Login
Remember the early days of the AI hype train, when everyone spent their time making stupid images using text prompts? If you want to recapture the nostalgic haze of, uh, late 2022, Picsart has got you covered. The popular image editor just launched an AI-powered animated GIF generator.
The major difference between earlier text-to-image platforms like DALL-E and Picsart’s new tool is animation. DALL-E is best known for making static images, whereas Picsart’s software creates animated GIFs, just like the ones you’ve been sending in group chats and social media platforms for years. Only, now you don’t have to search for your favorite It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia characters doing outlandish things. You can just make those outlandish things up. You can even make two cats arm wrestle.
Picsart is calling the tool its “most unhinged” platform yet, and it works exactly how you expect. Type a bunch of nonsense into the chat box, wait a minute or so and marvel at your “chaotic and eccentric” creation. The platform’s integrated into the regular Picsart app and is available for iOS devices, Android devices and on the web. You can download the GIF directly to your device to share with your group chat or to send anywhere else.
The images created by this platform are on the cartoony side, so don’t expect photorealism. However, that just adds to the fun. Picsart’s AI GIF generator is available right now, so let the nonsense begin. Just don’t use these tools to make the opening credits for an uber-expensive TV show based on popular comic book characters.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/animated-gif-generator-from-picsart-makes-ai-fun-again-175935532.html?src=rss
Picsart AI GIF Generator
Guy Fieri and dancing corgis popular GIFs.
Wikipedia is moving to the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, from the old version it's used for years. What's the difference? It means that other v4-licensed material can be added to Wikipedia verbatim, it's written with international law in mind, it has simpler attribution requirements, and is easier for laypersons to read and understand. — Read the rest
Some facts:
I’m here for the tiny fraction of 1% of Americans who can grasp that the interpretation of law, including the Constitution itself, is very difficult, especially when you have more than 200 years of precedent to reckon with. Often precedents are inconsistent with one another; previous Supreme Court decisions can be unclear, some of them right from the beginning and others in light of social and political developments that came after they were issued; very few cases make it to the Supreme Court if there are not defensible claims on both sides — if they were easy, they’d have been settled in lower courts, and SCOTUS wouldn’t have agreed to hear them at all.
Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College is a fascinating case, and the opinions, concurrences, and dissents — all 237 pages of them — provide an extraordinary education in the social as well as the legal consequences of hundreds of years of American racism, and in the enormous complications introduced into our system by the arrival in America of large numbers of people who are neither white nor black.
(I’m setting aside, for the moment, Native Americans, who have been a dramatically special case from the beginning — as can be seen in SCOTUS cases from this very term, most notably Haaland v. Brackeen. See this NYT piece on Justice Gorsuch’s passionate commitment to Native American rights.)
I don’t know how you could read the Harvard/UNC case and think that these matters are easily resolved. Those who can’t be bothered to read the details of the case may well find it easy, but then, most issues on most subjects are easy to the uninformed. This is one of those cases in which every argument (opinion, concurrence, dissent) seems convincing — when read in isolation from the others.
I’m working my way through the whole thing, and already have a thousand thoughts. I may report later. But in the meantime, I would just encourage those of you who haven’t read the case, and especially those of you who won’t read the case, to give up the luxury of having an opinion about it.
Arguing with Supreme Court opinions, as one does — in this case Counterman v. Colorado. Now, let me be quick to say that the comment I am making above is really irrelevant to the case, because almost nothing in the opinion or the dissent is about what Counterman did or didn’t do — it’s almost exclusively an in-house debate about what criteria should be used to determine whether given speech-acts are or are nor protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Basically, the judgment of the Court could be summarized thus: “Hey Colorado, you went after Counterman by claiming that he was making ‘true threats’ and further arguing that one should use a reasonable-person standard to decide what makes something a true threat, but you went about it all wrong. The guy may well be guilty of something, but the particular argument you made against him is inconsistent with First Amendment protections, so we’re going to vacate your decision and send it back to you. Please do better in the future.” So now Colorado has to decide whether to try Counterman again using a different set of standards.
I think this decision will be really consequential in the long term. For now just a handful of thoughts:
The bottom line is this: Counterman communicated true threats, which, everyone agrees, lie outside the bounds of the First Amendment’s protection.” Ante, at 4. He knew what the words meant. Those threats caused the victim to fear for her life, and they “upended her daily existence.” Ante, at 2. Nonetheless, the Court concludes that Counterman can prevail on a First Amendment defense. Nothing in the Constitution compels that result. I respectfully dissent.
The other day I mentioned some famous Supreme Court cases that were influenced by public opinion. I had forgotten that a few years ago I wrote a post, no longer online, about one of the most important of them. I’m reposting it here, with minor edits.
Let’s take a look at one of the most widely condemned of SCOTUS decisions, Korematsu vs. the United States. In Korematsu the court allowed the practice of evicting United States citizens, often native-born citizens, from their homes and moving them away from the West Coast simply because they were of Japanese descent. The vote was 6–3, and each of the justices in the majority was appointed by President Roosevelt, the man who issued that order. (In a separate but closely related ruling, issued on the same day, the Court ruled that such citizens, though they could be forced to leave their homes, could not be “detained,” thus depriving the internment camps for Japanese-Americans of legal sanction.)
The chief interest of Korematsu, for today’s reader of the history, is the dissent by Justice Robert Jackson, later to become the Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. In the first stage of his dissent — which you may see in full by going here and scrolling aout three-fourths of the way down — Jackson points out that Fred Korematsu was a natural-born citizen of the United States whose loyalty to his country had never been questioned by anyone. He was merely living and working in the place of his birth (Oakland, California) but was by the Executive Order obliged to turn himself in to military authorities — an obligation that he would not have faced had he been “a German alien enemy, an Italian alien enemy, [or] a citizen of American-born ancestors, convicted of treason but out on parole.” Yet he was different from those others “only in that he was born of different racial stock.” Jackson continues:
Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one’s antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him, for it provides that ‘no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attained.’ Article 3, 3, cl. 2. But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign.
