. AI unleashes more effects than we can forecast, let alone control. More will fall from it than we imagine, even if some of what falls from it will be good and desired. Third, because AI devices mimic so much that is human (memory, reasoning, anticipation), we sometimes imagine that these devices can solve every problem that will arise. But AI, like medicine, elides its limitations. We remain somewhat ignorant in relation to it.

It is for these reasons that we must think of AI in spiritual terms, and all things spiritual remain somewhat ineffable to us. In the medicine of ancient mystery cults, there was a clear acknowledgement of the dangers that lurk both in the human condition and in our attempts to intervene on the human condition. It is not clear to me that in our contemporary world there is any real acknowledgement culturally (and cultically) that we are in need of humility and grace as we move through our world. Our public liturgies today are mostly celebrations of the power and mastery that we have over the world, and not the liturgies that call us to wait on the power, to pause before it, to marvel at the fact of our lack of control (Grimes 1982; Grimes 2013).[3]

We sit in an asymmetrical relationship between the whole of reality and the small amount of knowledge that we have about that reality. Our sciences and technologies carry traces of our beliefs about ourselves and our world in their structures and functions. We believe wrongly that the power of thought is adequate to the totality of all that there is in the world, and that it is adequate to master all that there is (Adorno 1931).[4] Our hubris is on full display perhaps most with AI mimicry of human memory, understanding, and willing.

The activity of oath-making in the ancient world was a public liturgy that enacts a humility before the actions are ever taken by the partitioner of the arts of healing. It bound the practitioner more tightly to the community; the practitioner vowed to take responsibility for a future over which there is no absolute dominion. It seems to me that the hubris sometimes entangled with our best intentions could stand to pause before the mystery and the frailty of our own being, the being of the whole, and that which exceeds our capacity to master. The Hippocratic Oath then is not about principles; nor is it just something to be affirmed as if affirming a social contract. It is more like a covenant. That is to say, the practices of oath-making were the public acts that pause before we even begin to act. It is an act of bowing the head, before lifting up the eyes to intervene. I am not sure that such public practices are enacted into today’s technocultures; but a public bowing of the head seems apropos.

Adorno, Theodor W. 1931. “The Actuality of Philosophy” Telos 1977: 120-133.

AI World Society. 2020. “Social Contract for the AI Age.” Accessed July 9, 2025. https://aiws.net/social-contract-for-the-ai-age/.

Amundsen, Darrell W., and Gary B. Ferngren, 1983. "Evolution of the Physician-Patient Relationship, Antiquity through the Renaissance," The Clinical Encounter: The Moral Fabric of the Patient-Physician Relationship, ed. Earl Shelp (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company), 26–29.

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2019. Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th edition. Oxford University Press.

Burgess, K. 2026. “Could a Hippocratic oath for AI workers help rein in the robots?” The Times, accessed August 17, 2026. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/ai-hippocratic-oath-university-oxford-368j2ndf2.

Carel. Havi. 2018. Illness: The Cry of the Flesh, 3rd ed. Routlege. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315197999.

Chen, Qiong, Jinghui Wang, and Jialun Lin. 2025. “Generative AI Exacerbates the Climate Crisis.” Science 387(6734): 587. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt5536.

Derrida, Jacques, trans. 1981. Plato’s Pharmacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Duvenaud, David. 2025. “Better at Everything: How AI Could Make Human Beings Irrelevant.” The Guardian, last modified May 4, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/04/the-big-idea-can-we-stop-ai-making-humans-obsolete.

Ferngren, Gary. 2009. Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Floridi, Luciano, and Josh Cowls. 2019. “A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society.” Harvard Data Science Review, Issue 1.1. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.8cd550d1.

Gillon, R. 2003. “Ethics needs principles – Four can encompass the rest – And respect for autonomy should ‘be first among equals.’” Journal of Medical Ethics, 29(5): 307-12. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.307.

Grines, Ronald L. 1982. Beginnings of Ritual Studies. Lanham, Marlyand: University Press of America.

Grines, Ronald. 2013. The Craft of Ritual Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hanna, Matthew G., Liron Pantanowitz, Brian Jackson, Octavia Palmer, Shyam Visweswaran, Joshua Pantanowitz, Mustafa Deebajah, and Hooman H. Rashidi. 2024. Ethical and Bias Considerations in Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning. Modern Pathology 38(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.modpat.2024.100686.

Harrison, Peter. 2024. Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009477215.

Joyce, Rosemary A., Richard Edging, Karl Lorenz, and Susan D. Gillespie. 1991. “Olmec Bloodletting: An Iconographic Study.” In Sixth Palenque Roundtable, ed. V. M. Fields, 1-12. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Limneos, Pantelis, Andreas Kostroglou, Spyridon Sioutis, Konstantinos Markatos, Theodosis Saranteas, and Andreas F. Mavrogenis. 2020. “The Asclepian art of medicine and surgery.” International Orthopaedics (SICOT) 44: 2177–2183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-020-04640-8.

May, William F. 1983. The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics. Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press.

Metwaly, Ahmed M., Mohammed M. Ghoneim, Ibrahim H. Eissa, Islam A. Elsehemy, Ahmad E. Mostafa, Mostafa M. Hegazy, Wael M. Afifi, and Deqiang Dou. 2021. “Traditional ancient Egyptian medicine: A review.” Saudi J Biol Sci 28(10):5823-5832. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sjbs.2021.06.044

Mittelstadt, Brent. 2019. “Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI.” Nature Machine Intelligence 1: 501-7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4.

Pesic, Peter. 2022. Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.15-28.

Pope Leo XIV. Magnifica Humanitas. Encyclical Letter. May 15, 2026.

Suskind. Dana. 2025. “AI Engineers Need Their Own Hippocratic Oath. Here’s What It Should Say.” TIME. https://time.com/7312350/ai-engineers-need-hippocratic-oath/.

Toombs, S. Kay. 1992. The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient. Springer Dordecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2630-4.

Veatch, R. M. 1972. “Models for ethical medicine in a revolutionary age. What physician-patient roles foster the most ethical relationship?” Hastings Center Report 2(3):5-7. https://doi.org/10.2307/3560825.

[1] See Raanan Gillon (2003), who suggested that the principlist ethics of medicine may serve as a model for the social ethics of technologically advanced societies: Gillon, R. 2003. “Ethics needs principles—Four can encompass the rest—And respect for autonomy should “be first among equals.’” Journal of Medical Ethics 29 (5): 307-12. See also, Floridi and Cowls (2019): Floridi, L., and Cowls, J., 2019. “A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society”. Harvard Data Science Review, Issue 1.1.

[2] In fact, there is an option to sign the Holberton Turing Oath.

[3] Ronald L. Grimes, the anthropologist of ritual action, notes that there are six modes of ritual action—ritualization, decorum, celebration, magic, ceremony, and liturgy. The latter four have a specific relationship to power: magic wields power, ceremony honors power, celebration unleashes power, and liturgy waits on power (1982, 301ff).