We have a well-worn script for how to behave when a public figure does something wrong. What we don’t have is a script for what to do if they make amends.
First comes the outrage, then the sharing, then the public condemnation, where the force of thousands of indignant wills declare that the wrongdoer is no longer a member of our moral community. Then we cancel.
This script is powerful. It is predictable. It helps remove a perceived threat. But it doesn’t heal the moral wound. It doesn’t rebalance the scales. It doesn’t include lines for rehabilitation, re-education or rebuilding moral capital. The script only tells us how to push people out.
What we need is another script, one we can use if they make amends. If the wrongdoer owns what they’ve done, if they express genuine contrition and issue a heartfelt apology, if they demonstrate a lasting change to their behaviour for the better, what do we do?
The missing script
The first thing to decide is whether we’re in a position to forgive at all. There are a couple of reasons why we might not be. For a start, we might not even be the right person to judge in the first place.
Many of us are quick to judge these days. The media and internet have opened us up to a world of outrages that call out for condemnation, and the frantic pace of modern discourse makes us feel like we must have an opinion on every issue. We are also often motivated to show solidarity with our in-group by sharing outrage over the same subjects, even if we know little about them. And the logic of second-order punishment – where we punish those who refuse to punish wrongdoers – means we fear retribution from our own team if we don’t jump on the outrage train.
But none of these are good reasons to jump to a hasty conclusion, based on a news headline, a couple of tweets and a few second-hand hot takes. Many of the issues we face are more complex than can be understood, let alone judged, without careful consideration. Many of the details are hidden from our view or veiled by the hasty or biased interpretations of others.
The second reason as individuals we might not be in a position to forgive is that sometimes the only person who can forgive is the individual who was harmed. I can’t unilaterally forgive a thief for stealing from you, or a celebrity for cheating on their partner. I simply lack the standing to speak on behalf of the person who was harmed.
However, there are cases where we, as members of a moral community, can be in a position to judge – and forgive – an act of wrongdoing. Acts of stealing or infidelity don’t just harm the victims, they violate the norms of our community. That’s why we still get outraged at things that don’t impact us directly or offensive acts that have no apparent victim.
This is a different kind of forgiveness. It’s not speaking on behalf of the victim, it’s speaking on behalf of the moral community. If the wrongdoer apologises and makes amends to those they’ve harmed, the community can accept that apology, drop the enmity towards them and welcome them back into the fold.
This kind of “public forgiveness” is an important part of a healthy moral community. Without it, the community pursues a purity culture that only knows how to push people out.
Set the bar
The next thing we should ask ourselves: what would the wrongdoer need to do to justify our forgiveness?
For some wrongdoers, the answer will be “there’s nothing they can do”. There are such things like terrorist attacks, mass shootings, genocide and violent sexual assault that we might not reasonably expect anyone to forgive, especially those directly affected.
However, we need to think carefully about what is considered unforgiveable, and not allow that category to grow too large.
Only the most serious moral transgressions should be considered unforgiveable. For everything else, we need to set the bar high enough that wrongdoers must earn their forgiveness, but not so high that the pariahs will one day outnumber the pure.
Similarly, when it comes to character there may be people whose behaviour is so consistently bad that we can conclude that they are beyond redemption. But we must be very cautious about inferring too much about character from only one example of wrongdoing.
There has been a trend in recent years of leaping from outrage at a particular act – say a poorly worded tweet or an off-colour joke – to condemnation of the individual’s entire moral fibre. It’s a tendency to see the slightest slip as revealing deeper moral corruption, proving they are unworthy of forgiveness or rehabilitation.
While it’s tempting to see others as having an immutable moral fibre and painting them as either virtuous or wicked, we must remember our moral fibre is malleable. Throughout the course of our lives, our own moral views evolve with changes in our circumstances and the influence others have on us. We must believe the same of others too. This means setting a very high bar before judging character.
Open the door
Once we have set an appropriately high bar, we should invite people clear it. We should look for signs that they are aware that what they did was wrong. They should own their actions and show they can articulate how they harmed others. This involves them recognising how their act was received, even if they didn’t intend for it to be received that way.
We should also look for signs of genuine remorse, which suggests that the wrongdoer shares our negative judgement of what they did. It shows their moral standards are aligned with ours.
When assessing a public apology, we can look for “costly” gestures that make that apology more likely to be authentic. A murmured apology in private, or delivered at a curated press conference may be less authentic than an unscripted public statement. Emotion matters too, but we should recognise that not all people feel or express emotion in the same way; just because someone isn’t in tears doesn’t mean they are not sincere.