This point would have been sufficient in itself to declare Roosevelt’s order unconstitutional, but Jackson discerned a larger and greater issue at stake:
Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army program for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japanese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself. A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens.
Jackson’s point here is exceptionally acute: this is not as matter of rationalizing — that is, giving an implausible intellectual account of — the order, but rationalizing the Constitution itself. Which is a far more dangerous move.
The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes. All who observe the work of courts are familiar with what Judge Cardozo described as ‘the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limit of its logic.’ A military commander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality, and it is an incident. But if we [i.e., we Justices of the Supreme Court] review and approve, that passing incident becomes the doctrine of the Constitution. There it has a generative power of its own, and all that it creates will be in its own image. Nothing better illustrates this danger than does the Court’s opinion in this case.
People are often automatically dismissive of “slippery-slope” arguments, as though no slopes are ever slippery; but once a metaphor is dead it’s dead. Justice Cardozo’s phrasing may be more useful: “the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limits of its logic.” This tendency is almost inevitable in SCOTUS decisions, because of the power of precedent: only rarely is a decision walked back; rather, a “passing incident” very easily and naturally “becomes the doctrine of the Constitution” when justices see different situations in which it can be applied. All the pressure is on one side, towards expansion rather than contraction of the principle.
Such expansion of a principle is all the more likely to happen when popular opinion, especially elite popular opinion, is also strongly on one side. FDR’s decision to move Japanese-Americans from their homes was quite popular (as were the internment camps) and eight of the Justices had the further pressure of owing their positions on the Court to the Roosevelt. What the Justices needed was a jurisprudential principle substantial enough to make a counterweight to those pressures. All three of the dissenting judges had that principle, but it was most fully developed in and articulated by Jackson.
Not long before his death Justice Antonin Scalia was asked, by law students at Santa Clara University, which Supreme Court opinion he most admired. He named Jackson’s dissent in Korematsu.
Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?
A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.
Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions.
Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”
Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.
I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither.
“Some US lawmakers suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with European countries. This is disingenuous, to say the least.”
My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.
It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops.
Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.
Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.
Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)
A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.
Editor’s note: This year is the second time that Americans celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday. At Public Discourse this week, we offer essays that look back on Juneteenth’s history, and look ahead to consider its place in America’s self-understanding.
Juneteenth is a linguistic compression of the date “June Nineteenth,” with the particular June 19th in view being June 19, 1865. The American Civil War was practically over by that date—the principal Confederate field army under Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia on April 9, 1865, followed by the surrenders of other Confederate forces and the capture of fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis on May 10th. But only practically. The United States government had never recognized the Confederacy as a legal entity, and so there were no peace talks or treaty signings to mark a single end-point to the war; the Confederacy simply expired, and did so unevenly, from place to place. In Texas, there were still enough in the way of organized Confederate forces to fight a pitched battle, at Palmito Ranch on May 12th. Palmito Ranch was not a very large or significant battle, but it ended in the withdrawal of Union soldiers back to the southern Texas port of Brownsville, which they had occupied since 1863. Anyone who wanted to declare the war over might find themselves in more danger than they had imagined.
The same thing was true for slavery, which was the principal cause that triggered the war. President Abraham Lincoln had issued an Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, that declared “forever free” all the slaves in those parts of the breakaway Southern Confederacy not yet returned to Union control. This was an extraordinary step toward the ending of slavery in America, but not the final step. For one thing, Lincoln issued his proclamation on the strength of his “war power” as commander-in-chief, in order to weaken the Confederacy’s powers of resistance. But there was no body of settled law concerning presidential “war powers” in 1863, and even Lincoln was anxious that federal courts might overturn both the proclamation and the freedom it legally awarded to three and a half million black slaves in the Confederacy. For another, the proclamation—precisely because it was a “war powers” document—could only be operative against slavery in the Confederacy; it did not wipe out slavery in the four states where slavery was legal, but which had remained loyal to the Union (Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware).
President Abraham Lincoln had issued an Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, that declared “forever free” all the slaves in those parts of the breakaway Southern Confederacy not yet returned to Union control. This was an extraordinary step toward the ending of slavery in America, but not the final step.
After his reelection to the presidency in November 1864, Lincoln pressed Congress to adopt a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution that would both erase slavery everywhere in the United States and put emancipation beyond the reach of the courts. Congress agreed, by a slim margin, in January 1865. But the amendment would not become legally effective until its ratification by the states, and that would not happen until December 1865. Until then, there was always the chance of a legal or political version of the Palmito Ranch battle that might upset every inch of progress made toward ending slavery.
But the hourglass on these threats was running out swiftly. On May 26th—two weeks after the collision at Palmito Ranch—Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner arranged a formal surrender of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, a surrender confirmed on June 2nd by the last senior Confederate officer in the west, Edmund Kirby Smith. Union commanders were eager to move into Texas as quickly as possible: the Mexican border had been in chaos since the French empire of Napoleon III occupied the former Mexican republic in 1862, and many Confederates were crossing into Mexico to join the French. On June 13th, Union Major General Philip Sheridan, who had been appointed to command the formerly Confederate southwestern states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, directed Major General Gordon Granger (who had been in command of Union troops occupying the strategic port of Mobile, Alabama) to take charge of all Union forces holding points on the Texas Gulf coast and set up his headquarters at the port of Galveston. Chief among his responsibilities would be to “notify the people of Texas” that, under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery had ceased to exist in Texas and that “all slaves are free.”
