Daniel S. Nevins
Conservative Rabbi
The Conservative rabbi and former dean of JTS’s rabbinical school wrote the movement’s official ruling on artificial intelligence — concluding that AI “may provide valuable assistance” so long as a human keeps moral responsibility.
Why this score
How the formula works →- 50%nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
- 41%nuancedSupports AI only with conditions
- 9%pro1 pro-AI statement (measured)
Evidence splits 9% pro, 0% anti, 91% direction-free → Nuanced
In his words
While AI and autonomous machines may provide valuable assistance to humans in making and implementing momentous decisions, a human must remain responsible, especially for matters of life and death.
Biography
Rabbi Daniel S. Nevins (born 1966) is an American Conservative (Masorti) rabbi and, for over a decade, the Pearl Resnick Dean of the Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is a scholar of halakhah — Jewish law — and a member of the movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the body that issues binding legal opinions for Conservative Judaism.
A rabbinic ruling on machines
In June 2019 the committee approved Nevins’s responsum “Artificial Intelligence, Moral Machines, and Halakhah,” a nearly fifty-page teshuvah that measures autonomous systems against Jewish categories of agency, liability, and responsibility. Rather than reject the technology, Nevins treats AI as a genuine and welcome aid to human decision-making — from medicine to warfare — while insisting that accountability can never be delegated to a machine.
The boundary between human and artificial life is significant and must be maintained.
His conclusion is cautiously affirmative: the tools are permissible, even valuable, but a person must stay in the loop for consequential and life-and-death choices. It is one of the earliest attempts by any major religious body to bring an ancient legal tradition to bear on machine autonomy.
Quote sources
- Responsum, 2019(rabbinevins.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/daniel-nevins