Ultimately, what is most deserving of forgiveness is not words but actions. If someone changes how they behave in an enduring way, then that’s the most reliable sign that they have realigned their values to accord with those of the community. At that point, we should be inclined to invite them back into the moral community.
The final stage of the new script for public forgiveness mirrors the script for sharing outrage. Public forgiveness needs to be expressed in public. And those witnessing public forgiveness should read that as an opportunity to re-evaluate their own judgements of the wrongdoer and decide if they, too, are ready to forgive.
There are times when condemnation is justified. There are times when people ought to be cancelled. But if it’s a one-way street, we risk living in a culture where the circle of what – or who – is acceptable is forever shrinking. We need to have a pathway to redemption and forgiveness, and that pathway needs to become a script that we can all apply.
For a deeper dive on Cancel Culture, David Baddiel, Roxane Gay, Andy Mills, Megan Phelps-Roper and Tim Dean present Uncancelled Culture as part of Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2024. Tickets on sale now.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
You might be interested in…
Opinion + Analysis Relationships, Society + Culture
Committed to individualism and credited as the father of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher and poet.
Initially on a path to follow his father’s footsteps and serve in the Christian ministry, Emerson attended Harvard’s Divinity School to become a pastor. But as time went on and he delved deeper into his religious studies, he realised an unignorable sense of detachment and divergence from the traditional religious values he was immersed in. And so he left the Second Unitarian Church and decided to forge his own path.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
Emerson’s influential career began with public lectures in Boston that would inspire some of his most renowned essays and ideas. His lectures centred on human culture, English literature, biography and philosophy. He was known for popularising the major movement known as transcendentalism.
The Father of Transcendentalism
“Transcendental” was initially coined by philosopher Immanuel Kant in his theory of transcendental idealism. It’s a theory of perception that holds space and time, along with our five senses, are all subjective experiences and don’t exist outside of the human experience.
Even though Kant coined the term, Emerson is regarded as the father of transcendentalism.
Emerson’s transcendentalism, which became one of America’s first literature and philosophical movements, holds that we ought to be doubtful of knowledge we get from our five senses or even logic and reason; the only trustworthy source of knowledge manifests itself in our personal intuition and self-revelations.
In one of his first lectures, “The Uses of Natural History”, Emerson planted the initial seed for the movement when he explained science as something innately human. He emphasised nature to be an extension of one’s self: “the whole of Nature is a metaphor or image of the human mind.”
His book-length 1836 essay “Nature” is what officially and explicitly defined transcendentalism.
In essence, transcendentalists believe nature is paramount: all their ideals are rooted in the natural world. They believe all things are inherently good, humans and nature alike. In much the same way, transcendentalists see the divinity – the “God” – in everything and everyone. As Emerson wrote, “I am part or particle of God.” Transcendentalists also believe in the human potential for achieving greatness and genius.
Emerson is responsible for introducing a number of people to metaphysical concepts for the first time. A group he helped found in the late 1830’s called the Transcendental Club had dangerous conversations that critiqued societal institutions of the time, such as organised religion and slavery. Its members included prominent thinkers of the time, like Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, and allowed a space for transcendentalist ideas to grow.
Self-Reliance
As the title of one of his most famous essays, “Self-Reliance” describes one of his principal philosophies: relying solely on ourselves. Emerson’s transcendentalism has been equated to romantic individualism because of his emphasis on the self. For understanding and greatness, Emerson believed we ought only to rely on ourselves and trust our intuition. In fact, he believed the only thing separating the common person from “greatness” is that the “greats” have the gall to admit precisely what they’re feeling when they feel it. As humans, much of our experiences and emotions are shared, and Emerson saw beauty in such commonalities.
At the same time, he cited conformity as a major barrier to achieving greatness. He thought we should be comfortable and proud of being distinctly ourselves. He praised individuality and the pursuit of achieving “an original relation to the universe” by tuning inwards.
The key to unlocking genius is listening to what Emerson called our “creative insight”. He felt such insight was decidedly divine, God’s way of individually speaking to us. This insight is necessary for anyone to accomplish anything meaningful, and so Emerson encouraged everyone to trust their own creative insight over societal ones. Listening to our divinity, our creative insight, yields a life lived authentically.
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
It’s these transcendentalist ideologies that would eventually inspire philosopher Henry David Thoreau to reject society and go into the woods in order “to live deliberately and front only the essential facts of life”. And that same line of thinking is what inspired Christopher McCandless, an infamous American adventurer, to abandon family and escape to Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1990s. His story of living in the solitude of wilderness was later popularised in the film and novel Into the Wild.