Gordon Granger was a career U.S. Army officer and a graduate of West Point in the class of 1845 (where he finished a lackluster thirty-fifth in a class of forty-one). He had served in the Mexican War in the Mounted Rifles during Lieutenant General Winfield Scott’s lightning campaign against Mexico City in 1847, and thereafter against the Apache and Comanche in southern Texas. The outbreak of the Civil War brought a demand for anyone with professional experience, and Granger found himself quickly jumped in rank from first lieutenant to command of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry, and then brigadier general of Volunteers, and major general by 1863. One of his superiors characterized Granger as “a man of brains and courage,” but also “blunt to a degree” that would be “well nigh intolerable to strangers.” When an Alabama clergyman asked if Granger intended to require prayers for the president of the United States rather than the Confederacy, Granger sarcastically replied that since the man’s prayers had evidently done little good for Jefferson Davis, “it is no sort of consequence about your prayers, any way.” Still, he served creditably with the Army of the Cumberland at the disastrous battle of Chickamauga, and followed Ulysses Grant in the compensating victory at Chattanooga in 1863, and in 1865 he seemed the perfect choice for coordinating Union occupation of formerly Confederate Texas.
Granger began forwarding troops to Galveston immediately after Sheridan’s order. An advance contingent arrived on June 16th aboard the army transport Corinthian, and Granger arrived in Galveston himself on June 19th, on board the steamer Crescent with “two or three thousand” Union soldiers, and set up headquarters in the Osterman Building. It was at the Osterman Building and other points in Galveston that Granger’s soldiers read and distributed his General Orders No. 3, which (as Sheridan had directed him to do) declared in no uncertain terms that slavery was now over as a fact in Texas, as it had been legally since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Granger even took a small step beyond the ending of slavery, by declaring that the former slaves would now enjoy “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” with their former masters, “and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” On the other hand, Granger did not press beyond that to announce an equality of civil rights (that would not occur until the passage and ratification of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments over the next five years). He assured Galveston’s white inhabitants that “negroes fleeing from the country to this city would not be allowed to live in idleness or become a burthen to the people,” and with his characteristic brusqueness, General Orders No. 3 counseled the freedmen “to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages” and not “to collect at military posts” in any expectation of being “supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Granger only remained in command in Galveston until August 1st, and spent the remainder of his career until his death in 1876 in otherwise routine Army assignments in the west. But celebrations of June 19th began in Galveston with “a grand turn-out and barbeque” as early as 1866, and in 1872, four black leaders in Houston—John Henry “Jack” Yates, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, and David Elias Dibble—purchased a ten-acre “Emancipation Park” that became the focus for “Juneteenth” observations. By 1902, there were “five or six barbeques given by the colored people” in Brazos County alone, despite the sniffing disapproval of disgruntled white Texans that “our carnival-like Juneteenth outings” and “burlesque parade” should be “knocked on the head and done with”—and despite the offer by the “colored people” in 1909 to “prepare a special table for their white friends … so they may have the pleasure of entertaining them.” Juneteenth became “a second Christmas” for black Texans, with “everything especially set aside for that day.”
Celebrations of June 19th began in Galveston with “a grand turn-out and barbeque” as early as 1866, and in 1872, four black leaders in Houston—John Henry “Jack” Yates, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, and David Elias Dibble—purchased a ten-acre “Emancipation Park” that became the focus for “Juneteenth” observations
At first, Juneteenth was only a Texas holiday (and not even a formal state holiday until 1979, even though cities like Austin made it a municipal holiday as early as 1946) and had to compete with fifteen other emancipation holidays observed elsewhere by black Americans. The earliest of these holidays, even before the Civil War, was August 1st, in recognition of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834; yet another, in the District of Columbia, was (and is still) held on April 16th, to mark the signing of the District of Columbia emancipation bill by President Lincoln in 1862. Other holidays included the official ending of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, and the ratification date of the thirteenth amendment. The most prevalent, for decades, was January 1st—“Emancipation Day”—in remembrance of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which featured “Watch Night” church services beginning on New Year’s Eve and lasting into January 1st.
Gradually, however, Juneteenth has superseded even January 1st in importance as a black emancipation holiday. “The way it was explained to me,” recalled one black Texan, “the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed,” but “that’s the day they told them that they was free,” and they “whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light that, and that would be their blast for the celebration.” By the 1920s, there were Juneteenth celebrations in Shreveport, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, with “a parade through the principal downtown streets … and floats showing the gradual progress of the Negro from 1865 to 1920.” Annette Gordon-Reed, a native Texan and legal historian, recalled that, “for my great-grandmother, my grandparents, and relatives in their generation, this was the celebration of the freedom of people they had actually known.”
After World War II, black migration from the rural South to northern cities carried Juneteenth celebrations with it, and black historian Peniel Joseph recalled how “Each year we would commemorate the day, often during a Sunday service and occasionally during vacation Bible school. … I imagined myself as part of the Black Texas community, which dared to believe in dreams of freedom that were once considered impossible.” Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel, Juneteenth, captures the fiery spirit of Juneteenth celebrations when its principal character, Reverend Hickman, describes slavery as a kind of preparation for “the awe-inspiring labor of transforming God’s Word into a lantern,” a preparation that has continued because “He wants a well-tested people to work his will,” even “a new kind of human.” Opal Lee, a retired school teacher from Ft. Worth, began staging symbolic “walks” from Ft. Worth to Washington, D.C., to advocate the designation of Juneteenth as a national holiday, and in 2021, she was rewarded by the passage of a bill creating a national Juneteenth holiday.
Juneteenth has had its ups and downs as “a red-spot day on the calendar.” The foremost chronicler of black holidays, William H. Wiggins, believed that in the 1960s, interest in Juneteenth waned to the point of evaporation, only to be re-invigorated in the 1970s. The principal irony of Juneteenth, however, is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.
Recent philosophy-related news*, and a request…
1. Stephen Kershnar (SUNY Fredonia), whose February 2022 discussion of adult-child sex on the Brain in a Vat podcast sparked viral outrage and led to his removal from campus, has “filed a lawsuit this week in U.S. District Court in Buffalo asking the court to declare that Fredonia’s administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from the classroom after the comments he made on a podcast kicked off a social-media firestorm,” according to the Buffalo News. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed the lawsuit on his behalf, Kershnar says.
