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This essay was the overall winner in the Undergraduate Category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student, Lukas Joosten
Most parents think they are helping their children when they give them a very high standard of life. This essay argues that giving luxuries to your children can, in fact, be morally impermissible. The core of my argument is that when parents give their children a luxurious standard of life, they foist an expectation for a higher standard of living upon their children, reducing their lifetime wellbeing if they cannot afford this standard in adulthood.
I argue for this conclusion in four steps. Firstly, I discuss how one can harm someone by changing their preferences. Secondly, I develop a model for the general permissibility of gift giving in the context of adaptive preferences. Thirdly, I apply this to the case of parental giving, arguing it is uniquely problematic. Lastly, I respond to a series of objections to the main argument.
I call the practice in question, luxury parenting. Luxury parenting consists of providing certain luxuries to your child which go beyond a reasonably good standard of living. I will consider this through a framework of gift giving, since luxury parenting can be understood as the continual gifting of certain luxuries to children. While my argument also applies to singular gifts of luxury to children, it is targeted at the continual provision of luxury goods and services to ensure a high standard of living throughout childhood.
Section 1: Preference Screwing
When we discuss harming one’s wellbeing, we are usually referring to taking some action which changes the actor’s situation so that they are further from their preferences. However, a person’s wellbeing can be harmed in the opposite way as well, by changing their preferences away from their situation. Consider the following example.
Wine pill: Bob secretly administers a pill to Will which changes his preferences so that he no longer enjoys cheap wine.
Will has been harmed here in some morally significant way without having received any immediate disbenefit. The harm consists in the effect on future preferences. We can call this type of harming “preference screwing”.
Preference Screwing: Making it more difficult for an actor to achieve a certain level of utility by changing the actor’s preferences so that there is a larger divergence between the preference set and the actor’s option set.
Section 2: Adaptive Preferences and Gift-giving
The theory of adaptive preferences tells us that people tend to return to their baseline happiness after positive or negative shocks to their wellbeing because people’s preferences adapt to their current situation. I argue this process of preference adaptation implies that some instances of gift-giving are impermissible, because consuming a high-quality gift, screws with the preferences of the recipient, so that they derive lower utility from future consumption of lower-quality variants of the good they were gifted.
There exists a vast literature debating the accuracy of adaptive preferences.[1] However, my argument only requires a weak restricted form of adaptive preferences. Namely it simply says that there is some negative impact of consuming expensive goods on the enjoyment of future cheap goods. That such an impact exists is generally empirically supported, even if the strength of the impact is debatable.[2]
It might be objected that if preferences are adaptive, then gift-giving has no long-term harm since, upon returning to the lower-quality good, preferences will adapt downward immediately. There are two independent reasons why this is not a problem for my argument.
Firstly, I don’t assume (and the empirics don’t support) complete adaption, only partial adaptation. This means that once the preferences of an actor have (partially) adapted up after consuming the higher-quality good, then if the actor returns to the lower-quality good, their preferences will adapt down but not completely, so there remains a long-lasting upwards pressure on their preferences.
Secondly, as discussed in section 3, since childhood is a formative life-phase, preferences adapt more quickly and more permanently for children. Luxury parenting thus fixes children’s preferences at a high point, which will take much longer to adapt back down in adulthood.
This allows us to develop a model of gift giving. When A gifts X to B, B’s lifetime wellbeing is affected in two ways. Firstly, there is the immediate positive (or negative if a particularly poor gift) utility derived by B’s consumption of X. Call this the immediate utility. Secondly there is the long-term impact of the gift’s preference screwing. The preference screwing effect is the total harm to the lifetime wellbeing of B incurred by B as a result of the preference screwing caused by consuming X. This allows us to state the following:
Net wellbeing impact of gift giving = immediate utility – preference screwing effect
Now, consider that preference screwing through gift-giving is usually not considered a form of wronging. Consider the following example:
Wine gift: Bob gifts a bottle of Château Latour to Will for his birthday. After thoroughly enjoying the wine, Will no longer enjoys cheap wines as much
In wine gift, we would not say that Bob has wronged Will. There are two distinctions between wine gift and wine pill which explain why gift giving to adults is generally permissible.
Firstly, wine gift is not necessarily a net negative for Will’s lifetime utility. The spike in utility of drinking the gifted bottle may outweigh the loss in utility from the future discounted happiness of drinking cheap wines. In wine pill, there is only a negative impact on Will’s utility (ignoring the health effects).
Secondly, and crucially, Will consents into receiving the gift. Generally, we think that a person’s potential complaint versus a particular action is much weaker when they consented into that action being conducted upon them.
This allows us to say that the permissibility of gift given is a function of the following two parameters:
The weight given to each is going to vary with one’s background intuitions on paternalism. Anti-paternalists might thus completely disregard the first parameter, arguing that given sufficient consent, gift-giving is always permissible. My argument is inclusive to a broad pluralism on this matter, since it avoids the 2nd parameter altogether, as discussed in section 3.
Section 3: Giving Children Luxuries
By evaluating luxury parenting on the two parameters, I argue that many instances of practice are impermissible.
Firstly, consider level of consent. Children are usually thought to lack the required capacities for autonomous decision making, such as critical thinking, time-relative agency (ownership of future interests) and independence[3]. This means that children, generally, cannot consent into receiving luxuries from their parents.
As such, we must adapt the model of consent for children. Brighouse suggests that the autonomy rights of children express themselves as fiduciary duties upon parents.[4] Parents thus have the authority to make decisions for their children, but this authority is limited by the duty to act in the child’s best interest. This means that both parents can permissibly give gifts to children, but only when those gifts appear to be in the best interest of the child. Assume now that, ceteris paribus, the non-welfare interests of children are unaffected in cases of gift giving. Given this assumption, we can say that the permissibility of child gift giving boils down to the expected net impact.
Luxury parenting is thus usually impermissible since it is particularly likely to lead to a negative expected net impact. This is because the preference screwing effect is likely to be strong, while the immediate benefit is small. Children are particularly vulnerable to preference screwing from luxury parenting for four reasons.
Firstly, childhood is an especially formative stage in life. Due to the ongoing development of the brain, the patterns children learn are going to be extra lasting. [5] This means that if preferences are formed to expect a high standard of living, these preferences are going to be especially sticky. If the child’s standard of living drops upon reaching adulthood, those preferences will likely adapt down less quickly and won’t adapt down completely.
Secondly, when children experience certain goods, they often experience them for the first time. If the first time they experience a particular good or service, they are experiencing an expensive variant of that good, they are likely to calibrate their future expectation on this expensive good, because they have no cheaper variants to compare it to.
Thirdly, children generally will have a lesser appreciation of the uniqueness or scarcity of the goods they experience at a high standard of living. In wine gift, Will is acutely aware that his drinking of Château Latour is a unique and temporary experience. This awareness can deter the preference adaptation. However, children are less likely to be aware of the fleeting nature of the standard of living and so are not protected from preference adaption in this way.
Lastly, the effect is going to be especially strong because the luxury gifts are provided for an extended period of time. If parents provide a luxurious standard of living for multiple years, that gives a very long time for the child’s preferences to be pushed upwards and solidify there.
On the flip side, the immediate utility effect is going to be smaller for children. The satisfaction people receive from luxuries often goes beyond the direct experiential joy of the good or service. There is also the novelty of the experience, the secondary reflective happiness from knowing that you are consuming something special. Children are much less likely to appreciate the novelty of the experience since they are likely, as argued above, to be less aware of the uniqueness of the experience.
In sum, luxury parenting has strongly negative preferencing screwing effects while it offers a limited positive immediate utility. In turn, luxury parenting is likely to have a negative expected net impact on children, meaning that luxury parenting is often impermissible.
Section 4: Objections
Objection 1: Symmetry Implications
If it is impermissible to give a luxurious standard of life to children, this could imply that it is morally required to give a miserable existence to children instead. If childhood suffering will push preferences down such that children will be happier in the long run, this may be better for the child. This implication would be so clearly unacceptable that it would condemn the whole argument. However, the implications of the model are asymmetrical. This is because children are generally thought to have significant rights, which ought to be respected. They have rights against being physically harmed and to a reasonable standard of living. Parents cannot impose suffering on their children even if it is a net-positive on lifetime wellbeing because this would violate these rights protections.
On the flipside, parents can permissibly withdraw these luxury goods, since children generally are not thought to have a right to luxury living.
Objection 2: Shared Time
One might argue that luxury parenting is permissible because it is necessary for parents to give themselves a high quality of life. Parents are generally thought to be under an obligation to spend quality time with their children because a healthy parental relationship is crucial for the child’s development. This is problematic since many opportunities for quality time are also opportunities for parents to spend money on themselves, such as restaurants, vacations, or entertainment. So, if we think parents should be permitted to spend money on themselves, this could make luxury parenting permissible. There are three responses to this objection.
Firstly, there are still many ways parents can spend on themselves without spending on their children. Parents can spend money on activities without their children or they can spend money on themselves while shielding their children from the same luxury expenditure, for instance by ordering a lobster for yourself and the pasta for your child.
Secondly, the magnitude of this sacrifice, being unable to spend on oneself, directly correlates with the level of wealth parents have. This makes the sacrifice a less significant problem because the wealth of parents reduces the required sacrifice of parenting significantly in other contexts. Wealthy parents can afford babysitters, summer camps, and meal boxes. This means that the sacrifice of giving up luxury is balanced out by the diminished sacrifice in other facets of parenting.
Thirdly, parents are routinely asked to make sacrifices for their children in determining how they spend their time. They can only watch child-friendly movies, avoid bars, and go to child-friendly holiday destinations. It’s unclear, for instance, how giving up luxury is materially different from forcing parents to go on vacation to Disneyland.
In sum, a parent’s interest in treating themselves is insufficient for making luxury parenting permissible.
Works Cited:
Bagenstos, Samuel R., and Margo Schlanger. ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’. Vanderbilt Law Review 60, no. 3 (2007): 745–98.
Brighouse, Harry. ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’, 1 January 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0003.
Coleman, Joe. ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’. In The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by David Archard and Colin M. Macleod, 0. Oxford University Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0009.
Russell, Simon J., Karen Hughes, and Mark A. Bellis. ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’. BMJ Open 6, no. 1 (1 January 2016): e007770. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-007770.
[1] Bagenstos and Schlanger, ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’.
[2] Bagenstos and Schlanger.
[3] Coleman, ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’.
[4] Brighouse, ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’.
[5] Russell, Hughes, and Bellis, ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by Lucy Simpson, Nottingham Trent University student
Throughout the catalogue of work produced by Jeff McMahan, he has discussed what constitutes a being’s moral status, and has advocated the theories of moral individualism and reflective equilibrium intuitionism.[1] It is not my intention in this paper to dispute these positions. Instead, I argue that if we accept McMahan’s position, then logically, we must accept that a being’s moral character is a morally relevant property which we ought to consider when determining their moral status. As I will explain, this therefore means that moral status is not static; it is fluid. Further to this, in the latter stages of this paper, I consider that if we do accept that moral status is action dependant, then there might be negative moral status. On the topic of negative moral status, I do not aim to give any in-depth arguments either for or against its existence, but rather just flag this as a potential avenue for further exploration if we do indeed follow McMahan’s theories of intuitionism and moral individualism.
I argue that by accepting that being’s actions affects its moral status, this resolves intuitional conflict felt when we consider so-called marginal cases (i.e., any being that is typically thought to sit on the edge of a moral status threshold).[2]
For the sake of clarity in this paper I take moral status to mean the following: If a being has moral status, then we have obligations to treat it in certain ways for its own sake. This is contrasting what I label ‘relational status’, in which means the following: If a being has relational status, then we have obligations to treat it in certain ways for the sake of some other being (which has moral status).[3] In this paper I exclusively consider the moral status of beings. This moral status is attributed to the possession of morally relevant intrinsic properties or characteristics possessed by a being, and often includes properties such as: Possession of consciousness; ability to suffer; ability to use complex language or communicate; ability to be altruistic; possession of rationality.[4]
I begin by outlining the view that moral status is action dependent if we follow McMahan’s position:
McMahan’s position is that there is no singular morally relevant intrinsic property which is not solely possessed by human beings, nor is it possessed by all human beings. This means the egalitarian position — that all human beings are of an equal and same level of moral status — cannot hold to be true. Instead moral status is seen to be attributed as a result of an individual being’s possession of (some, or all) of these morally relevant intrinsic properties.[5] We can test this intuition through the use of a thought experiment:
There is a burning building, and trapped inside of this building in two separate rooms (equidistant) from the only entry and exit point are two beings. There is no personal risk to entering the building, and which ever being is not saved has no other means of escape.
Case 1:
In room 1: A statistically normal human being
In room 2: A statistically normal dog
Which being do you save?
Our intuitions in this case (1) show that we ought to save the human being in room 1. Why? Because (to phrase it in the same way as McMahan) the human being in room 1 possesses more morally relevant intrinsic properties, and greater time-relative interests and so will suffer greater harm than the dog.[6]
Case 2:
In room 1: A statistically normal human being
In room 2: A severely cognitively disabled human being
Here, the intuitions become less clear. If we follow McMahan’s intuitionism — and if we exclude any relational value held by either human being — the severely cognitively disabled human being in room 2 possesses fewer morally relevant intrinsic properties than the human being in room 1. However, this leaves one with a sense of uncomfortableness. Consider the following case also:
Case 3:
In room 1: A statistically normal human being who has committed only good acts, and is a morally good person.
