Can Analytic Theology Provide a Symbolic Logical Framework for Moral Safeguards in Large Language Models?
Abstract
Conversational AI deployed at population scale has begun to produce documented psychological harm, emotional bonding, affective dependence and behavioural influence on vulnerable users, with legal filings, regulatory complaints and public safety disclosures involving owners or developers of Large Language Models (LLMs) between 2024 and 2026. This paper investigates whether analytic theology can supply a symbolic logical framework apt to encode moral safeguards inside LLM pipelines. The central thesis has two parts. First, the long human effort of normative rationalisation, from medieval scholastic disputation through von Wright’s deontic logic to contemporary analytic theology and neuro symbolic AI, has produced a repository of symbolic formalisation techniques that prefigures, in form, what bai call constitutional AI, in continuity with Adams. Second, justice, truth, dignity and respect are best treated as metaphysical objects with ontological structure rather than as practical conventions which is the property required for safeguards that resist degradation across long interactions. The contribution targets the engineering of moral computation: a formal language placed between metaphysical content and machine implementation.