UPDATE: Here is the lawsuit and the motion for injunction (via Stephen Kershnar).
2. The editors of Philosophy, the flagship journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, have announced the winners of their 2022 Essay Prize, which was on the topic of emotions. They are: Renee Rushing (Florida State) for her “Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account” and Michael Cholbi for his “Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve.” Mica Rapstine (Michigan) was named the runner-up for his “Political Rage and the Value of Valuing.” The prize of £2500 will be shared between the winners, and all three essays will be published in the October 2023 issue of the journal.
3. Some philosophers are on the new Twitter alternative, Bluesky. Kelly Truelove has a list of those with over 50 followers here. And yes, you can find me (and Daily Nous) on it.
4. One philosopher is among the new members of The American Philosophical Society, a learned society that aims to “honor and engage leading scholars, scientists, and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship.” It is John Dupré of the University of Exeter, who specializes in philosophy of science. The complete list of new members is here. Professor Dupré joins just 21 other philosophers that have been elected into the society since 1957 (the society was founded in 1743).
5. I’ve decided that some news items I had been planning to include in these summary posts over the summer should instead get their own posts. These are posts about philosophers’ deaths and faculty moves. Regarding the former, it would be wonderful if individuals volunteered to write up memorial notices for philosophers they knew, or whose work they are familiar with, including at least the kinds of information I tend to include in these posts (see here). Recently, philosophers Henry Allison, Richard W. Miller, and Donald Munro have died. If you are interested in writing up a memorial notice for one of them, please email me. Generally, over the summer, these posts and faculty move notices may take longer to appear than usual.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Voters outside the Alameda County Courthouse casting their ballots in the 2020 election in Oakland, Calif.
I attended a show-cause hearing for two attorneys and their firm who submitted nonexistent citations and then entirely fictitious cases manufactured by ChatGPT to federal court, and then tried to blame the machine. “This case is Schadenfreude for any lawyer,” said the attorneys’ attorney, misusing a word as ChatGPT might. “There but for the grace of God go I…. Lawyers have always had difficulty with new technology.”
The judge, P. Kevin Castel, would have none of it. At the end of the two-hour hearing in which he meticulously and patiently questioned each of the attorneys, he said it is “not fair to pick apart people’s words,” but he noted that the actions of the lawyers were “repeatedly described as a mistake.” The mistake might have been the first submission with its nonexistent citations. But “that is the beginning of the narrative, not the end,” as again and again the attorneys failed to do their work, to follow through once the fiction was called to their attention by opposing counsel and the court, to even Google the cases ChatGPT manufactured to verify their existence, let alone to read what “gibberish” — in the judge’s description—ChatGPT fabricated. And ultimately, they failed to fully take responsibility for their own actions.
Over and over again, Steven Schwartz, the attorney who used ChatGPT to do his work, testified to the court that “I just never could imagine that ChatGPT would fabricate cases…. It never occurred to me that it would be making up cases.” He thought it was a search engine — a “super search engine.” And search engines can be trusted, yes? Technology can’t be wrong, right?
Now it’s true that one may fault some large language models’ creators for giving people the impression that generative AI is credible when we know it is not — and especially Microsoft for later connecting ChatGPT with its search engine, Bing, no doubt misleading more people. But Judge Castel’s point stands: It was the lawyer’s responsibility — to themselves, their client, the court, and truth itself — to check the machine’s work. This is not a tale of technology’s failures but of humans’, as most are.
Technology got blamed for much this day. Lawyers faulted their legal search engine, Fastcase, for not giving this personal-injury firm, accustomed to state courts, access to federal cases (a billing screwup). They blamed Microsoft Word for their cut-and-paste of a bolloxed notorization. In a lovely Gutenberg-era moment, Judge Castel questioned them about the odd mix of fonts — Times Roman and something sans serif — in the fake cases, and the lawyer blamed that, too, on computer cut-and-paste. The lawyers’ lawyer said that with ChatGPT, Schwartz “was playing with live ammo. He didn’t know because technology lied to him.” When Schwartz went back to ChatGPT to “find” the cases, “it doubled down. It kept lying to him.” It made them up out of digital ether. “The world now knows about the dangers of ChatGPT,” the lawyers’ lawyer said. “The court has done its job warning the public of these risks.” The judge interrupted: “I did not set out to do that.” For the issue here is not the machine, it is the men who used it.
The courtroom was jammed, sending some to an overflow courtroom to listen. There were some reporters there, whose presence the lawyers noted as they lamented their public humiliation. The room was also filled with young, dark-suited law students and legal interns. I hope they listened well to the judge (and I hope the journalists did, too) about the real obligations of truth.
ChatGPT is designed to tell you what you want it to say. It is a personal propaganda machine that strings together words to satisfy the ear, with no expectation that it is right. Kevin Roose of The New York Times asked ChatGPT to reveal a dark soul and he was then shocked and disturbed when it did just what he had requested. Same for attorney Schwartz. In his questioning of the lawyer, the judge noted this important nuance: Schwartz did not ask ChatGPT for explanation and case law regarding the somewhat arcane — especially to a personal-injury lawyer usually practicing in state courts — issues of bankruptcy, statutes of limitation, and international treaties in this case of an airline passenger’s knee and an errant snack cart. “You were not asking ChatGPT for an objective analysis,” the judge said. Instead, Schwartz admitted, he asked ChatGPT to give him cases that would bolster his argument. Then, when doubted about the existence of the cases by opposing counsel and judge, he went back to ChatGPT and it produced the cases for him, gibberish and all. And in a flash of apparent incredulity, when he asked ChatGPT “are the other cases you provided fake?”, it responded as he doubtless hoped: “No, the other cases I provided are real.” It instructed that they could be found on reputible legal databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw, which Schwartz did not consult. The machine did as it was told; the lawyer did not. “It followed your command,” noted the judge. “ChatGPT was not supplementing your research. It was your research.”