Although some find wisdom and beauty in Emerson’s fierce admiration of solitude and complete rejection of groupthink, others see privilege in his ideals. Not everyone is able to exercise free will; not everyone can afford to stray from the norm and escape their social circumstances. And so to some, his ideas are lofty and unattainable, less you have the power of class and money on your side.
Beyond privilege, others see selfishness in his philosophies. By tuning inwards and considering only our own needs and desires, what is lost? What might we sacrifice when we neglect those around us? When we disregard even our loved ones? And yet, Emerson never said anything definitively:
“But it is the fault of our own rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge is very cheap.”
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
You might be interested in…
Opinion + Analysis Business + Leadership, Climate + Environment
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
When we first meet Dre (Dominique Fishback), the terrifying anti-hero of Swarm, she’s obsessed.
For years, she has been busy constructing a world with the pop singer Ni’Jah at its centre – the musician has become the yardstick by which Dre measures whether anything in her life is worthwhile. This isn’t just a casual interest for Dre. It’s everything.
And because it’s everything, before too long, Dre starts murdering in Ni’Jah’s name. In the world of Swarm, violently dispatching anyone who stands in the way of the Ni’Jah fandom is par for the course. Indeed, much of the show’s dark comedy comes from the messed-up, but eerily logical, motivation behind Dre’s bloodthirsty rampage, which takes her across the United States, and sees her dispatch both Twitter trolls and fellow fans.
No doubt then – love is at the centre of Dre’s life. Only, it’s a violent, obsessive kind of love. And a love that attaches itself to someone that Dre doesn’t even know.
Dre (Dominique Fishback) in Swarm, image courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
She just gets me
Dre’s form of love is a parasocial one. She pores over the details of Ni’Jah’s life, sharing factoids about the pop star with her fellow stans. No matter that she doesn’t even know Ni’Jah, really. She doesn’t have to meet her. After all, she has Ni’Jah’s music, and music is the language of the soul, right?
This kind of romantic obsession is a common feature of the modern age, though it wasn’t invented by it. Certainly, parasocial relationships aren’t new. They go back as far as the fans who tore at classical composer Franz Liszt’s clothes, gripped by a fever called Lisztomania that resembles the hysteria that has met boy bands over the decades.
When people feel seen by art, it makes sense that they also feel seen by the artist that has made it. You love the music, and then you love the musician. This goes a long way to explaining the behaviour of modern stans, who are not content to merely listen to the newest pop album. They collate pictures of the popstar in question; try to learn details about their personal life; hang on to their every word.
Fans at The Beatles concert, New York, 1965
Indeed, what sets Beyonce stans apart from Liszt fanatics is the way that technology has stepped up this fascination with the lives of artists. It used to be you had to mail in a self-addressed envelope to a Beatles fanclub to connect with likeminded folks. Now you can log on, sharing and ramping up your mutual obsession. All in it together.
What love makes us do
Parasocial relationships can spawn a range of immoral acts. They overstep the boundaries of privacy of artists, treating them like commodities, not people.
This is a violation of one of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s most important tenets – Kant says, use people as ends in themselves, their own people, rather than mere means. Pop stans don’t do this. They use popstars as mediums for their art.
Stans also tend to operate under a groupthink mentality, a kind of contagious sharing of values and emotions that the philosopher Derek Matravers called out in his book,Empathy. Matravers noted that crowds can “catch” feelings from each other – that if one person is angry, then a person who witnesses that anger will pick up on it, through what is known as “emotional contagion.” Then, that anger spreads. And when it spreads out of control, violence can occur.
That emotional catching is key to Swarm, and Dre’s obsession – she and her fellow stans whip themselves up into a frenzy of hatred, a virulence particularly directed towards the other. This other-directed hatred has been noted by philosopher Jesse Prinz, who argues that empathy and emotional contagion both tend to be triggered in the cases of perceived likeness. As in, if you think someone resembles you in important ways, you’re more likely to feel what they feel. That’s why groups form. Groups share perceived traits – in the case of Swarm, a love of Ni’Jah – and catch feelings of those in their group, without catching the feelings of those outside the group. Thus – an us and them mentality.
This in turn accounts for the behaviour we see in real life, outside of Swarm, particularly on Twitter. There, stans turn on people who commit the slightest perceived indiscretion, threatening, in some cases, their homes, livelihood, and health. Take the pop music critic, not named here to avoid kicking off a potential wave of abuse, who criticised a pop music stan and had her home address found, and threatening messages left on her voicemail.