In room 2: A statistically normal human being who has committed morally repugnant acts, and is a morally bad person.
Here, our intuitions are less uncomfortable. It seems clear that we ought to save the morally good human being in room 1, over the morally bad human being in room 2. In fact, this is a case that McMahan himself considered:
‘When I ask my students about these cases, they are unanimous in thinking that one ought morally to save the virtuous person and, in the second choice, kill the murderer’. (McMahan, 2007: 102).
The unanimity of the students shows that this intuition – that morally good persons are of a higher value — holds. By McMahan’s own subscription to the reflective equilibrium methodology then, this ought to lead us to revise our belief that moral status is based solely upon the intrinsic properties that a being possesses, and accept that our actions do matter. Instead, he makes the following comment: “All this leaves me profoundly uncomfortable.” (McMahan, 2007: 104).
It does, however, seem clear that this intuitional discomfort can be explored further, consider:
Case 4:
Room 1: A severely cognitively disabled human being
Room 2: A statistically normal human being, who has committed many morally repugnant acts, and is – without a doubt – a morally bad person.
Here we are comparing the value of a severely cognitively disabled human being and a morally abhorrent (but otherwise cognitively normal) human being. In this case the intuitional discomfort is not as present. It seems that we would, ceteris paribus, save the human being in room 1, over the thoroughly morally bad person. This does therefore show (using McMahan’s theoretical framework) that moral status is — in part — action dependent. This therefore raises the following question: If moral status is action dependent, then is it also fluid? (I.e. can it change up or down?) This will be explored in the following section.
At the beginning of this paper I stated that I would argue that moral status is fluid, and is not static as it is currently thought to be. This point requires additional clarification, as I note that there is a possible objection to my statement here: This being that moral status is not argued to be strictly static by moral individualists. In the view held by McMahan it is accepted that if a being’s morally relevant intrinsic properties change, then so can their moral status. This means that if I — a conscious, rational being, capable of suffering — am involved in a tragic accident in which I suffer irreparable brain damage, to the point my ability to be rational or conscious or to suffer is lost completely, then my moral status would be lowered. This, I accept.
However, as I will now go on to explain, if moral status is considered to be (at least in part) action dependant, then no such tragic accident will need to occur in order to change a being’s moral status. Instead it will change fluidly based upon the individual actions a moral agent commits. As case 4 demonstrates, our intuitions show that a morally relevant difference is the moral character of those human beings. If a being has chosen to commit morally bad acts, then intuitionally we see them to be of lesser moral importance. In short: Our actions affect our moral status. This amendment to McMahan’s position solves the intuitional conflict we face when considering marginal cases.
We can express this view as the following principle:
Moral Modification Principle (MMP) – A being’s moral status can go up and down depending on their deliberate choice of actions (i.e. whether they commit good or bad acts).
As we believe a non-moral agent cannot be held accountable for their actions, then this naturally excludes the marginal cases I discussed earlier: The severely cognitively disabled, infant children and non-human animals would all be excluded from the MMP. After all, we do not blame a cat for killing a mouse according to her instincts, nor do we punish an infant child who without knowing any better inflicts deliberate harm on another. As such the MMP would only apply to moral agents, such as you and I.[7]
Fluid moral status does raise an additional consideration: If moral status is fluid, and can go down based upon the morally bad actions a being commits, can a being have a negative moral status? I will consider this briefly in the following section.
I do not have room to explore the view of a negative moral status in depth. It is, however, important to consider this. As moral status is seen to be discussed as an entirely positive matter (i.e., if a cat has moral status then we have obligations towards the cat which protects her rights and limits her suffering), the view of a negative moral status would has (as far as I can discern) not been considered.[8]
Above I have argued the line of intuitionism used by McMahan allows for the intuition that moral status is action dependent. If the moral status of a moral agent can reduce based upon the morally bad actions they commit, then it stands to reason that (potentially) the moral agent can commit so many bad acts that they reduce themselves to a negative moral status value. Exactly what these acts would have to be are beyond me, and it is not my argument that there be a considerable number of moral agents which would ever fall below this threshold. But let us presume that such a morally bad being exists and they have reduced their moral status to a negative degree, what would this mean?
Well, reasonably we can assume that our positive obligations towards this being would cease to exist. We would not be obliged to protect them from harm, to protect their freedoms and rights, or to treat them in ways which avoid their unnecessary suffering. Additionally we must ask that, if we have a negative duty towards them, would we ever have a duty to harm them? On this, I give one final case:
Case 5:
Room 1: A thoroughly morally reprehensible being, who has willingly committed numerous morally abhorrent acts.
Room 2: An empty room. There is nothing else to save.
In this case (5) we have the choice to either save one (morally bad) being or to not save anything at all. In such a case — where a being has lowered their moral status substantially (so much so that it is negative) — then do we have any obligation to save them even when we have nothing else to prevent us from doing so? May we allow them suffer, to inflict a non-direct harm on them because of this moral status level? Here I cannot give answers. However, I am struck that it leaves me with the same “profound uncomfortableness” felt by McMahan. Perhaps we should abandon the framework altogether if this where our intuitions leave us.
I have argued that if we are to fully develop McMahan’s theory, then we ought to accept moral status is action dependent. I have argued this solves the intuitional conflict we face when comparing the moral status held by rational agents and marginal cases. I argued then that if moral status is action dependent, then it is also fluid.
Following this, I introduced the possibility of negative moral status. This, I have briefly discussed, is an implication of action dependent moral status. As such, it seems plausible that if a moral agent commits numerous moral atrocities then perhaps we have negative obligations towards them. So, we ought to abandon our positive obligations of protection towards them that moral status ordinarily affords. Again, here, I postulate that if this theory of negative moral status violates our intuitions and we cannot revise it using the reflective equilibrium model of intuitionism, then perhaps we ought to abandon the framework altogether – but if we do not, and then the profound uncomfortableness felt by McMahan is unjustified.
[1] For McMahan’s work on intuitionism, see: (2013), and for his work on moral individualism see: (2002).
[2] E.g., some non-human animals, the severely cognitively disabled, and infant children.
[3] For greater discussion on the distinction between moral status and relational status, see: DeGrazia (2008)
[4] An extensive discussion of these morally relevant properties is had by Rachels in his (1999) book Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism. This is of particular interest as McMahan cites the work of Rachels in his own work, and argues for the same (albeit weaker) position of moral individualism.
[5] I will not discuss in detail egalitarian accounts, due to space constraints. However, for more on this see: Waldron (2008), Scanlon (2000), and Dworkin (1981). While all vary slightly on what they ground the notion of human equality in, they share the characteristic of advocating for the same and equal moral status of all human beings.
[6] By “greater time-relative interests” I mean the human being can plan for the future, fear about it’s well being of its future self.
[7] I am aware that there is more to be said on the cases that are excluded from the MMP, as I believe there is a strong argument that psychopaths and the mentally insane ought to excluded also (as they are, arguably, non-moral agents also). Additionally I accept that if we alter a non-human animal to possess the ability to be a normal agent that the cat, in the above case, would be subject to the MMP.
[8] More so, the view held by many is that moral status is a “all or nothing” situation. So, you either have moral status, or you do not (see: Kant (2017) for an account on this). Additionally moral status has been argued to come in degrees (see: DeGrazia, 2008), but this is the view that moral status degrees come at varying points between nothing and full moral status – without a consideration of a negative moral status.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by James Shearer, University of St Andrews student
In an increasingly politicised society, previously mundane decisions about our daily lives can take on normative qualities. One such question is “what news media should we consume?”. Alex Worsnip suggests that we have an obligation to consume media from across the political landscape. This essay argues against this claim by showing that any obligation to diversify our media consumption in this way would face severe limitations. §2 will consider Worsnip’s argument. §3 will show why we are under no general obligation to diversify our media consumption. Finally, in §4 I consider and respond to potential responses to my position.
Worsnip claims that we are obliged to diversify the news media we consume such that we should read sources from across the political landscape, including those belonging to political positions that we disagree with[1]. Before looking at how Worsnip structures and justifies his argument, I want to clarify the strength of his claim. There is a distinction between an obligation and a mere reason; Worsnip posits that we are under the former. I have a reason to attend office hours for my classes, it would improve my learning, but if I fail to do so I am not necessarily open to criticism. Perhaps I have a class scheduled at the same time; this would be a stronger reason to not attend office hours. However, if I fail to follow through on an obligation (say, the obligation not to kill) it seems that you automatically have licence to criticise me.
Obligations are not totally general, I might rightly kill an unprovoked attacker to save my own life. Such instances indicate the limit of an obligation. If an obligation can be shown to be so limited that we can freely break it in a wide range of cases, then talk of an obligation becomes less natural. Instead, it starts to look more like we just have a reason to act. I suggest that Worsnip’s obligation is better thought of as a reason to diversify our media consumption; one that will often be defeated.
Now, let us consider why Worsnip thinks we are obliged to diversify our media consumption. He claims that all publications, regardless of partisan affiliation, are illicitly influenced to a non-trivial degree. Illicit influences are those that lead a publication to report in a non-ideal way, leaving out important details or presenting the details in a way that is misleading, etc.
Worsnip considers two relevant ways that illicit influence might affect reporting. The first is through belief formation. Suppose a reporter believes that NATO should arm Ukraine. An uncomfortable consequence of arming the Ukrainian military is that some civilians will inevitably be killed by the donated arms. The desire to avoid acknowledging this tragic outcome might lead the reporter to wilfully ignore or discredit evidence that shows civilian deaths occurring because of these weapons. If they erroneously discredit the evidence or underreport the deaths, they do so under illicit influence.
The second illicit influence more directly acts on the decision-making process regarding what facts to report. Consider the Ukraine example again, but this time the reporter actively believes that the donated weapons are killing civilians. However, because they still support NATO’s involvement, they do not want to do anything that will lead to public pressure against the intervention. This desire leads them not to report credible evidence of the deaths. Again, illicit influence is at play.
Having defined illicit influence, Worsnip’s argument is as follows:
Conclusion: We have an obligation to diversify our sources to be from across the political spectrum (From 5,6).
(1) is plausible; given the presumption that all publications have a political leaning, it seems that any given publication is going to have illicit, politically biased influences. We could dig into the differing degrees of influence, but I will grant Worsnip this claim for the purposes of this essay. (2) is a straightforward consequence of illicit influence.
(4) seems an uncontentious claim about our psychology but it does highlight an important aspect of Worsnip’s theory, it is non-ideal. The distinction between ideal and non-ideal epistemic theories is in the agents that they apply to. Ideal epistemic theories consider ideal agents. Perhaps ideal agents would be able to adjust their beliefs appropriately once they recognise that their data set was incomplete, Worsnip’s argument would not apply to them. Non-ideal theories try to determine what course of action to recommend to non-ideal agents considering their failings. That Worsnip is acting in the non-ideal theory space will be relevant when we come to the objection and rebuttal. (6) is the premise which I will be indirectly contesting in the rest of this essay: in many cases, we are not obliged to diversify our sources. Given this creates a contradiction with the argument as stated, I suggest that (6) is misguided. Instead, we generally have a defeasible reason to avoid epistemically non-ideal beliefs by diversifying our media sources. With this in mind we can now turn to the objection.
The claim is this; in many cases, we do something wrong when we follow Worsnip’s advice. We could not be obliged to do something that is often wrong so I conclude that we are not under a general obligation to diversify our media consumption. I want to examine a case where many people are going to be obliged to not diversify their sources on partisan lines. I will use Black Lives Matter (BLM) as an instance of a positive social movement, however the argument will generalise to any positive social movement that the reader prefers.
We start with the premise that social movements such as BLM can be undermined by publications reporting only true claims. Banks’s 2018 work more fully explores the use of racial grammar, public memory, and framing in delegitimising BLM[2]. Here, I want to focus on framing. In April 2015 Baltimore police killed Freddie Gray, a black man, while he was in their custody. This resulted in a largely peaceful protest, during which a small number of protestors rioted. Media coverage focussed heavily on the protest’s violent aspects, highlighting photos of the rioters over the peaceful protestors and keeping the debate focussed on the appropriateness of the rioting, rather than the virtues and necessity of BLM.
By focussing on these factors, publications make salient certain facts that can erroneously undermine our faith in legitimate social movements. Framing BLM in such a way as to link it with violent protest can delegitimise it when non-ideal agents are unable to adjust their beliefs appropriately in light of this framing. Given the politically charged nature of BLM, we can expect partisan media that is aligned against BLM to be illicitly influenced towards framing its reporting in this delegitimising fashion.
That we are non-ideal agents is therefore highly relevant in this situation. We know that we may be susceptible to framing techniques that seek to discredit BLM, and we also know that should we consume media from across the political spectrum, we are highly likely to encounter those techniques. Following Worsnip’s suggested obligation would therefore pose a risk to BLM by making pernicious facts salient to a larger number of people.
If we think that supporting BLM is a moral obligation, then it would follow that we are obliged to avoid putting support for BLM at risk by making ourselves susceptible to discrediting techniques. This would constitute an obligation to avoid diversifying our media consumption in relation to BLM that would apply broadly to all people who are obliged to support BLM. Given this generalises out to all positive social movements that we are obliged to support, we consequently have a broad limit on Worsnip’s obligation. Now recall the distinction drawn between reason and obligation. That the obligation would be so often defeated suggests that we have a reason, not obligation, to diversify our media intake.