Schwartz gave a choked-up apology to the court and his colleagues and his opponents, though as the judge pointedly remarked, he left out of that litany his own ill-served client. Schwartz took responsibility for using the machine to do his work but did not take responsibility for the work he did not do to verify the meaningless strings of words it spat out.
I have some empathy for Schwartz and his colleagues, for they will likely be a long-time punchline in jokes about the firm of Nebbish, Nebbish, & Luddite and the perils of technological progress. All its associates are now undergoing continuing legal education courses in the proper use of artificial intelligence (and there are lots of them already). Schwartz has the ill luck of being the hapless pioneer who came upon this new tool when it was three months in the world, and was merely the first to find a new way to screw up. His lawyers argued to the judge that he and his colleagues should not be sanctioned because they did not operate in bad faith. The judge has taken the case under advisement, but I suspect he might not agree, given their negligence to follow through when their work was doubted.
I also have some anthropomorphic sympathy for ChatGPT, as it is a wronged party in this case: wronged by the lawyers and their blame, wronged by the media and their misrepresentations, wronged by the companies — Microsoft especially — that are trying to tell users just what Schwartz wrongly assumed: that ChatGPT is a search engine that can supply facts. It can’t. It supplies credible-sounding — but not credible — language. That is what it is designed to do. That is what it does, quite amazingly. Its misuse is not its fault.
I have come to believe that journalists should stay away from ChatGPT, et al., for creating that commodity we call content. Yes, AI has long been used to produce stories from structured and limited data: sports games and financial results. That works well, for in these cases, stories are just another form of data visualization. Generative AI is something else again. It picks any word in the language to place after another word based not on facts but on probability. I have said that I do see uses for this technology in journalism: expanding literacy, helping people who are intimidated by writing and illustration to tell their own stories rather than having them extracted and exploited by journalists, for example. We should study and test this technology in our field. We should learn about what it can and cannot do with experience, rather than misrepresenting its capabilities or perils in our reporting. But we must not have it do our work for us.
Besides, the world already has more than enough content. The last thing we need is a machine that spits out yet more. What the world needs from journalism is research, reporting, service, solutions, accountability, empathy, context, history, humanity. I dare tell my journalism students who are learning to write stories that writing stories is not their job; it is merely a useful skill. Their job as journalists is to serve communities and that begins with listening and speaking with people, not machines.
Image: Lady Justice casts off her scale for the machine, by DreamStudio
The post ChatGPT goes to court appeared first on BuzzMachine.
Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a three-part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here.
In the famous story of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, we hear about a woman who faithfully waited for her spouse, Odysseus, to return home from war. Despite the attention of more than a hundred suitors, the queen of Ithaca employs diplomacy and cunning to defer their attentions for twenty years, symbolically weaving and reweaving a burial shroud to buy her time. Not until she could confirm that Odysseus had died was she willing to entertain the idea of remarriage. But what about Odysseus? Was he faithful to her?
It depends on how you look at it. During his arduous ocean journey home, he meets up with two separate seductresses. The first, Circe, uses her magic to charm Odysseus into an intimate relationship as she provides for his every desire. After a year of island comforts, however, he asks her to release him and his crew so they can return home.
The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.
Later in the journey, Odysseus is shipwrecked alone on an island, where the obsessed nymph Calypso makes him her amorous prisoner for seven years. She offers Odysseus immortality if he will stay and become her husband forever. But every day, he goes to the shoreline to weep and pray, longing to return to his wife and son. Eventually, Zeus intercedes, and Calypso is forced to free him. He finally makes it home to an epic reunion with Penelope.
My reading of Odysseus’s entanglements is a merciful one, of a hero who falls but ultimately triumphs in the virtue of fidelity. The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.
What Is Marital Fidelity?
In modern lingo, marital fidelity is often taken to mean abstaining from sex with anyone other than one’s spouse. However, this involves not only an oversimplification, but a hyper-focus on the sexual aspect of marriage. If marriage is what natural law teaches it is, namely, the union of a man and a woman who 1) give their whole selves to each other: minds, wills, hearts, and bodies; 2) are open to begetting children; 3) agree to a lifelong union; and 4) are exclusive (no side-partners allowed), then it’s not merely about keeping our hands off others, but primarily about being faithful to the whole gift of self being given and received in marriage.
Therefore, we can distinguish among different kinds of infidelity that offend different parts of the marital union. Infidelity of mind and will involves intellectually desiring or wishing for intimacy with another person outside the marriage bond—which includes neglecting to care for one’s spouse, even if no other person is involved. Emotional infidelity, on the other hand, involves misdirecting the heart, allowing one’s feelings to attach to someone else, and/or neglecting our spouse’s emotional needs. And physical infidelity, of course, involves the body and includes succumbing to outside physical, including sexual, acts of affection, and/or neglecting our spouse’s physical-sexual needs.
Essentially, it is possible to cheat not only through sex but in several ways, including by creating intellectual and/or emotional bonds with an opposite-sex friend other than our spouse. Indeed, intellectual and emotional infidelity are often the ladder rungs that lead to the slide down into sexual infidelity. We are body-soul unities, and the sharing of our souls (through our minds and emotions) naturally leads to the sharing of our bodies. So, guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternative appeals, as Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.
It takes concerted effort to avoid indiscretions on all these fronts, but that is where the complete gift of the will matters. When fidelity becomes difficult and a thousand Siren songs are playing in our ears, we tie our will to the mast and take the necessary measures to avoid entrapments. This is made easier by the positive effort to focus on weaving (and reweaving) the two strands of the marriage, man and woman, into one. Committed couples strive toward a more perfect union every day, focusing on daily collaboration, mutual understanding, forbearance, making compromises, patiently bearing each other’s faults, displaying good humor, and making creative sacrifices to add joy to the daily grind. In this way, the lion’s share of romantic energy and attention is already in the right place, and there’s not much of either one left over for others!
Guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternate appeals, like Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.