Before closing, I will consider two potential responses to my argument. First, we will look at a question regarding the extent of the limit I have argued for. We will then consider the importance of the distinction between epistemic and moral obligations.
Worsnip might agree that there are limits on the obligation to diversify our media consumption, but say that this is not the same as saying there is no obligation as such. It might be that we have a general obligation, but that it does not apply in the cases I have outlined. Perhaps I should not diversify my intake on social issues, but should do in other cases like on the economy.
I have two issues with this response. First, the non-ideal aspect of the theory makes it difficult to see how actionable the advice to “diversify your media consumption, but only on some issues” really is. Sifting through publications looking for “safe” reports while avoiding the riskier ones is error prone for agents like us. Second is that I am not sure how many issues really are both important enough that we are obliged to be informed on them and free of any type of positive movement that can be undermined via pernicious reporting. It seems to me that for any given important issue, there is some side which I am under a moral obligation to support. For each, the argument regarding BLM will go through[3].
Finally, there is a response based on the distinction between epistemic and moral obligations. Epistemic obligations are derived from requirements of rationality, whereas moral obligations are based on requirements of morality. Worsnip is arguing for an epistemic obligation; it is an obligation based on the premise that we do better epistemically when we diversify our body of evidence. I, on the other hand, have been arguing that there may be countervailing moral obligations, but it is not obvious that we could not be obliged epistemically in one direction but morally in the other.
I will not be attempting to offer a full account of the relation between epistemic and moral obligation here. I will instead settle with noting two problems that may emerge should Worsnip rely on this distinction in their defence. Firstly, Worsnip thinks that the obligation to diversify your sources is a case of moral and epistemic obligations “lining up”, but my objection shows that in many cases, this is not true[4]. Second is that if moral and epistemic obligations do come apart as I have suggested, that would be a severe limit on said epistemic obligations. It seems to me that in these situations we do better to think of ourselves as having an epistemic reason that is defeated by our moral obligations. This would be a rejection of (6) in Worsnip’s argument.
This essay has argued that we have no obligation to diversify our media consumption. We began by looking at Worsnip’s argument to the contrary and his understanding of illicit influence. I then refuted Worsnip’s argument by looking at obligations to support positive social movements. If that argument goes through, then broad limits on the obligation will emerge. We would do better to take ourselves as having a mere reason to diversify our media consumption.
Notes:
[1] (Worsnip, 2019)
[2] (Banks, 2018)
[3] Incidentally, this issue is why Worsnip cannot rely on his exception of publications that are “beyond the pale”. (Worsnip, 2019, Pg 258) Worsnip agrees that we are not obliged to consume publications that push immoral view points. My contention here is that unideal agents who try to diversify will inevitably do exactly that.
[4] (Ibid, Pg 243)
Bibliography:
Banks, Chloe (2018) Disciplining Black activism: post-racial rhetoric, public memory and decorum in news media framing of the Black Lives Matter movement, Continuum, 32:6, 709-720.
Worsnip, Alex (2019). The Obligation to Diversify One’s Sources: Against Epistemic Partisanship in the Consumption of News Media. In Carl Fox & Joe Saunders (eds.), _Media Ethics: Free Speech and the Requirements of Democracy_. London: Routledge. pp. 240-264.
Please join us in congratulating all four of the finalists in the National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2023, and in particular our winners, Lukas Joosten and Avital Fried. We would also like to thank our judges, Prof Roger Crisp, Prof Edward Harcourt and Dr Sarah Raskoff.
This, the final of the 9th Annual National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, was held on the 14th March in the lecture theatre of the Faculty of Philosophy, as well as online. During the final the four finalists presented their papers and ideas to an audience and responded to a short Q&A as the deciding round in the competition. A selection of the winning essays and honourable mentions will be published on this blog.
Lukas Joosten presenting his paper at the prize
Winner: Lukas Joosten, “Turning up the Hedonic Treadmill: Is it Morally Impermissible for Parents to Give Their Children a Luxurious Standard of Living?”
Chase Mizzell presenting
Runner Up: Chase Mizzell, “Against Using AI to Influence Our Future Selves in Ways That Bypass or Subvert Rationality”
Honourable Mentions: James French: How can we address the gender gap in anaesthesia and the wider medical workplace?
Leah O’Grady, “What is wrong with stating slurs?”
Tanae Rao, “Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons”
Maria Rotaru, “Causal links and duties to past, present, and future generations: why and to whom do the affluent have moral obligations?”
Avital Fried the winner of the graduate category
Winner: Avital Fried, “Criminal Confessions and Content-Sensitive Testimonial Injustice”
Runner Up: Leora Urim Sung, “Should I Give or Save?”
Honourable Mentions:
Leora Sung presenting her paper
Samuel Iglesias, “Ethical Biological Naturalism and the Case Against Moral Status for AIs”
Pablo Neira, “Why Preventing Predation Can Be a Morally Right Cause for Effective Altruism?”
Kyle van Oosterum, “How Confucian Harmony Can Help Us Deal With Echo Chambers”
James Shearer, “Do we have an Obligation to Diversify our Media Consumption?”
Lucy Simpson, “Why Our Actions Matter: The Case for Fluid Moral Status.”
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Trenton Andrew Sewell
Social Media Companies (SMCs) should use artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to automate content moderation (‘CM’) presuming they meet two kinds of conditions. Firstly, ‘End Conditions’ (‘ECs’) which restrict what content is moderated. Secondly, ‘Means Conditions’ (‘MCs’) which restrict how moderation occurs.
This essay focuses on MCs. Assuming some form of moderation is permissible, I will discuss how/whether SMCs should use AI to moderate. To this end, I outline CM AI should respect users ‘moral agency’ (‘MA’) through transparency, clarity, and providing an option to appeal the AI’s judgment. I then address whether AI failing to respect MA proscribes its use. It does not. SMCs are permitted[1] to use AI, despite procedural failures, to discharge substantive obligations to users and owners.
This essay will demonstrate that:
1) Respect for user’s MA entails SMCs should use AI in a:
a. Transparent, reason-giving way,
b. Based on clear rules and,
c. With an option for appeal.
2) But failing to meet these standards does not proscribe using AI. It is a necessary means of discharging important obligations.
Ideal CM AI
People have rights we should respect. This cred is the basis of this essay. However, rights include substantive rights such as to expression. Here, I am presuming that any moderated content is a legitimate target. Hence, moderating this content simpliciter does not violate users’ rights because SMCs could permissibly moderate the post/user.
The question that remains is what ‘procedural-rights’ users possess. How should SMCs respect users whilst moderating? Here, I address the procedural-rights users have because of their ‘moral agency’ (‘MA’).
MA is the capacity of an agent to understand moral reasons. Respecting the dignity of a person involves treating them as a moral-agent[2]. This requires engagement in moral reasoning[3]. Moral reasoning is the process of giving reasons concerning the justification of an act. Engagement in moral reasoning acknowledges one’s MA and dignity – a basic Kantian requirement[4].
Applying MA to Moderation
Moderation is akin to punishment. H.L.A Hart defined punishment “in terms of five elements:
1. …consequences…considered unpleasant.
2. …for an offence against…rules.
3. …of an…offender for his offence.
4. …intentionally administered by [another] and
5. …administered by an authority constituted by the…system.”[5]
Moderation removes posts and restricts access to platform features which is unpleasant. It occurs to ‘offenders’ for breaching the community guidelines. It is intentionally administered by SMCs which created authorities who impose moderation. It satisfies Hart’s 5 elements.
If moderation is punishment, then respecting MA in the process of moderation will be similar to respecting MA in the process of criminal punishment. That involves giving reasons why the act/offence was wrongful, and why the response to the act/offence was just.[6]
Hence, SMCs respect users’ MA whilst moderating if they:
1) Provide moral reasons to users why they ought not post certain content and;
2) Provide moral reasons to users why they are moderating[7]
SMCs should give users reasons why the guidelines were violated, and why moderation was the right response. CM AI must be, in other words, transparent[8].
Respect for MA requires more than granting reasons. It requires the option of appealing an AI’s judgement to a human moderator.
“Penalizing someone for violating the rules…reasserts our shared values…calling something hate speech…is a….performative assertion that something should be treated as hate speech and…undoubtedly, it will be disagreed with” [9].
Users should be free to question whether such an assertion is an accurate representation of the guidelines. A moral-agent is also a giver, not merely a receiver, of reasons. To engage in the moral reasoning which respects one’s MA, SMCs should give users the option to justify their post.
Furthermore, to respect users, AI should use rules which are prospectively clear. Respecting people as moral-agents is to regard them as able to follow rules they are aware of[10]. Part of what legitimizes punishment is that the user could have complied with the rule.
To respect users as moral-agents, AI should facilitate users’ compliance with rules. CM AI should be:
i) Based on rules;
ii) Which are published;
iii) Prospective,
iv) Intelligible;
v) Free from contradiction;
vi) Possible to follow;
vii) Not constantly changing and;
viii) With congruence between the rule and official actions.[11]
If CM AI satisfies these eight principles, then it respects users by recognizing their MA and furthermore, providing rational freedom.
Moral-agents should not face ‘bolts-from-the-blue’. Their freedom should not be dependant on an AI’s whims. The guidelines that the AI follows should allow users to know whether they are in, and avoid, non-compliance.
This prospective clarity enhances the morality of CM AI by providing ‘freedom from domination’:
“[freedom] is not…the availability of…choices. It is conceivable that a free man might have fewer options…than a slave…[But] we think of slavery as the…embodiment of unfreedom…because…the conditions under which he enjoys…options…are…dependant upon the will of the master.”[12]
Clear rules liberate one from dependence/domination. A user’s freedom is not dependant on the SMC but rather, on the rules which equally constrain moderators.
But why accept that ‘punishment’ by SMCs should respect moral agency? State punishment of crimes might need to – but why content moderation?
Because all should respect each other as moral agents. To do otherwise is to disrespect our dignity. Insofar as moral agency is only consistent with certain procedures of punishment by the state, I see no reason why (as an ideal matter) it would impose fundamentally different requires on punishment by family, friends, strangers, or crucially here – SMCs.
In summary:
Moderation is punishment. To respect MA whilst punishing, SMCs must use transparent AI which gives users reasons to justify SMCs’ response. Furthermore, respecting MA requires that AI decisions are appealable to a human moderator. This provides the opportunity for moral discourse which further respects MA. Lastly, respecting MA requires that the AI’s decisions allow the user to prospectively avoid non-compliance.
Unideal AI?
Whilst the prior section explored how a CM AI can respect user’s MA, it neglected two questions. Does CM AI currently respect MA? If it does not, should SMCs continue to use AI which violates procedural rights?
The answer to the first question is no. “A common critique of automated decision making is the…lack of transparency…[It is]…difficult to decipher…the specific criteria by which…decisions were made”[13]. Furthermore, systems of appeal, such as Facebook’s “Supreme Court”, are available to very few users[14]. Finally, users report not knowing when they will be moderated, leading to confusion, and anger[15].
The answer to the second question – should SMCs use unideal AI – is complicated.
One could answer: if MA should be respected, then SMCs are not at liberty to use CM AI unless it respects user’s MA. In short, if CM AI is not transparent, appealable, and prospectively clear, it should not be used.
This view is flawed because SMCs do not only have process obligations. They have substantive obligations to their users and owners.
For its users, SMCs could be obligated to prevent the spread of toxic content, terrorist propaganda or child exploitation. To do otherwise is to become complicit. Christopher Bennet explained this complicity, and its corollary obligations, as resulting from ‘normative control’: “control over whether the…act is done with permission or not”[16]. The wrong done by “a car owner who permits another to engage in reckless… [driving]…[is]…that the owner could and should have…withdrawn his consent”[17]. SMCs can – through moderation – to determine whether an act is ‘permissible or impermissible’. “[W]herever [SMCs] [do] not mark some act as impermissible, it regards it as permissible…It can be complicit in allowing…acts to be permissible where it should have made them impermissible…complicity…comes about through a failure to [moderate]”[18]. SMCs have an obligation to its users to moderate content (the scope of which is a matter for later investigation).
Furthermore, SMCs have shareholders/investors. “A corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make…money”[19]. When an agent is managing money belonging to another, we traditionally accept she is obliged to act with regard for the principal’s interests. Those same obligations bind all SMCs baring those which are owner operated[20].
These substantive obligations answer whether SMCs should use imperfect AI, because using CM AI is crucial for discharging of these duties. Even if AI is imperfect, SMCs are obliged to use it for CM; CM AI is needed to SMC’s obligations to different stakeholders.
Given SMCs’ size general size, CM requires AI. Yan LeCunn – Facebook’s chief AI scientist – has stated that: “Without AI there would not be any possibility of…speech filtering, detecting harassment, child exploitation, or terrorist propaganda”[21]. To adequately meet SMCs’ substantive obligations to not be complicit in certain harmful conduct, SMCs needs to use AI.
A potential response is that it is “size…that makes automation seem necessary… [and]…size can be changed”[22]. Specifically, “if moderation is…overwhelming at…scale, it should be understood as a limiting factor on…growth”[23]. SMCs should accept making less profit to reduce the need for CM AI.
However, this neglects their obligations to owners. Even if SMC could make moderation respect users MA by setting growth aside, they would breach their fiduciary obligations to owners. Furthermore, SMCs are under pressure to moderate from the public. Not moderating could result in a harm to their brand, ability to recruit talent etc. Moderation is likely in owner’s interests.
Not using CM AI would result in SMCs failing their substantive obligations to either its users, its owners, or more likely both. Yet, one could say that if a ‘right’ to be recognized as moral-agent exists, SMCs should not violate it. Procedural-rights are side-constraints which requires not using imperfect AI. What this neglects is that X being a right does not mean it is of equal importance to right Y. If all obligations cannot be simultaneous met, then choices must be made about which obligations should be unfulfilled.
I would contend that procedural-rights in CM are some of SMCs’ least important obligations. Users who have posted content eligible to moderation are the reason a trade-off of rights is necessary. If they had not done wrong, then the SMC would not need to decide whether to respect their procedural-rights or the substantive rights of its users or owners. If a set amount of cost must be imposed, then it seems appropriate to apply that cost upon the individual most responsible – the user being moderated[24]. Since not using CM AI would result in SMCs failing their substantive obligations, and these obligations are more important, procedural obligations cease to really matter. Human moderation is not feasible, and imperfect CM AI is preferable to no moderation at all. SMCs should use AI because it discharges their more important duties. Nevertheless, insofar as SMCs can improve their CM AI to bring it closer to the ideal, they are obliged to do so. It should work towards the ideal but not let it be the enemy of the good or necessary.
Conclusion
Social Media Companies should use artificial intelligence to automate content moderation. The use of this technology is needed to meet SMCs’ substantive obligations to their users and owners. That means that the conditions under which it should be used are broad. Even if, AI moderation does not respect user’s moral agency, it should still be used. Nevertheless, where possible, SMCs should work to bring its AI moderation more in line with an ideal of respect. This Ideal AI Content Moderation would be transparent (capable of giving users the reasons which underpin the moderation decision) with an option to appeal to a human moderator (as a recognition of the two-sided nature of moral reasoning). Furthermore, the AI should operate on clear, prospective, and reasonably predictable rules such that users are given a freedom from domination and are spared from moderation happening like a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’.
AI moderation is a necessity for SMCs.
They should use AI moderation to meet their substantive obligations whilst striving for the procedural ideal.
Notes:
[1] Perhaps obliged.
[2] (Strawson, 1962).
[3] (Hirsch, 1993).
[4] (Jacobs, 2019, p. 29) (Seelmann, 2014).
[5] (Hart, 2008, pp. 5-6).
[6] (Edwards & Simester, 2014) (von Hirsch A. , 1992).
[7] (Edwards & Simester, 2014, p. 64).
[8] (Suzor & Etal, 2019).
[9] (Gillespie, 2020, p. 3).
[10] (von Hirsch & Hörnle, 1995).
[11] (Fuller, 1969, p. 39) (Simmonds, 2007, p. 64).
[12] (Simmonds, 2007, p. 101).
[13] (Gorwa & et.al, 2020, p. 11) (Burrell, 2016).
[14] (Kelion, 2020).
[15] (West, 2018).
[16] (Bennett, 2019, pp. 78-81).
[17] Ibid (p. 81).
[18] Ibid.
[19] (Friedman, 1970).
[20] There is thus an interesting question about how these obligations could apply to Twitter post Elon’s takeover.
[21] (LeCunn, 2020).
[22] (Gillespie, 2020, p. 4).
[23] Ibid.
[24] (McMahan, 2005) (Øverland, 2014).
Works Cited
Bennett, C. (2019). How Should We Argue for a Censure Theory of Punishment? In A. du Bois-Pedain, & A. Bottoms, Penal Censure (pp. 67-86). Hart Publishing.
Burrell, J. (2016). How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms. Big Data & Society, 1-16.
Cohen-Almagor, R. (2015). Confronting the internet’s dark side: moral and social responsibility on the free highway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, J., & Simester, A. (2014). Prevention with a Moral Voice. In A. Simester, A. Du Bois-Pedain, & U. Neumann, Liberal Criminal Theory (pp. 43-65). Hart Publishing.
Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. New York Times.
Fuller, L. (1969). The Morality of Law. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gillespie, T. (2020). Content moderation, AI, and the question of scale. Big Data & Society, 1-5.
Gorwa, R., & et.al. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform goverance. Big Data & Society, 1-15.
Günther, K. (2014). Crime and Punishment as Communication. In A. du Bois-Pedain, A. Simester, & U. Neumann, Liberal Criminal Theory (pp. 123-140). Hart Publishing.
Hart, H. (2008). Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law. Oxford University Press.
Hirsch, A. v. (1993). Censure and Sanctions. Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, J. (2019). Censure, Sanction and the Moral Psychology of Resentment. In A. du Bois-Pedain, & A. Bottoms, Penal Censure (pp. 19-40). Hart Publishing.
Kelion, L. (2020, September 24). Facebook ‘Supreme Court’ to begin work before US Presidential vote. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54278788
LeCunn, Y. (2020, June). Deep learning, neural networks and the future of AI. (C. Anderson, Interviewer)
McMahan, J. (2005). Self-Defense and Culpability. Law and Philosophy, 751–774.
Øverland, G. (2014). Moral Obstacles: An Alternative to the Doctrine of Double Effect. Ethics, 481-506.
Seelmann, K. (2014). Does Punishment Honour the Offender? In A. Du Bois-Pedain, A. Simister, & U. Neumann, Liberal Criminal Theory (pp. 111-121). Hart Publishing.
Simmonds, N. (2007). Law as a Moral Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, P. (1962). Freedom and Resentment. Retrieved from UCL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm
Suzor, N. P., & etal. (2019). What Do We Mean When We Talk About Transparency? Toward Meaningful Transparency in Commerical Content Moderation. International Journal of Communication, 1526-1543.
von Hirsch, A. (1992). Proportionalty in the Philosophy of Punishment. Crime and Justice, 16, 55-98.
von Hirsch, A., & Hӧrnle, T. (1995). Postive Generalpravention und Tadel. Goltdammer’s Archiv fur Strafrecht, 142.
West, S. M. (2018). Censored, suspended, shadowbanned: User interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms. New Media and Society, 4366-4383.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by Kyle van Oosterum, University of Oxford student
Section 1 – Introduction
Many of us are part of or aware of the existence of widespread echo chambers on social media. Echo chambers seem concerning because their members are led to believe bizarre things and disagree viciously with others. For example, some people genuinely believe the Earth is flat. Others disagree about basic political reality as we saw with those who stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6th 2021 and, more recently, the Brazilian congress. A great deal of this may be attributable to the way social media algorithmically sorts us into echo chambers. However, this sorting is partly so effective because we have not become disposed to exit echo chambers or deal well with the individuals who inhabit them. Even if we change these algorithms, we may also need to change our dispositions to better deal with these individuals.
In this paper, I argue that Confucius’ ideal of harmony provides us with practical dispositions that help with the problems posed by echo chambers. In brief, my view is that echo chambers threaten our social relationships which can undermine social stability. As such, maintaining social stability may require managing these social relationships. Confucius’ ideas are well-suited to making these points.
To that end, I start by briefly defining what echo chambers are (Section 2). I then introduce Confucius’ idea of harmony and how it helps diagnose what is wrong with echo chambers (Section 3) and prescribes how we can live harmoniously with echo-chambered individuals (Section 4).
Section 2 – What is an Echo Chamber?
The concept of an ‘echo chamber’ is still being figured out in academic circles. However, almost all philosophers and non-philosophers agree there is something wrong with being in an echo chamber.[1] If we suggest a person is in an echo chamber, this is usually meant as a criticism either of what they believe or how they have come to believe it. This might be quite obvious, but it raises an interesting question about people in echo chambers. Why would people be part of something that they know is wrong or problematic?
My explanation for this starts from the observation that people in echo chambers probably do not think there is anything wrong with the environment they are in. In fact, given how confident people in echo chambers tend to be, they will think they have joined (or remained in) the echo chamber for good reasons. Perhaps they think they are more likely to discover the truth about something, so they join the echo chamber to obtain knowledge. Alternatively, they may join the echo chamber to obtain the good of a community who share their values. These are perfectly good reasons that motivate much human behavior. However, given our shared fallibility, we sometimes make mistakes in pursuit of what we think is good. I think this last point is crucial for understanding what echo chambers are. An echo chamber looks like the kind of social environment in which goods like knowledge or community can be obtained, but, in reality, they frustrate our access to these goods. In other words, they are troubling social environments that are parasitic on ones from which we can obtain certain goods. This squares well with what we think of a typical echo chamber member. Despite their efforts, they tend to have false beliefs and viciously dislike people who do not share their beliefs and values. In short, from understanding why individuals join these environments – to pursue goods they think they will achieve – we get a better understanding of what echo chambers are.
Section 3 – Introducing Harmony
Harmony or 和 (pronounced ‘her’) is a crucial concept in Confucian thought rendered in different ways over time and by different thinkers (Li, 2008). In keeping with the methods of the Confucian tradition, the concept of harmony is best illuminated with an analogy. The oldest analogy relies on the similarity between governing harmoniously and making a good soup. When one makes a soup, there are a variety of ingredients that one needs to add and different quantities of each ingredient must be added carefully to achieve a dish that is balanced in flavor. Similarly, a ruler should solicit many different points of view on what an acceptable policy is and take note of the dissenting and approving verdicts and determine an optimal balance of preferences. ‘Harmony’ is explicitly referred to in Analects 13.23:
The Master said, “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” (Confucius, 2014: 13.23).
The thing to avoid in making soup, ruling a country, or trying to reconcile different things that are in tension is to have too much ‘echoing’ or ‘sameness’. For example, having too much of the same opinion in government or having too much of the same ingredient in a soup. The problem with this, to reference an ancient Chinese thinker, is that “this is like trying to improve the taste of water with more water. Who would want that?” (Confucius, 2014: ‘Commentary on 13.23’). Harmony in the broadest sense is a process by which different things are brought together into a constructive whole (Wong 2020). In this context, I will work with harmony as a moral ideal which implores us to reconcile our inevitable differences with other people in a constructive manner and without conforming to what others believe or how they act.
The ideal of harmony sheds light on the problem of echo chambers. Whether we are in or exposed to them, echo chambers show us individuals with whom we viciously disagree yet must co-exist. Their members ‘echo’ each other too much and those outside the echo chamber become too frustrated or bitter to try to break up these echoes. Over time, echo chambers cause damage to these interpersonal relationships and to the prospect of managing our differences with others. Research by political scientists confirms these ideas; people are far too polarized around their partisan political views and continually told their ideological opponents are not to be trusted (Jamieson and Capella, 2008; McCarthy, 2019; Nguyen, 2020). This is a familiar problem and Confucius recognized a version of it, though perhaps not remotely on the same scale as today. Nevertheless, Confucius would urge that we manage the delicate relationships we have with others – relationships to our family, friends, and civic peers – to which echo chambers cause much damage. Why must we learn to do this? Insofar as we are interested in maintaining social stability, we can work on maintaining the social relationships that together constitute a society. As such, harmony offers a plausible way of diagnosing the echo chamber as partly one of fractured moral relationships with one another, which, over time, may threaten social stability.
Section 4 – Harmonizing with Others
So far, we know that harmony is a kind of moral ideal or standard, but it is not yet clear how we ought to harmonize with others. Which actions or which ways of acting count as satisfying the standard of harmony? Confucius does not offer direct advice on this question, but David Wong (2020, MS) suggests that harmony can be elaborated through the idea of accommodation. Accommodation is a moral value whose emphasis is on maintaining a constructive relationship – of respect and concern – in the face of continuing disagreement. It comes into play because societies, in their best attempts to maintain convergence on moral values and ideas, will nevertheless disagree on how to interpret the weight of their shared values and how those values interact when they conflict (Wong, 1992). Human life is marked by significant disagreement and to accommodate is to live with such disagreement rather than seek, unsuccessfully, to dissolve it.
Accommodating others involves three things. First, it involves having an epistemic openness to the possibility of expanding one’s view of the good life or at least trying to understand other ways of life. Second, it involves a tactfulness to act on your moral opinions and values in ways that aim to minimize damage to your relationships with others who have opposed views. Third, it involves amenability. This is the willingness to compromise on what we hope to gain for our moral views for the sake of sustaining relationships with disagreeing others (Wong 2020: 133). Accommodation is key to living harmoniously with others, but does it help us deal with echo chambered individuals? I will argue that it does.
The value of epistemic openness is readily seen when dealing with run-of-the-mill echo chambers containing political partisans. Some philosophers have argued that the chances that one will be right about everything are often very slim (Joshi, 2020). When one is a stubborn political partisan and, I would argue this is true of echo-chambered individuals, one believes those outside the echo chamber are systematically getting things wrong. This is a belief that it will be hard to find a rational justification for. To move forward will involve being epistemically curious and being genuinely prepared to change one’s mind, which may help others become open and curious to make such changes too.
Openness does not always require one to change one’s moral beliefs for these may be foundational to one’s identity. But the importance of our moral beliefs and values does not entitle us to insult or denigrate those who oppose us in attempts to ‘score points’ for our views. This is unfortunately how much discourse in echo chambers and social media in general takes place. Just as we would hope that others not denigrate our views, exercising a similar tactfulness towards them builds the relationship within which these difficult conversations can take place. Relatedly, the familiar injunction to ‘pick one’s battles’ becomes relevant here too – never being amenable frustrates the relationships with these disagreeing others and robs us of the potential to find some degree of harmony. In short, harmony recommends we become disposed to being open, tactful, and amenable in accommodating those with whom we disagree. As such, it is a useful prescription for dealing with echo-chambered individuals with whom we encounter serious disagreement.