Modern Criticisms of Marital Fidelity
Clearly, marital fidelity involves a lot of hard work, so it’s reasonable to ask: is it worth it? For decades, we have been hounded with messages that nonmarital sex, easy, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex romantic relationships are acceptable, and that we should lighten up on the commitment to faithful marriage as the one and only ideal. Today, we hear new voices calling for society to loosen further, to consider polyamory and support open marriages and polycules, what academics call “consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) relationships.”
Still other (more cantankerous) voices are calling for society to do away with mononormativity altogether (which, like heteronormativity, is used as a term of disparagement—in this case, toward the monogamous ideal). These voices claim it’s discriminatory to put monogamy on a pedestal over and above other romantic relationships.
It’s worth pausing to ask, do they have a point? Or do the cost-benefit scales still tip in favor of fidelity?
Personal Benefits of Marital Fidelity
Social-science research on CNM partnerships is still in its infancy, but the best data to date are not flattering. Participants report lower overall happiness, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction than monogamous couples. Researchers hypothesize that this is due to minority stress, or the social stigma that still exists toward nonmonogamous partners. If only society were more accepting, the story goes, these groups would experience better outcomes. However, experience-based wisdom suggests other reasons related to the nature of the arrangement itself (and not external social factors). Here are a few of the more obvious hypotheses.
First, a firm marital commitment engenders deep psychological benefits. Once the promise to be faithful, exclusive, and permanent is given, and after some time living that way, couples experience a deep sense of psychological peace. Essentially, they realize they can trust each other. Neither has to worry about whether interest is waning, if the other has his or her eyes on the door, or if there might be a new partner on the side.
Fear of the future is also reduced, as faithful couples have confidence that they won’t be all alone as they face tragedy, illness, old age, and finally, death, especially the longer they stick together through hard times. And fears about parenting and children’s futures are reduced, as mothers can count on the father’s help and fathers can count on the mother’s help. As both sexes pour their unique talents into the parenting enterprise, a great synergy of their strengths gives children the best start in life.
By contrast, consensual nonmonogamy promotes distrust, insecurity, and fear. With no promises to be faithful, exclusive, or permanent, these relationships are unstable and prone to dissolution. Naturally, real or perceived comparisons to other sexual partners will lead to deep insecurities and frail self-esteem. The cluster of relationships will feel unfair; someone will certainly feel less loved and valued than others in the group.
Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing. In the case of a polycule, high-maintenance group members (the ill, aging, depressed) will be let go to fend on their own.
Challenges multiply when children enter the question. Fights over different perspectives on childcare and discipline will increase, as the revolving door of lovers means more adult opinions have to be managed about what to do with kids. And there is, of course, a heightened risk of novel sexual disease transmission, with the accompanying stress, accusations, and blaming.
Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing.
Second, permanent marital partnerships accrue material and financial benefits. Faithfully married people are better off financially because they pool their resources, with no sharing with additional romantic partners.
They invest together in their own assets, savings, retirement accounts, and education. This investment includes the manual labor that goes unmonetized—time spent helping with children, chores, and upkeep of other material goods—rather than on outside partners unrelated to the primary home.
Married couples can also sign couple-exclusive contracts with confidence, taking advantage of longer-term opportunities including insurance policies, homeownership, and entrepreneurial endeavors.
Nonmonogamous couples, by contrast, experience greater financial confusion and struggle. Myriad questions about how to handle expenses will bring on stifling decision fatigue. In an open marriage, fights will emerge around who pays for what, lives where, and how much can be spent on new romantic pursuits.
Jealousy seems inevitable as partners spend money on outside relationships, making budgeting an emotional minefield. The instability of polyamorous relationships will preclude much long-term financial strategizing.
Third, faithful marriages generate an ethos of unity. To make the relationship last, spouses must learn to negotiate, compromise, and carve out win-win solutions. Compromise strengthens character and builds emotional resilience. Checks on personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society. Mercy and forbearance are required to hang on, giving rise to more compassionate spouses.
Checks upon personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society.
But open marriages and polycules foment an ethos of division. These relationships give primacy to each individual’s self-actualization through subjective feelings rather than to spousal unity, so tensions and disagreements will more likely to lead to standoffs and exits than to compromises.
Each partner will prefer to release tension outside, on new distractions and abatements, further weakening the primary relationship. Open marriages and polycules will be more susceptible to division and divorce and will bring that spirit of separation to their parenting style, being more willing to separate children from biological parents and established relational bonds. Questions of paternity, fatherly responsibility, and abortion have the potential to sow deep discord and bitter conflict.
Public Benefits of Marital Fidelity
Besides the personal advantages that marital fidelity confers, there are numerous public benefits as well—especially to children and lower income families.
Benefits to children. About 25 percent of the U.S. Population is children, and this sizable portion of our society is also the most vulnerable, dependent on us adults for their well-being. Faithful marriages provide these benefits to kids: 1) A more stable home, meaning greater stability for the child, a greater probability of a lifelong home and family. 2) A safer home, by virtually eliminating the number one risk of child abuse: an unrelated adult male in the home. 3) Higher quality parenting, due to the gender-balanced synergy described above. 4) An anchor for the child’s identity, satisfying the human desire to know and be loved by one’s biological kin. 5) Better educational outcomes, as these kids are statistically more likely to achieve higher grades and degrees, which are correlated with higher earnings later. 6) Increased financial resources, as described above, including inheritance and family-owned assets.
Benefits to the poor and to working-class men. Other vulnerable segments of our society include the poor, and working-class men. Marriage benefits them in several ways: First consider the Success Sequence: 97 percent of millennials who follow the success sequence—that is, they graduate from high school, get a full-time job once their education is completed, and marry before having children—avoid a life of poverty. The power of this sequence, which includes monogamous marriage, can catapult many vulnerable individuals upward.
All the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.
Marriage is also associated with better mental and physical health for men. Men faithfully married to a woman are less likely to report depression, and they experience higher levels of happiness. Likewise, men do better financially when faithfully married.