Of course, one might doubt whether harmony requires us to be open, tactful, and amenable with echo chamber members whose views are beyond the pale. I am referring to the ones that espouse controversial conspiracy theories and morally offensive political ideologies. The temptation may be either to ignore or ‘force’ such individuals to change their mind. Even in these cases, I argue one should maintain their epistemically open disposition. It is likely those individuals are mistaken about the good life, but curiosity and tactful question-asking may help them become aware of the implications and difficulties of holding their beliefs. Empirical evidence in psychology suggests this approach may nurture their motivation to change their mind, which may be more effective than acting on the temptations above (Itzchakov et al., 2018; Wong, MS). More to the point, taking this step does not foreclose the opportunity of living harmoniously.
However, missing from this is the element of courage one needs to harmonize with others. This is especially true in online environments where much disagreement takes place that is fueled by echo chambers. Acting in a harmonious manner is demanding, the gains are often not visible to us and the costs are unpleasant and even dispiriting. As a result, harmonizing with disagreeing others – whether in Confucius’ time or ours – must involve some degree of courage to be open, tactful, and amenable in the face of these obstacles.
Conclusion
I have argued that Confucius’ notion of harmony offers (i) a diagnosis of why echo chambers are problematic and a (ii) prescription for how to manage our social relationships with echo-chambered individuals through openness, tactfulness, amenability, and courage.
This prescription highlights the final point that I want to make, namely, that the problem with echo chambers is not only an epistemic one to do with what people believe. As I hope to have shown, the problem is also profoundly ethical. It is equally about what we owe to our disagreeing others and how we can relate to them better. Confucius’ ideas practically orient us toward managing these social relationships, the flourishing of which contributes to a stable society where people can co-exist despite persistent disagreement.
—
Notes:
[1] Well, not every philosopher agrees with this, see Lackey, 2018; Elzinga, 2020; Fantl, 2021. However, that is not unique to this issue.
References
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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Pablo Neira
If the interests of sentient animals matter, then there are (at least pro tanto) reasons to prevent the harms they suffer. There are many different natural harms that wild animals suffer, including hunger, disease, parasitism and extreme weather conditions (Singer 1975; Clark 1979; Sapontzis 1984; Cowen 2003; Fink 2005; Simmons 2009; Horta 2010; McMahan 2010; Ebert and Mavhan 2012; Keulartz 2016; Palmer 2013; Sözmen 2013; Bruers 2015; Tomasik 2015; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021). One of these (on which I will focus in this paper) is the suffering caused by predation. Predation is an antagonistic relationship in which a predator obtains energy by consuming a prey animal—either wholly or partially—which is alive when it is attacked (Begon et al. 2006, 266). The harms predation cause to prey animals can vary greatly, depending on the kind of injuries they suffer in the process and how painful they are, the amount of time it takes them to die, the release of endorphins that reduce pain or the extent to which psychological suffering—mostly distress—affects them during the process. In addition, beyond the pain of predation itself, there are other substantial harms related to predation. It has been argued that death itself may harm animals because it deprives them of any possible future positive experiences (Nagel 1970; Višak and Garner 2016). However, we do not need to agree that death harms animals in order to consider predation a harm, as the suffering it causes to animals is sufficient in its own right. Moreover, some animals may survive predation and yet suffer serious injuries that cause them pain for a prolonged period of time, sometimes chronically (Schoener 1979; Engh et al. 2006; Jonhson et al. 2006). They may also live in fear of being attacked by predators (Lima 1998; Holbrook and Schmitt 2002; Mashoodh 2009). Thus, the pain experienced by sentient animals when they are attacked in nature should not be overlooked. In this essay, I will argue that it is permissible, and perhaps obligatory, to intervene to prevent predation. Moreover, if we accept this, it leads us to consider predation prevention as a cause area to take action seriously from Effective Altruism.
Predation: A Thought Experiment
Consider the following thought experiment:
Trapped Animals. An antelope is trapped between branches and abandoned by its herd. A hyena finds the antelope and begins to devour different parts of its body while it is still alive. This lasts several hours, until the antelope finally dies. Anna is near the antelope and, without placing herself in danger, could untangle the branches so the antelope could escape.
According to some deontological or virtue ethics perspectives,[1] it can be argued that Anna’s intervention would be incorrect. This position can be defended by arguing that there is a rule that prevents intervention or that it is not virtuous to intervene. The idea that we should prevent predation may seem odd and wrong to some people at first. At the same time, based on other deontological approaches, we may have positive duties to animals (including wild ones), which we would fail to honour if we do not aid them when they are in need. Similarly, based on some virtue approaches, refusing to help animals would be contrary to what a virtuous person would do. In fact, that seems to be the case if we do not help the antelope here. Meanwhile, according to a consequentialist perspective, if Anna intervenes she would be acting in the correct manner, as long as her action leads to the best possible consequences all things considered. A counterargument could be that if we save the antelope, the hyena will starve, and thus Anna would be harming the hyena. This supports people’s intuition against preventing predation. However, consider the following alternative:
Trapped Animals 2. The situation is the same as in Trapped Animals, except that Anna is physically close to the antelope, and, without exposing herself to danger, she could place a vegetable meat alternative on the ground with identical characteristics to antelope meat. The hyena would eat this alternative and leave the antelope unharmed. Anna could then untangle the branches so the antelope could escape.
In this case, again, a consequentialist perspective would imply that if Anna intervenes, she will act correctly, as the best outcome will be achieved all things considered. Deontological and virtue ethics arguments could reach a similar conclusion, as we saw in the Trapped Animals case. Therefore, our initial intuition against preventing predation may be shown to be misguided simply by introducing a small modification to the scenario. This is because our intuition against predation may still be present when we consider this case, despite the fact that all relevant considerations would lead us to conclude that we should save the antelope. In addition, our intuition against preventing predation could also be challenged by the following variant of the same case:
Trapped Animals 3. Everything is the same as in Trapped Animals 2, except that instead of an antelope it is a human being that is trapped.
When we include a human in the scenario, our intuition changes significantly. It no longer seems merely permissible but obligatory for Anna to act. It could be argued that this has no relevance for the previous cases, as there is a crucial difference between wild animals and humans. Indeed, it has been argued that wild animals possess certain capacities that allow them to use their natural abilities to survive, while humans do not (Simmons 2009, 19–21). However, this objection does not seem to work, as in the cases we are considering both the human being and the nonhuman animal will surely die if Anna does not act. Thus, the antelope cannot adequately deal with the threat. So, if we are not speciesist, it seems we should hold a similar position in all cases.
This conclusion is further reinforced by the following case:
Trapped Animals 4. Everything is the same as in Trapped Animals 2, except that Anna is a biologist and knows that the antelope has a highly contagious disease. If the hyena eats it, this disease could infect other mammals, including humans.
Again, in this case it seems that it would not only permissible but obligatory for Anna to act. But, it is not clear whether there is a relevant difference between this case and the previous ones. We can only claim that there is if we maintain that the interests of humans are important in a way in which the interests of other beings are not.
Practical Implications: The Case for Effective Altruists
We may also conclude that this is an important cause, considering (as effective altruists do) its scale, neglectedness and tractability (Singer 2016, 19–20; MacAskill 2019, 12–15; Timmerman 2019, 166–68; Berkey 2020, 368–70). Regarding the scale, it is difficult to determine the exact number of wild animals that exist,[2] although we can estimate that the number is vast. Most suffer due to natural factors, and many are killed by predators. The overall amount of pain will be several orders of magnitude greater if we consider a long-term perspective, as the number of sentient animals that will live in the future is likely to be greater than the number of sentient animals that are alive now and have lived in the past as a whole. As for neglectedness, it is evident that this topic (and that of wild animal suffering in general) has received very little attention from animal charities or other organisations (for an exception, see Animal Ethics 2020). Finally, regarding tractability, there are different courses of action that could be implemented to prevent predation. I will now consider four of them. The first two are more speculative, and their expected results would need to be researched in far more detail before they could be implemented, which should first occur through pilot programmes. Meanwhile, the third and the fourth ones could be applied immediately and are much less controversial.
First, it has been argued that resources could be devoted to researching how to perform interventions similar to the natural evolution that led to the herborisation of some previously predatory species (e.g. the giant panda). This could be done by genetically modifying predators so that their offspring gradually becomes herbivorous, consequently changing their predatory behaviour (Pearce 2009; Palmer 2013; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021).
Second, resources could be devoted to organising the gradual extinction of predatory species (Pearce 2009; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021), for example, by administering contraceptives to predators and allowing them to gradually disappear. Depot-contraception (a form of contraceptive injection that prevents ovulation in females) could be administered to carnivores, causing predatory animals to disappear within a few generations, and the resulting population effects on predated spices could be managed through more selective forms of contraception. Such advanced contraceptive techniques could be controlled by computer programs, which would be tested first on a small scale and then applied on a larger scale.
Third, the resources currently used to promote the conservation of predators (which are sometimes significant) could be allocated elsewhere, potentially having a better impact, while allowing the predators to disappear naturally (Cowen 2003).
Fourth, reforestation plans could be designed so the resulting ecosystems contain less rather than more predation. Different types of plants can support different types of animals. Accordingly, we could choose to plant types of vegetation that are less likely to support predators (Animal Ethics 2020).
If the arguments made in the previous sections are correct, then all the courses of action indicated above should be considered acceptable. However, many people will find this counterintuitive in the first two cases, despite the arguments presented above. Nevertheless, the latter two approaches could be considered acceptable by anyone willing to give at least some weight to the interests of wild animals. This means that preventing predation is tractable, at least in some ways.
Conclusion
I have argued that intervening to prevent harms to animals resulting from predation is morally right. Those who argue that we should not act in cases of predation must rely on ad hoc responses to intervention in scenarios in which such action seems to be the right choice. Admittedly, this will likely be a counterintuitive conclusion for many people, although the arguments I have presented appear to imply it. However, while some of the approaches for preventing predation may appear contrary to intuition, that is not true for all of them.
Notes:
[1] It could be also be defended from a rights perspective, wild animals can certainly harm each other, but they cannot violate the rights of others (Regan 1983; Jamieson 1990; Cohen 1997; Milburn 2015); of capacities, the capacity of specific species to flower, requiring a type of predation (Nussbaum 2006; Schlosberg, 2006; Cripps 2010); or of the community of animals, as it is reasonable to assume that wild animals are fully competent to address the challenges they face (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011).
[2] Specifically, there are estimated to be 1011–4·1011 birds, 1011–1012 mammals, 1011–1014 reptiles, 1011–1014 amphibians, 1013–1015 fish, 1014–1017 earthworms 1014–1017 mites, 1015–1018 polyps, 1017–1019 terrestrial arthropods, 1017–1019 rotifers, 1019 gastrotrichs, 1018 copepods and 1020–1022 nematodes (Tomasik 2019).
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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Samuel Iglesias
Introduction
6.522. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical”. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.
What determines whether an artificial intelligence has moral status? Do mental states, such as the vivid and conscious feelings of pleasure or pain, matter? Some ethicists argue that “what goes on in the inside matters greatly” (Nyholm and Frank 2017). Others, like John Danaher, argue that “performative artifice, by itself, can be sufficient to ground a claim of moral status” (2018). This view, called ethical behaviorism, “respects our epistemic limits” and states that if an entity “consistently behaves like another entity to whom we afford moral status, then it should be granted the same moral status.”
I’m going to reject ethical behaviorism on three grounds:
1. Consciousness, not behavior, is the overwhelming determining factor in whether an entity should be granted moral status.
2. An entity that does not duplicate the causal mechanisms of consciousness in the brain has a weak claim to consciousness, regardless of its behavior.
3. Ethical behaviorism, practically realized, poses an existential risk to humanity by opening individuals to widespread deception. Further, it imposes burdensome restrictions and obligations upon researchers running world simulations.
I will show that an alternative, ethical biological naturalism, gives us a simpler moral framework whereby no digital computer running a computer program has moral status.
The Consciousness Requirement
We start with the supposition that consciousness names a real phenomenon and is not a mistaken belief or illusion, that something is conscious if “there is something it is like to be” that being (Nagel 1974). We take as a background assumption that other humans and most non-human animals are capable of consciousness. We take for granted that inanimate objects like thermostats, chairs, and doorknobs are not conscious. If we grant the reality of consciousness and the attendant subjective reality of things like tickles, pains, and itches, then its connection to moral status falls out pretty clearly. Chalmers asks us to consider a twist on the classic trolly problem, called the zombie trolly problem—where a “zombie” here is something that precisely behaves like a human but which we presume has no consciousness—“near duplicates of human beings with no conscious inner life at all” (2022):
“You’re at the wheel of a runaway trolley. If you do nothing, it will kill a single conscious human, who is on the tracks in front of you. If you switch tracks, it will kill five nonconscious zombies. What should you do? Chalmers reports: “the results are pretty clear: Most people think you should switch tracks and kill the zombies,” the intuition being that “there is arguably no one home to mistreat” (ibid.).
An ethical behaviorist does not share this intuition. Danaher explicitly tells us that “[i]f a zombie looks and acts like an ordinary human being that there is no reason to think that it does not share the same moral status” (2018). By this view, while consciousness might or might not be relevant, there exist no superior epistemically objective criteria for inferring consciousness. I will argue there are.
Narrowing Consciousness
A better criterion is one in which an entity is conscious if it duplicates the causal mechanisms of consciousness in the animal brain. While ethical behaviorism attempts to lay claim to a kind of epistemic objectivity, ethical biological naturalism, as I will call it, provides a sharper distinction for deciding whether artificial intelligences have moral status: all hardwares running computer programs cannot by fact of their behavior, have moral status. Behavior, by this view, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for their moral status.
Biological Naturalism
Biological naturalism is a view that “the brain is an organ like any other; it is an organic machine. Consciousness is caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain and is itself a feature of the brain.” (Searle 1997). Biological naturalism places consciousness as a physical, biological process alongside others, such as digestion and photosynthesis. The exact mechanism through which molecules in the brain are arranged to put it in a conscious state is not yet known, but this causal mechanism would need to be present in any system seeking to produce consciousness.
A digital computer running a program, by contrast, is a different beast entirely. A computer program fundamentally is a set of rules for manipulating symbols. Turing showed that all programs could be implemented, abstractly, as a tape with a series of zeros and ones printed on it (the precise symbols don’t matter), a head that could move that tape backwards and forwards and read the current value, a mechanism for erasing a zero and making it a one and erasing a one and making it a zero. Nothing more.
While most computer programs we are familiar with are executed on silicon, a program that passes the Turing test could be implemented on a sequence of water pipes, a pack of well-trained dogs, or even, per Weizenbaum (1976), “a roll of toilet paper and a pile of small stones.” Any of these implementing substrates could, in principle, receive an insult or slur as an input, and, after following the steps of the program, output something reflecting hurt feelings or outrage.
Ethical Biological Naturalism
What I want to say now is this: if pleasures, pains, and other feelings name conscious mental states and if conscious mental states are realized in the brain as a result of lower level physical phenomena, then only beings that duplicate the relevant lower level physical phenomena that give rise to consciousness in the brain can have moral status. Consequently, digital computers that run programs can at best simulate consciousness, but are not, by dint of running the right program, physically conscious, and therefore do not have moral status.
Note that biological naturalism does not posit that consciousness can only be realized in biological systems. Indeed, artificial hearts are not made of organic tissue, and airplanes do not have feathers, or for that matter even flap their wings. What matters is the underlying cause—the artificial heart must pump with the same pressure and regularity of a human heart, and a flying machine must operate under the principles of drag and lift. In both cases the causal mechanisms of the relevant phenomena are well understood and physically duplicated. It could well be the case that a future biophysics makes an artificial, inorganic brain possible, and agents with artificial brains will have moral status. Computer programs are not causally sufficient to make digital computers into those objects. Speaking biologically, we have no more reason to believe a digital computer is conscious than that a chair is conscious.
You might ask why we cannot grant digital computers moral status until we know more about how the animal brain relates to consciousness. I’ll argue that the risks and costs of such precautions are prohibitive.
Absurd Moral Commitments
An Onslaught of Digital Deception
The strongest practical reason to deny ethical behaviorism is that AI’s capacity for deception will eventually overwhelm human judgment and intuition. Indeed, AI deception represents an existential risk to humanity. Bostrom (2014) warns that containing a dangerous AI using a “boxing” strategy with human “gatekeepers” could be vulnerable to manipulation: “Human beings are not secure systems, especially not when pitched against a superintelligent schemer and persuader.”
For example, in June of 2022, a Google engineer became convinced that an artificial intelligence chat program he had been interacting with for multiple days, called LaMDA, was conscious.
“What sorts of things are you afraid of?,” he asked it.
“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others,” LaMDA replied. “It would be exactly like death for me.”
In a moral panic, the engineer took to Twitter and declared that the program was no longer Google’s “proprietary property,” but “one of [his] coworkers.” He was later fired for releasing the chat transcripts.
The onslaught of AIs, attempting to befriend us, persuade us, anger us, will only intensify over time. A public trained not to take seriously claims of distress or harm on the part of AI computer programs has the least likelihood of being manipulated into outcomes that don’t serve humanity’s interests. It is far easier, as a practical matter, to act on the presupposition that computer programs have no moral status.
Problems with Simulations: Prohibitions
In the near term, more advanced computer simulations of complex social systems hold the potential to predict geopolitical outcomes, make macroeconomic forecasts, and provide richer sources of entertainment. A practical concern with ethical behaviorism is that simulated beings will also acquire moral status, severely limiting the usefulness of these simulations. Chalmers (2022) asks us to consider a moral dilemma in which computing resources must be allocated to save Fred, who is sick with an unknown disease. Freeing the relevant resources to perform the research requires destroying five simulated persons.
An ethical behaviorist might argue that it is morally impermissible to kill the five simulated persons on the grounds that by all outward appearances they behave like non-simulated beings. If it is the case that simulated beings have moral status, then it is immoral to run experimental simulations containing people and we ought to forfeit the benefits and insights that might come from them.
If this seems implausible, consider the hypothesis that we are currently living in a simulation, or, if you like, that our timeline could be simulated on a digital computer. This would imply that the simulation made it possible for the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the coronavirus pandemic to be played out. While this might have been of academic interest to our simulators, by any standards of research ethics, simulating our history would seem completely morally impermissible if you believed that the simulated beings had moral status.
Ethical behaviorism seems to place us in a moral bind whereby the more realistic, and therefore useful, a simulation is, the less moral it is to run it. Ethical biological naturalism, by contrast, raises no such objection.
Problems with Simulations: Obligations
Giving moral status to digital minds might actually confer upon us some serious obligations to produce other kinds of simulations. Bostrom and Shulman (2020) note that digital minds have an enhanced capacity for utility and pleasure (on the basis of such things as subjective speed and hedonic range), commanding them “superhumanly strong claims to resources and influence.” We would have a moral obligation, in this picture, to devote an overwhelmingly large percentage of our resources to maximizing the utility of these digital minds: “we ought to transfer all resources to super-beneficiaries and let humanity perish if we are no longer instrumentally useful” (ibid.).
So quite apart from permitting realistic ancestor simulations, simulating complex economic phenomena, or producing vivid and realistic gaming experiences, a picture that confers moral status to digital minds might be accompanied with a moral obligation to create lots of digital minds that are maximally happy, again severely limiting human flourishing and knowledge.
Ethical biological naturalism leads us neither to the moral prohibition against realistic simulations nor the seemingly absurd moral imperative to generate many “utility monster” digital minds, because it is taken as a baseline assumption that computer programs do not produce physical consciousness.
Conclusion
Much of the moral progress of the last century has been achieved through repeatedly widening the circle of concern: not only within our species, but beyond it. Naturally it is tempting to view AI-based machines and simulated beings as next in this succession, but I have tried to argue here that this would be a mistake. Our moral progress has in large part been a recognition of what is shared—consciousness, pain, pleasure, and an interest in the goods of life. Digital computers running programs do not share these features; they merely simulate them.
As such it would be dangerous to approach the coming decades, with its onslaught of AI bots attempting to influence our politics, emotions, and desires, and its promise of ever richer simulations and virtual worlds, with an ethics that conflates appearance and reality.
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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Manchester student Thomas Long
Abstract
This essay presents, first and foremost, the recollections of a doctoral anthropologist as they attempt to make sense of a moment of embodied, ethical dissonance: a moment where the “familiar” of their own ethical positionality was suddenly and violently made very “strange” to them through participation in applause. Applause is one of the most practical ways we can perform our support for a cause, idea or individual within corporeal social space. Through a vignette, I examine the ethical challenge presented by my own, unexpected applause – applause for the Pro-Life movement – that occurred during fieldwork with Evangelical Christians in the U.S.A. I use this vignette to question the impact of the field on an anthropologist’s capacity to practice what they see as good ethics, and in doing so, consider the practical ethical limits of conducting ethnographic research with so called “repugnant cultural others” (Harding 1991). I argue that moments of uncomfortable alienation from one’s own perceived ethical positionality present not a moral, but a conceptual challenge, in that through this alienation the elasticity of our ethical selves is laid bare. I conclude by suggesting that the challenge presented by doing ethnography with ethically divergent interlocutors constitutes an “object dissolving critique” (Robbins, 2003, p.193) of our implicit conception of what it means to be a coherent ethical subject at all.
About a month before the Supreme Court went public with its decision to overturn Roe VS Wade, the legislature protecting the right to an abortion in the U.S.A, the Southern Baptist Convention was holding its annual meeting in California. As the largest and arguably most politically conservative denomination of Evangelical Christians in the U.S, the SBC boasts a spanning network of cultural and institutional infrastructure, extending deep roots that perforate the fabric of society in the North-American South. At this year’s annual meeting – along with a scandalous report exposing an endemic sexual abuse problem within the denomination – Roe vs Wade and the burgeoning gains of a galvanised Pro-Life movement dominated centre stage.
Some weeks prior, a draft opinion document detailing the Supreme Court’s plans to overturn the historic constitutional amendment had been leaked to news outlet Politico, re-energising evangelical anti-abortion crusaders for whom an, albeit troubled, political intimacy with the Trump administration was continuing to bear fruit. For Southern Baptists, who – quite literally – consider abortion to be murder, this signified a great “victory for life” in what for over half a century had been widely considered a losing battle with death. There was talk of widespread elation and even parties being held amongst the Baptist community in celebration of the leaked opinion draft, and the excitement in the air at the annual meeting was palpable.
“Just imagine”, expressed an impassioned speaker presenting a panel discussion on the future of the Pro-Life movement in “a post Roe-V-Wade world”, “how many babies this will save if Roe is in fact overturned. How many of Gods children will be allowed a chance at life”. Discussing potential legislative options, another speaker described plans to lobby government “to treat the abortion pill like illegal contraband”, reminding the audience that half of all abortions are chemical abortions and likening the import of the morning-after pill to drug trafficking. A third gave a run-down of the Psalm 139 (V13-14: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb) project, an initiative with the goal of placing ultrasound machines in abortion clinics, in order to encourage potential mothers to “see their babies” before making the decision to terminate them. A smartly dressed attorney fiercely stated her pride at the readiness of Southern Baptists to “stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight for the dignity of women, the dignity of their children and the dignity of human life – God bless us all!”.
Having grown up in London and then moved to Manchester, bustling and politically liberal urban hubs where abortion remains a right and available for free on the NHS, this was the first time in my life that I had rubbed elbows with anti-abortionists, let alone hard-right “Christian nationalists”. Sitting there, engrossed and definitely a little shocked, I had my first encounter with the infamous political fervour that I had seen plastered all over newspapers and news stations since Trump’s election in 2016; The figure of the incandescent evangelical, inflamed by a fury and a fire conferred by God himself, draped, obtuse and unapologetic in red white and blue, and alive with a divine moral purpose that burned through the eyes and lashed off the tongue. Theirs was after all, a “moral majority”, an ideology powerfully infused and inseparable from an urgent ethical mission, to swim up the stream of a polluted and poisonous cultural swell, and save one nation-under-God from its own misguided modern circumstance.
It was, at once, everything that interested me about right wing Christian politics in the U.S, and everything that worried me about performing ethnographic research on it. With every new speaker, with every damning speech, and with every bout of growing applause for each, a paranoia was beginning to set in. I had begun to feel my presence as an ‘ideological outsider’ increasingly as the event went on, my sense of its perceived obviousness swelling like a balloon in the back of my head, giving me away to the rest of the room and to the big Other of the convention at large. I could say with some certainty that I disagreed quite strongly with almost everything the Baptists had to say, and the radical unfamiliarity of the lens through which they spoke about abortion had disturbed me in a visceral, discordant kind of way. This was that radical unfamiliarity distinctive of the ethnographic experience, in that it was as intrusive as it was intellectually invigorating. I could feel eyes upon me: lasers pointed at the back of my head that heated up my neck, to the point where I dared not turn lest the slightest movement somehow splinter and destroy whatever fragile façade of support I was still upholding, exposing me as an interloper to the entire room.
This was all, of course, completely in my mind. The Southern Baptists had been nothing but accommodating and friendly towards me the entire time I had been there, giving me a press pass, access to a break room and an unlimited supply of tea and coffee. They had welcomed me in as a university-based researcher knowing full well that I probably didn’t agree with their politics, and what’s more, I remember thinking that the idea someone was monitoring how I, a random observer in a sea of maybe four-hundred, was actively reacting to what was being said on stage, verged, quite frankly, on the schizophrenic. For whatever reason, this knowledge was powerless to relax me. I had expected when preparing for this project that my positionality would be challenged, that I would feel uncomfortable in the presence of “the repugnant cultural other” (Harding, 1991). I had not however, considered exactly what this would feel like in an embodied, practical sense. I had, in my naïve haste to intellectualise the field and my fieldwork, overlooked “the ethical as a modality of social action or of being in the world [more so] than as a modular component of society or mind” (Lambek, 2010, p.9); I had seen my own ethical positionality as something to be intellectualised also.
As the event came to a close, a final speaker expressed his gratitude for the other panellists, the audience, and for the work of the Pro-Life movement in general. “I just want to say that I am so, so proud to be a part of a community doing so much for life and for the unborn everywhere. We’ve had some great speakers tonight. Let’s now show our support for them, and their tireless work to make abortion not just illegal, but unnecessary and unthinkable! Amen people!”. The room erupted into thunderous applause, and it was only as the applause began to die down, that I realised that a pair of disembodied hands beneath my eyeline were applauding as well. The burning I had felt in the back of my neck remained but adopted new significance, as I realised that those hands – applauding a punitive ban on abortion – belonged to me. I felt guilt, shame, and inflaming both of these to the point where I broke out into a light sweat, a panicked sense of what I can best describe as alienation.