All the above benefits of faithful monogamous marriage ripple out to benefit society as a whole (see graphic). They yield more unified and stable families that strengthen the social fabric. Their ethos of unity generates “a web of trust across generations, giving rise to the acquisition of virtues and immense social capital (pp. 9–10 here).” By contrast, all the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.
Let us acknowledge that, in our wounded world, brokenness is often inevitable. Life happens, and often we cannot live up to the ideal, no matter how much we might try. With compassionate mercy, we can avoid painful judgments of particular people in particular situations. Nonetheless, we cannot give up on fidelity to the marriage ideal, which is the source of human healing, unity, and flourishing. Only when we acknowledge an ideal for what it is—a gold standard by which all other options are calibrated—can we work to shore up less-than-ideal situations to become the best versions of themselves possible.
Those in stable, intact families bear a special responsibility here to reach out to those who are relationally wounded, to share their relationship riches, and to offer apprenticeships in healthy family formation, so as to promote social healing writ large.
Conclusion
Over the past several decades, our civilization has experimented with a number of alternatives to faithful marriage. Yet the evidence is abundant that from a personal as well as a public perspective, we are most likely to flourish when faithful, monogamous, natural-law marriages are plentiful and the norm.
To all our modern marriage heroes, those facing challenging situations and doing all they can to put the needs of their spouse and children before their own self-centered desires, we salute you. Thank you for your national service. You are walking the path of fidelity, which leads to a brighter future for you, your family, and the entire nation.
Last month, a school district committee in Utah decided that the Bible should be removed from elementary and middle school libraries.
Article tags
The question of the relationship between the American Founding’s ideals and the Christian faith is as old as the Mayflower Compact. The line between secular and religious has never been plainly visible in American history. The famous “wall of separation” has never really amounted to more than a picket fence. It is not surprising, then, that declining confidence in American institutions and declining conviction in American ideals has occurred in parallel with declining religiosity in the United States. Any attempt to reverse the former must contend with the ongoing impact of the latter. What, though, is the nature of the relationship between the secular and the religious in American political thought and history?
Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer’s The Classical and Christian Origins of American is an elegantly written, tightly argued, and profoundly thoughtful contribution to the recurring debate over this question. Cooper and Dyer’s deep immersion in the historical and ongoing conversation about the role of religion in American political life, and their contributions to this conversation, will provide a touchstone for scholars and commentators for years to come.
Cooper and Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without, in this reviewer’s opinion, successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again across the book’s pages like a well-greased elephant. This middle option may be described as follows: the American experiment is a novus ordo seclorum that has coexisted with and drawn support from the classical–Christian order that preceded it.
What is the nature of the relationship between the secular and the religious in American political thought and history?
Natural Law
Despite ultimately missing the bullseye on the question whether the Founding is ultimately a Christian or secular project, the book makes noteworthy contributions on the relationship between natural law theory and American political thought. The first of these occurs in the introductory chapter’s treatment of the question “What is Natural Law?” In addition to providing one of the most succinct and accessible descriptions of natural law available in recent literature, in this section the authors very helpfully highlight natural law’s relevance to American constitutionalism, in contrast with “Hobbist” absolutism. Cooper and Dyer define the natural law as “the moral law for human beings known to reason through rationally apprehended goods, rationally discerned moral obligations, and the freedom of the will to choose to obey or disobey this law.” By tethering moral obligation to reason rather than force, the natural law requires political constitutionalism rather than absolutism—“reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” to quote the first Federalist essay.
The authors’ discussion of the pamphlet debates in the decade preceding the Declaration of Independence is also excellent. They successfully establish the importance of natural theology to the colonists’ arguments throughout this time. They also show how natural theology informed other important lines of argumentation (such as debates about the British imperial constitution). Of particular note in this context is the illuminating discussion of James Otis, who, along with another James (Wilson), provides a central case for the authors’ overall account. Cooper and Dyer expound insightfully on Otis’s belief in the existence of a “supreme ruler of the universe” who governs all of nature—inanimate as well as human—through necessary laws. Just as rocks fall to the ground, so human beings are naturally drawn to moral goods and bound by moral obligations. This framework is, the authors show, essential to appreciating Otis’s arguments about the British imperial constitution and the rights of the colonists.
By tethering moral obligation to reason rather than force, the natural law requires political constitutionalism rather than absolutism—“reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” to quote the first Federalist essay.
The book’s treatment of sovereignty and constitutional theory is another signal contribution to scholarship. Cooper and Dyer persuasively establish the direct relevance of natural law theory to the concept of popular sovereignty, connecting popular sovereignty to American constitutionalism in clear and compelling terms. Drawing primarily on James Wilson and James Madison, they explain how popular sovereignty relies on individual sovereignty, and how individual sovereignty in turn was conceived by these leading theorists of the founding in the context of both natural law and natural rights.
When it comes to constitutional authority and interpretation, the authors successfully illustrate how their natural law-based account speaks to current debates about the American Constitution. This occurs through a nuanced discussion of the “voluntaristic originalism” espoused in various ways by constitutional scholars such as Bruce Ackerman, Keith Whittington, and Randy Barnett. While agreeing with these scholars on the importance of popular sovereignty in establishing constitutional legitimacy, Cooper and Dyer argue persuasively that “the people’s constitution-making power [was] an exercise of reason rather than will.”
Secondary, Dispensable Causes?
It is in the context of this discussion of sovereignty that the aforementioned greased elephant enters the room most forcefully. Orestes Brownson, as Cooper and Dyer explain, elaborated on the theological doctrine of “secondary causation.” This is the idea that God creates certain things (“substantial existences”) that then act as causes for other things. Human beings are good examples of secondary causes, because they act through reason and free will to accomplish their own purposes. Human beings’ role as secondary causes is, as the authors note, closely connected with Aquinas’s definition of natural law as “a form of participation in the eternal law.”