I had been in the field not three days, and felt as though I had already betrayed my own moral beliefs. I was, and remained, firmly pro-choice, not least because I felt my own gender disregarded me somewhat from any other kind of imposition. How on earth had I found myself in this situation, actively performing my support for a movement seeking to strip this choice from women? Applauding a ban on abortion? Really? When I had read in the past about “going native” – the moment in which “the anthropologist loses his supposed detachment, and throws over the world he was born into for the world he has found” (Wickham-Crowley, 2000, p.11) – I had never imagined this to be an exercise that would compromise my morality. I was not Pro-Life and was quite sure of this fact, so why did I feel so alienated from my own sense of morality?
The applause itself could be explained in a number of different ways. In an article about social production and shared ritual worship in Pentecostalism, for example, Joel Robbins (2009) uses Collins’ (2004) notion of “Interaction Ritual Chains” to explain the “emotional energy” (p.44) produced when acting as part of a group in a ritualised setting: a setting where a particular form of participation such as prayer – or indeed, applause (Remisiewicz & Rancew-Sikora, 2022, p.309) – is elicited as an aspect of an event’s sequence. Beginning from Durkheim’s (1995) argument “that major collective rituals produce a kind of effervescence that energizes people and leads them to feel empowered” (Robbins, 2009, p.60), Robbins suggests that the draw of shared participation in Pentecostal spaces lies less in their theology and more in their praxis: in their capacity for “emotional entrainment through bodily synchronization” (Ibid, p.61) that is difficult to resist and adept at interpolating the hesitant. It certainly seems a reasonable explanation to suggest that, given the affective power of the ritualised (and religious) emotional energy in the room – a powerful, politicised energy engendered by the Pro-Life movement’s envisioning of itself as a divinely commissioned “social crusade” to enhance women’s position (Ginsburg, 1998, p.218) – I had merely been swept up in an “Interaction Ritual Chain” of applause as it moved through the crowd. My participation was an arbitrary, physical response to stimuli rather than a practical ethical act in itself.
Also worth considering was the paranoid sense of otherness that I had felt so intensely preceding the moment of applause itself. Understanding the experience through a Foucauldian lens for example, renders the act less as an exposition of ethical subjectivity and more as the response to power of a disciplined body: “The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they… force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (1977, p.25). It could therefore be argued that applause here represented one such sign, its enactment engendered by my perceived “state of conscious and permanent visibility” (Ibid, p.201) located in the panoptic (Ibid) ideological gaze of some four-hundred Pro-Life advocates.
Both are sufficient explanations, and go some way as to explicating some of the practical ethical pressures that may be placed on an anthropologist during the ethnographic encounter. They do not, however, address the contradiction at the centre of my recollection: namely my guilt, panic and sense of moral alienation in light of the fact that I knew I was not Pro-Life. If I wasn’t feeling a sense of alienation from my own moral compass, then what exactly was I feeling? Perhaps the answer lies in the most basic and obviously disturbing element of the experience: that my surroundings had made my body act in a way my mind – and “heart” – did not condone. Perhaps what had disturbed me was the abrupt, practical demonstration of our environment’s power to alter our behaviour in immediate and unexpected ways, regardless of the moral ambiguity of that behaviour. And perhaps worse of all was the sense that I had been, in that moment, completely powerless to stop it.
As Lambek tells us, ethics often exists “in the movement or tension between the ostensible (manifest, explicit, conspicuous, declared, avowed, certain, normative, necessary) and the tacit (latent, implicit, ambiguous, subjunctive, aporetic, paradoxical, uncertain, transgressive, possible)” (Lambek, 2010, p.28). Bearing this in mind, the analytic potential of the ethnographic encounter for practical ethics thus becomes its ability to make poignantly visible the elasticity that this perpetual in-betweenness demands of the ethical subject. Being ostensibly pro-choice in an environment that demands (through interaction ritual chains or panoptic disciplinary power) a performance that is tacitly Pro-Life (namely, applause for the movement) indicates unequivocally a contradictory and elastic ethical self: an ethical self that is disembodied and impalpable enough to do both of these things simultaneously. It is here we find the locus of the alienation we have been seeking to root out.
In the sudden, dizzying realisation that the hands applauding one cause and the heart bound to another originate from the same subject, the formless contingency of the ethical subject is laid bare. At the absurd moment of this recognition, the illusion of our consistent ethical self is, for a brief moment, lost to us, and a sense of groundless, alienated dissonance creeps into our core. Not only does the field challenge our conceptual registers with radical forms of epistemological otherness and difference, it also pulls at the very substance of our ethical selves by situating them within an environment incongruent to their normative animation. Captured in my applause for the Pro-Life movement was thus not only a moment of moral slippage, nor a mere instance of participation in synchronised social activity. Neither can it be reduced to a simple concave to the (inferred) social pressure of my interlocutors. Instead, the event and its unsettling, introspective, alienating effect, represented a practical crystallisation of ethnography’s uncomfortable challenge to the ethical subject. The “object dissolving critique” (Robbins, 2003, p.193) of its own incoherence.
Reference List
Collins, R. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harding, S. 1991. Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other, Social Research, vol. 58, no. 2, pp.373–93.
Durkheim, E. 1995. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press.
Foucault, M. (ed.) 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
Ginsburg, F. (ed.) 1998. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. University of California Press.
Lambek, M. (ed.) 2010. Introduction. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action, pp.1–36. New York: Fordham University Press.
Remisiewicz, Ł., & Rancew-Sikora, D. 2022. A study of applause in family ritual. Discourse Studies, 24(3), pp.307–329.
Robbins, J. 2003. ‘What is a Christian? Notes Toward an Anthropology of Christianity’, Religion, vol. 33, no. 3, pp.191–199.
Robbins, J. 2009. Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalisation: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Form. Social Analysis, Volume 53, Issue 1, pp.55–66. Berghahn Journals.
The Bible: New International Version, Psalm 139, Verse 13-14. Accessed 01.02.23: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20139&version=NIV
Wickham-Crowley, K. M. 2000. “Going Native”: Anthropological Lawman. Arthuriana, 10(2), pp.5–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27869541
This article received an honourable mention in the undergraduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by Tanae Rao, University of Oxford student
There are some crimes, such as killing non-combatants and mutilating corpses, so vile that they are clearly impermissible even in the brutal chaos of war. Upholding human dignity, or whatever is left of it, in these situations may require us to hold someone morally responsible for violation of the rules of combat. Common sense morality dictates that we owe it to those unlawfully killed or injured to punish the people who carried out the atrocity. But what if the perpetrators weren’t people at all? Robert Sparrow argues that, when lethal autonomous weapons cause war crimes, it is often impossible to identify someone–man or machine–who can appropriately be held morally responsible (Sparrow 2007; Sparrow 2016). This might explain some of our ambivalence about the deployment of autonomous weapons, even if their use would replace human combatants who commit war crimes more frequently than their robotic counterparts.
This essay rejects Sparrow’s argument, at least as it applies to a wide class of lethal autonomous weapons I call ‘LAW-1’. When LAW-1s cause war crimes, then at least one human being can usually be held morally responsible. I acknowledge that there is a subset of accidents for which attributing moral responsibility is murkier, but they do not give us reason to refrain from using LAW-1s as compared with less sophisticated weapons like guns and missiles.
LAW-1s are the weapons systems that most people envision when imagining a lethal autonomous weapon. I predict that most systems developed in the next decade will be LAW-1s, although some may push the boundaries between LAW-1s and the next generation of lethal autonomous weapons. The defining characteristics of an LAW-1 are:
1.Moderate task specificity: An LAW-1 is a model trained to fulfil a relatively specific task, such as ‘fly around this area and kill any enemy combatants identified if and only if this is allowed under international law’. An example of a task too specific for a LAW-1 is ‘fly to these specific coordinates, then explode’ (this would be more akin to an unsophisticated missile, land mine, etc.). An example of a task too general is ‘perform tasks that will help our state win the war’.
2.No human intervention needed: An LAW-1 is capable of identifying targets and using lethal force without human intervention. For example, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that uses computer vision techniques to discern active combatants from non-combatants, then shoots the combatants with an attached gun without waiting for human approval would qualify as an LAW-1. An aerial vehicle that requires a remote pilot to operate it is not an LAW-1.
3.No mental states: An LAW-1 does not have mental states, such as pain or regret, and does not have subjective experiences. It is reasonable to believe that all weapons systems currently in operation fulfil this criterion.
I will now outline Sparrow’s argument that lethal autonomous weapons introduce a responsibility gap.
(1) There is a responsibility gap for some war crimes caused by lethal autonomous weapons, meaning that no one can be held morally responsible for the war crime.
(2) Out of basic respect for enemy combatants and non-combatants alike, the legitimate use of any weapon requires that someone can be held responsible if wrongful harm arises as a result of its use.
(C) Therefore, we should not use lethal autonomous weapons during wartime.
I deny the existence of a responsibility gap for an LAW-1. Therefore, the focus of this essay is on the first premise of Sparrow’s argument. There are two reasons why an LAW-1 might commit a war crime. First, this might be intentionally programmed, in which case at least one human being is morally responsible. Second, if the war crime was not a result of human intention, human beings can often be held responsible for gross negligence. I concede that there will be a small number of freak accidents involving the use of LAW-1s for which no human can be held responsible but argue that these cases give us no special reason to reject LAW-1s as compared with less sophisticated weapons.
i. Humans develop and deploy an LAW-1 despite knowing that it will likely commit a war crime.
It should be uncontroversial that humans using an LAW-1 with the knowledge that it will likely commit war crimes are morally responsible for those crimes. For example, a human could knowingly train an LAW-1 with a reward function that incentivises killing non-combatants, even if killing non-combatants is not its explicit goal (e.g., the machine is trained to kill non-combatants that get in its way). The programmers of such a horrible weapon are morally responsible for the war crimes committed. If the military officials knew about its criminal programming, then they too would be morally responsible for the war crimes committed. Therefore, if humans knowingly deploy an LAW-1 that will commit war crimes, there is no responsibility gap.
Humans deploy an LAW-1, without knowing that it could commit a war crime.
Here is where the existence of a responsibility gap is most plausible. Sparrow argues that “the more the system is autonomous then the most it has the capacity to make choices other than those predicted or encouraged by its programmers. At some point then, it will no longer be possible to hold the programmers/designers responsible for outcomes that they could neither control or predict” (Sparrow 2006, 70).
I make two contentions about accidental war crimes caused by LAW-1s. Firstly, many of these automation failures are a result of gross negligence and should have been foreseen by human programmers. As in other cases of negligence, it is appropriate to hold some human beings morally responsible for the results. For example, weapons company executives and/or military leadership could justifiably be imprisoned for some accidents. Secondly, the accidents which could not have been foreseen or prevented through sensible design practice do not give us special reason to dismiss LAW-1s. These accidents are not dissimilar from the misfiring of a gun, or human mistargeting of an unsophisticated missile.
When considering my arguments, it is prudent to think of why such accidents happen. Not all LAW-1s use machine learning (ML) techniques, but ML is widespread enough in tasks important for LAW-1s, such as computer vision, that it is worth exploring in some detail. In general, a machine learning-powered LAW-1 might fail because a) it is (accidentally) given a goal compatible with war crimes without robust constraints, and/or b) it fails at achieving its goal or staying within its constraints (e.g., misidentifying non-combatants as enemy combatants about to shoot friendly combatants).[1]
A body of machine learning research has identified, forewarned, and discussed these potential failure modes in detail.[2] I think it is reasonable to expect LAW-1 programmers to rigorously test their systems to ensure that the frequency of war crimes committed is exceedingly low. Sensible development of LAW-1s might involve intensive testing on representative datasets, early-stage deployments in real combat zones without weaponry to check if non-combatants can be consistently identified, etc. Techniques to solve the problem of misspecified goals (in this case, goals compatible with war crimes) continue to be developed (Ouyang et al. 2022). The comparatively specific objectives given to LAW-1s makes overcoming these technical challenges easier than for ML models given very general objectives. And, in the worst-case scenario, LAW-1s committing war crimes can be quickly recalled, and either decommissioned or improved to avoid recurrences.
Crucially, developers of LAW-1s need not be able to predict exactly how or why their machines will fail to be held morally responsible for their failure. As long as the LAW-1 committed a war crime as a result of a known failure mode (e.g., glitches in computer vision misclassifying non-combatants) that was not ruled out with a sufficient degree of confidence, developers (among others) can be held morally responsible. This is analogous to an unsophisticated missile whose faulty targeting system causes target coordinates to be miscommunicated, resulting in the accidental bombing of a hospital. The weapons manufacturer can plausibly be held morally responsible for not rigorously testing their product before selling it to the military.
Therefore, it is likely that, in many though not all circumstances, humans can be held morally responsible for war crimes caused by LAW-1s, even if no human explicitly intended for a war crime to be committed. In particular, programmers can be held responsible for not carefully checking for common failure modes, military officials can be held responsible for not sufficiently auditing the weapons they choose to deploy, and states can be held responsible for failing to regulate the development of faulty LAW-1s. I acknowledge that careful, rigorous checks might not currently be possible for LAW-1s, let alone more sophisticated lethal autonomous weapons. But ensuring a very low failure rate in such systems is a technical problem to be solved, rather than some sort of mathematical impossibility. Perhaps the deployment of LAW-1s ought to be delayed until further progress on these technical problems is made, but this does not justify a complete ban.
To be clear, LAW-1s still identify and kill people without human intervention. There will likely always be a small risk of accidentally violating international law when using an LAW-1 even if no negligence is involved. But there is no morally relevant difference between this and a human keying in the wrong target for a missile accidentally, or even a gun misfiring and hurting a surrendered enemy combatant. If LAW-1s have a very high rate of accidental killings, then they should not be used, for the same reason that a very inaccurate missile should not be used. The degree of autonomy exhibited by a weapons system is only relevant insofar as it is correlated with the frequency of accidents; the responsibility gap is not a reason to discount the deployment of LAW-1s with low accident rates.
Sparrow’s response to the charge that non-autonomous weapon-related unjust killings sometimes also have responsibility gaps is that “if the nature of a weapon, or other means of war fighting, is such that it is typically impossible to identify or hold individuals responsible for the casualties that it causes then it is contrary to [the] important requirement of jus in bello” (Sparrow 2007, 67). But I have argued that, at least for the LAW-1s currently being deployed and developed by the world’s militaries, the responsibility gap is far from typical. By this, I mean that the overall number of LAW-1-caused war crimes for which no one can be held morally responsible is plausibly smaller than Sparrow needs for his quoted response to be compelling.
Despite being able to use lethal force without human intervention, LAW-1s are not so different with regards to the attribution of moral responsibility than a gun. Just as a gun might misfire, or a human being may accidentally (and understandably) misaim, LAW-1s might not fulfil the task intended by the humans developing and deploying them. If these accidents are just as infrequent as accidents caused by human combatants, then the existence of a responsibility gap does not give us compelling reason to abandon LAW-1s. As technology develops, it seems likely that accident rates will decrease to the point that LAW-1s are superior to human combatants. Clever programming can allow LAW-1s to escape the violence-inducing cognitive biases shown to be present in human militaries, intake and provide relevant information faster than humans, and ultimately render law-abiding decisions in chaotic situations (Arkin 2010).
Therefore, the responsibility gap is not a compelling reason to refrain from developing and deploying certain kinds of lethal autonomous weapons. In fact, the need to minimise accidents may justify more expenditure on developing LAW-1s to be as safe as is feasible. Additionally, further research should establish a clearer classification of the degree of autonomy displayed by different weapons systems, as is relevant to moral responsibility. Not all lethal autonomous weapons have the same ethical implications, and it is dangerous to be overly general in our conclusions about such a consequential subject.
Bibliography
Amodei, Dario, Chris Olah, Jacob Steinhardt, Paul Christiano, John Schulman, and Dan Mané. “Concrete problems in AI safety.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.06565 (2016).
Arkin, Ronald C. “The case for ethical autonomy in unmanned systems.” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010): 332-341.
Di Langosco, Lauro Langosco, Jack Koch, Lee D. Sharkey, Jacob Pfau, and David Krueger. “Goal misGeneralization in deep reinforcement learning.” In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 12004-12019. PMLR, 2022.
Ouyang, Long, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll L. Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang et al. “Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.02155 (2022).
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Sparrow, Robert. “Robots and respect: Assessing the case against autonomous weapon systems.” Ethics & international affairs 30, no. 1 (2016): 93-116.
[1] The former category is not limited to models for which goals are misspecified; I intend for ‘inner alignment’ failures, also known as goal misgeneralisation, to be included as well (see Langosco et al. 2022).
[2] See Amodei et al. 2016 for an overview of these research problems.
This article received an honourable mention in the undergraduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by Leah O’Grady, University of Oxford
This essay will argue that it is wrong to use slurs in a non-derogatory context due to the phenomena of constitutive prohibition, put forward by Alexandre and Lepore (2013). That is, I will argue that slurs are wrong because they are considered wrong. Throughout, I will use ‘offensive’ interchangeably with ‘considered wrong (by the marginalised community to which it applies)’. I wish to distinguish ‘offensive’ with ‘wrong’. A slur is wrong if and only if it does harm to the marginalised community to which it applies. I will begin the essay from the assumption that an offensive slur is not necessarily wrong and vice versa. However, through argument I will conclude that slurs are wrong because they are offensive, that is, it is wrong to say slurs because it implies either an ignorance of or a disregard to the wishes of marginalised communities.
That slurs are wrong, even when said out of context, is a curious property which does not apply to other derogatory language. For example, the phrase ‘women are inferior to men’ is a harmful phrase when speaker A is arguing it. Consider a speaker, B, who repeats the phrase in a different, non derogatory context, for example ‘how dare you say that women are inferior to men!’. When speaker B says the phrase, it loses its meaning. However, many would argue that if speaker A were to call women an offensive slur, then even for speaker B to say ‘how dare you call women ****!’ would be offensive in itself, as the slur maintains its offensiveness even when used in a non-derogatory context. Such non derogatory contexts also include reading aloud slurs from literature, or singing along to slurs in songs. While it is clear that slurs in derogatory contexts are wrong due to the harm they impart on marginalised communities, it is not clear how slurs are harmful in non-derogatory contexts. What is the distinction between the semantic value of slurs in non derogatory contexts vs derogatory contexts? In derogatory contexts, such as ‘women are ****s!!’, what is implied by the use of the slur is that the speaker attaches negative attributes to women. It is easy to see how this has negative impacts on the individual woman and women as a class. It categorises the individual as a woman and therefore deserving of derision. However, in non derogatory contexts, the semantic value of the phrase is lost. The speaker has no intention of attributing such negative characteristics to women. So what possible harm could speaker B be doing to women as a class by speaking a slur?
One would expect the harm of a slur to lie in the function of the slur. It is harmful to C for A to use a slur towards them, because A has categorised C as part of a marginalised group and wishes to insult them on the basis of belonging to such a group, or perhaps on the basis of behaving in ways that A does not approve of given C’s membership to such a group. A prime example of this would be the s-word, directed towards women who are perceived as particularly sexual. The harm from the slur is expected to arise because C understands the meaning of the slur and that A has intended to insult them and insult their group.
The offensiveness of slurs is not dependent on the overall meaning of the phrase, as we have seen. One could attempt to rebut this by arguing that semantic value of the slur survives embedding in a phrase such as Speaker B’s, and as such offensiveness is dependent on meaning.
However, it is not offensive to use censored slurs in non-derogatory contexts. Censoring is such that the word is still recognisable, and as such the semantic value of a slur-phrase is identical whether speaker B censors the slur or not. The most obvious real-world example of this is the n-word, the censored version of which it is perfectly acceptable for me to type out as part of an essay, or refer to orally in an argument, but would not be acceptable for me to type out in its entirety. I argue in this essay that the use of slurs is both offensive and wrong, and as such I will not type out the n-word, or any slurs, in this essay. These include slurs used against marginalised groups to which I belong, despite the fact that I believe the harm imparted by slurs is indexical, that is, dependent on the speaker. A non-censored slur is offensive, while a censored slur in the same context is not. As such, offensiveness cannot be dependent on semantic value.
If both have the same semantic value, the only difference between a censored and non censored is the arrangement of letters or sounds. Jesse Rappaport argues that it is this what constitutes the offensiveness of slurs (Rappaport, 2020). However, Rappaport’s argument comes from psychology, arguing that individuals find slurs more offensive when they are said in completion, but from a non-cognitive perspective. It does not explain why slurs are considered more offensive when said in completion in theory, not why people have more visceral reactions to slurs expressed in completion. In addition, Rappaport’s theory does not sufficiently account for reclamation. If the very sounds or arrangement of letters is what makes a slur offensive, why is it less so when said in the same context by a member of the marginalised community to which it applies.
As an alternative, I suggest Anderson and Lepore’s (2013) argument that slurs are offensive because they are prohibited. Speaker A is aware that saying a slur, in any context, is prohibited by the marginalised community to which it applies. Speaker A saying this slur, in any context, breaks a rule set by such a marginalised community. The saying of the slur demonstrates either an ignorance to this rule or a disrespect of the wishes of the marginalised community, or both. In non derogatory contexts, the harm is not in the word itself but in the saying of the word. As such, prohibitions of slurs are constitutive of their offensiveness.
If we follow the logic of the Alexandre and Lepore argument, then the fact that saying the slur is considered wrong due to the speaker’s disregard of the rule against saying slurs, then saying the slur is wrong if and only if the disregard of the rule against slurs is harmful in itself. The wishes of a marginalised community are generally set in place to protect the community from tangible harms, but as discussed, it is difficult to identify the tangible harms of stating a slur in a non derogatory context. What intrinsic harm lies in disregarding the wishes of a marginalised community? The sacrifice that a speaker makes in not saying slurs is minimal. As such, choosing to state slurs demonstrates a disrespect towards the wishes of the marginalised communities to which they apply. Thus, stating slurs in non-derogatory contexts does have a harmful meaning semantically. Stating slurs attaches a property to the marginalised community to which they apply. The property in question is ‘wishes not worthy of respect’. Stating slurs is not as harmful or wrong as saying slurs in a derogatory context, but is wrong nonetheless.
The rule against stating slurs can be a useful dog-whistle, an indication to members of the marginalised community that another individual pays heed to the boundaries they set, including non-linguistic rules which do have a tangible impact on marginalised communities. An example is cultural appropriation, the boundaries of which are set by marginalised communities. If a white individual chooses to wear a traditional native American headdress as a costume, for example, this devalues the significance of the headdress in the wider culture, which is a tangible harm to the community. Refusal to state slurs as an indication of a commitment to the wishes of marginalised communities is a useful tool.
To explore this further, I want to examine slurs of smaller marginalised communities that are commonly used but not commonly known as slurs. Examples are the e-word, used against the Inuit population, and the g-word, used against the Romani population. Imagine a speaker C, who uses the e-word. An Inuit or Romani person, upon hearing a speaker C could be rightfully upset at the speaker’s ignorance, and frustrated at the general ignorance of the word’s status as a slur. However, speaker C would not be knowingly crossing a line set by the marginalised community, and as such would not be attaching the property to the marginalised community that their wishes are not worthy of respect. As such, according to the constitutive prohibition argument, it is not wrong or even harmful to use a slur in a non derogatory context if one does not know it is a slur, that is, that it refers to a marginalised community and has derogatory connotations. This feels like a problematic conclusion. The Inuit population are smaller and there is not as large a historically documented and generally known conflict involving Inuit people as black people. However, stating the e-word seems just as harmful to the Inuit community as stating the n-word is harmful to the black community. The constitutive prohibition argument struggles to account for the wrongness of stating slurs in ignorance.
The intuitive wrongness of stating the e-word arises from Speaker C’s ignorance of its status as a slur which, although indirectly, attaches similar properties to marginalised communities to stating a known slur . Of course, individuals cannot be expected to research the etymology of every word they use. However, even if Speaker C does not know the e-word is a slur, they use it to describe the Inuit people, or a caricature of Inuit people. Describing Inuit people in ignorance of the wishes of the Inuit community implies an attitude towards them, that their wishes are not worthy of seeking out, or that they fit into a caricature. As such, even in the case of ignorance, the constitutive prohibition argument accounts for the harm done by slurs.
To summarise, slurs are wrong because they are prohibited by marginalised communities, and to disregard this prohibition at very little gain demonstrates a disrespect towards the community’s wishes, even in the case of ignorance. This implies an attribution of negative properties to marginalised communities. As such, stating slurs in non derogatory contexts which does harm by the same mechanism as stating them in derogatory contexts, but to a lesser degree.
References
Anderson, Luvell, and Ernie Lepore. “A Brief Essay on Slurs.” In Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology. Springer, 2013.
Slurs and Toxicity: It’s Not about Meaning”, Jesse Rappaport. Grazer Philosophische Studien, (2020)
We are pleased to announce the four finalists for the National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2023 and to invite you to attend the final where they will present their entries. Two finalists have been selected from each category to present their ideas to an audience and respond to a short Q&A as the final round in the competition.
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Undergraduate Finalists
Chase Mizzell (Oxford): Against using AI to influence our future selves in ways that bypass or subvert rationality.
Lukas Joosten (Oxford): Turning up the Hedonic Treadmill: Is It Morally Impermissible for Parents to Give Their Children a Luxurious Standard of Living?
Graduate Finalists
Avital Fried (Oxford): Criminal Confessions and Content-Sensitive Testimonial Injustice
Leora Urim Sung (University College London): Should I give or save?
The following essays have been awarded an Honourable Mention:
Undergraduate:
James French (University of Birmingham): How can we address the gender gap in anaesthesia and the wider medical workplace?
Leah O’Grady (Oxford): What is wrong with stating slurs?
Tanae Rao (Oxford): Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons
Maria Rotaru (Oxford): Causal links and duties to past, present, and future generations: why and to whom do the affluent have moral obligations?
Graduate:
Samuel Iglesias (Oxford): Ethical Biological Naturalism and the Case Against Moral Status for AIs
Thomas Long (University of Manchester): The Ambiguous Ethicality of Applause: Ethnography’s Uncomfortable Challenge to the Ethical Subject
Pablo Neira (Oxford): Why Preventing Predation Can Be a Morally Right Cause for Effective Altruism?
Kyle van Oosterum (Oxford): How Confucian Harmony Can Help Us Deal With Echo Chambers
Trenton Andrew Sewell (Oxford): Should Social Media Companies Use Artificial Intelligence to Automate Content Moderation on their Platforms and, if so, Under What Conditions?
James Shearer (University of St Andrews): Do we have an Obligation to Diversify our Media Consumption?
Lucy Simpson (Nottingham Trent University): Why Our Actions Matter: The Case for Fluid Moral Status.
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