Cooper and Dyer emphasize the fact that human beings’ causality is secondary, subject to and ordered teleologically toward the prime cause (God). The magnitude of God’s primary causality and the primacy of His purposes end up eclipsing the significance of secondary causality in the remainder of this and related discussions throughout the book. The ontological dependence of secondary causes appears to translate into their ultimate dispensability or irrelevance because, after all, the buck ultimately stops with God.
The authors wrestle frequently with the idea that the natural law is supposed to be accessible to unaided reason, and the attendant idea that reason is supposed to be able to gain knowledge and guide action apart from revelation. What, then, is the relationship between reason and faith, or between natural law and eternal or divine law? If you have the latter, do you really need the former? If the latter really exist, do the former have independent existence at all? Does the possession of faith eliminate the need for reason, and does the recognition of the eternal or divine laws obviate the need for the natural law? Is reason really just faith’s substitute for the nonbeliever, and natural law really just divine law’s substitute for the non-Christian?
These and related questions hover over many of the book’s discussions, and the authors’ persistent hesitation to address them leads to the “missing middle” problem that plagues the book’s overarching account. Whenever a non-theological concept comes into contact with a theological one, its significance effectively vanishes. Secondary causes collapse into the Primary Cause, natural theology becomes a branch of revealed theology, political ideology becomes religion, the state bows to the church, and the natural law is baptized Christian.
Ownership and Imago Dei
This phenomenon is especially evident at a few key moments in the book. The first is the book’s recurring references to the imago Dei doctrine in the Book of Genesis. The authors see a connection between this principle of revealed theology and the secular idea of human dignity. Cooper and Dyer consider this connection in discussing Locke’s theory of property, and particularly Locke’s disagreement with the idea that children are owned by their parents. They dismiss the Lockean argument that “there is something intrinsic to persons barring them from being owned by their makers” because “[t]o be an imago Dei does not per se shield one from being owned, because by that very fact one is owned by God.”
This is not quite true, though. It is not by virtue of being made in a certain way—as an imago Dei—that human beings are owned by God; it is by virtue of being made by God simply. Squirrels are similarly owned by God because they are made by God, but they are not made in God’s image and likeness. Moreover, being made in God’s image and likeness might shield one from being owned by another creature without shielding them from being owned by God. It is possible, as Cooper and Dyer note in citing one of my articles, to be simultaneously owned by God and to own oneself in a way that excludes ownership by other human beings.
It is not by virtue of being made in a certain way—as an imago Dei—that human beings are owned by God; it is by virtue of being made by God simply.
This difficulty reemerges at the end of the book, when Cooper and Dyer state that “[t]he Declaration and other founding era sources clearly rooted the value and dignity of persons in a transcendent Creator, who was the source of value in the world, and apart from whom that world did not have value. Human dignity was and is, at bottom, a theological concept.” This passage perfectly illustrates the missing middle problem of the book’s account. Of course it is true that without the Creator the world wouldn’t have value; but this is because the world wouldn’t exist at all. Does the fact that squirrels wouldn’t have bushy tails without the Creator mean that the bushiness of squirrels’ tails is a theological concept?
The question here is similar to the question that separates the voluntarists and the rationalists, and that Cooper and Dyer consider at length: is creation good because God created it, or did God create this way because it was good to do so? Is there some secondary goodness in creation that is related to but not identical with the primary goodness of God? In the case of human dignity we seem to have a clue in the biblical account of creation in the imago Dei. Every being other than God is created, but only human beings are created in God’s image and likeness. The simple fact of creation does not bestow any special dignity on human beings that is not shared by all other creatures. It is the unique fact of creation in God’s image and likeness that roots the concept of human dignity in the Bible. But what does it mean to be created in God’s image and likeness? The Bible does not say. Human dignity is thus a theological concept in one way—because the meaning of creation in the imago Dei presumes some knowledge of God—but it is a philosophical concept in another way, because the question of what God’s image in humanity is is nowhere revealed directly by God.
A Missed Middle
A recognition of the missing middle would also have allowed Cooper and Dyer to more successfully account for some key elements of the American political tradition that are either excluded, downplayed, or otherwise mishandled in the book. One of these is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which is alternately dismissed as “an outlier” despite its incredible popularity and influence, and then rescued as being centrally concerned with biblical interpretation. Another is Abraham Lincoln’s civil religion, which is affirmed to be “in essential continuity with the classical Christian natural-law philosophy” without substantial argumentation, despite the fact that Lincoln would probably be even more difficult to bring into the Christian natural law fold than Jefferson was (and he has an entire chapter dedicated to him).
Lastly, there is the book’s concluding statement that “sectarian confessional states . . . are, in our view, in principle within the ambit of prudence as a constitutional arrangement.” Although the authors do, to be fair, describe and qualify this approval in such a way as to distinguish it substantially from the position of church–state integralists, this statement sits very uneasily with key strains of the American political tradition. One need look no farther than James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Liberty, or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (not to mention the First Amendment itself) to appreciate the fact that Cooper and Dyer steer wide of the course set by American Founding thought on this question. The reason for this is the same as in the case of accounting for people like Paine and Lincoln or explaining the concept of human dignity: because the purposes of the secular state are ultimately ordered to those of the church, the intrinsic meaning and value of the former become subsumable into the meaning and value of the latter.
One of the most important achievements of the book is that it keeps questions and debates like these alive for scholars and citizens in the United States today. As the rise of the “religious nones” continues, and as American ideals continue to be mocked by some as the baseless imaginings of hypocrites, the time is ripe for reopening the question of the relationship between American Christianity and American politics. Cooper and Dyer have given us an excellent place to start.
The debt ceiling legislation would end the pause on student loan payments on Aug. 30 at the latest.
Dade Phelan, Speaker of the House in Texas, overseeing debate in the House chamber at the Capitol in Austin on Tuesday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
Article tags
Yale Law School, which led the boycott of the U.S. News rankings, is at the top of the rankings again in 2023, though tied this year with Stanford.
FreshRSS