Swarm, image courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
A love that doesn’t change
It’s worth noting that parasocial relationships aren’t totally foreign to other forms of love. Many of us are guilty of turning the object of our infatuation into something other than what they are. Consider those early days of romance, when everything that the object of our affection has touched or produced seems blessed by a kind of glow – there’s the coffee cup they drank from, and then left at ours. There’s the toothbrush they used, on the bathroom mantle.
But what makes parasocial relationships different to others is the strange way in which they develop and change. Or, don’t change. When the person you love is right in front of you, your affection molds to their shape. They do things, and you respond to those things. They are human, so they fuck up, and your adoration changes in step with those fuck-ups.
Parasocial relationships lack that constant evolution. Pop albums don’t change. You listen to the new Taylor Swift album, and then months go by, and you listen to it again, and again, and again. Not a note has shifted since that first time. So your love can stay locked in that honeymoon phase – that obsessive, giddy kind of romance, consistent in intensity.
Without evolution, our passion is obsession, and obsession can turn us into bad ethical actors of all sorts.
This unchanging nature also explains that darker side of modern fandoms – the side targeted by Swarm. Dre doesn’t see Ni’Jah’s flaws. Doesn’t get exposed to the healthy regularity that romance descends into. That keeps her obsession at a fever pitch. One with such violent passion at its heart that it’s only a matter of time until it becomes literally violent.
Thus, Swarm, and indeed modern fandom itself, teaches us the ethical importance of evolution. Not only is a static love a dying love – how many relationships break up because of the horrifying routines that we can settle into, years into being with someone? The monotony of it all? Static love is also a dangerous love. Without evolution, our passion is obsession, and obsession can turn us into bad ethical actors of all sorts.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume.
“If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away.” – Jobu Tupaki, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Do our lives matter?
Nihilism is a school of philosophical thought proposing that our existence fundamentally lacks inherent meaning. It rejects various aspects of human existence that are generally accepted and considered fundamental, like objective truth, moral truth and the value and purpose of life. Its origin is the Latin word ‘nihil’, which means ‘nothing’.
The most common branches of nihilism are existential and moral nihilism, though there are many others, including epistemological, political, metaphysical and medical nihilism.
Existential nihilism
In popular use, nihilism usually refers to existential nihilism, a precursor to existentialist thought. This is the idea that life has no inherent meaning, value or purpose and it’s also often (because of this) linked with feelings of despair or apathy. Nihilists in media are usually portrayed as moody, brooding or radical types who have decided that we are insignificant specks floating around an infinite universe, and that therefore nothing matters.
Nihilist ideas date as far back as Buddha; though the beginning of its uprising in western literature appeared in the early 19th century. This shift was largely a response to the diminishing moral authority of the church (and religion at large) and the rise of secularism and rationalism.This rejectionled to the view that the universe had no grand design or purpose, that we are all simply cogs in the machine of the existence.
Though he wasn’t a nihilist himself, Friedrich Nietzsche is the poster-child for much of contemporary nihilism, especially in pop culture and online circles. Nietzsche wrote extensively on it in the late 19th century, speaking of the crisis we find ourselves in when we realise that the world lacks the intrinsic meaning or value that we want or believed it to have. This is ultimately something that he wanted us to overcome.
He saw humans responding to this crisis in two ways: passive or active nihilism.
For Nietzsche, passive nihilists are those who resign themselves to the meaninglessness of life, slowly separating themselves from their own will or desires to minimise the suffering they face from the random chaos of the world.
In media, this kind of pessimistic nihilism is sometimes embodied by characters who then act on it in a destructive way. For example, the antagonist, Jobu Topaki in Everything Everywhere All At Once comes to this realisation through her multi-dimensional awareness, which convinces her that because of the infinite nature of reality, none of her choices matter and so she attempts to destroy herself to escape the insignificance and meaninglessness she feels.
Jobu Topaki, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Active nihilists instead see nihilism as a freeing condition, revealing a world where they are emboldened to create something new on top of the destruction of the old values and ways of thinking.
Nietzsche’s idea of the active nihilist is the Übermensch (“superman”), a person who overcomes the struggle of nihilism by working to create their own meaning in the face of meaninglessness. They see the absurdity of life as something to be embraced, giving them the ability to live in a way that enforces their own values and “levels the playing field” of past values.
Moral nihilism
Existential nihilism often gives way to moral nihilism, the idea that morality doesn’t exist, that no moral choices are preferable in comparison to others. Because, if our lives don’t have intrinsic meaning, if objective values don’t exist, then by what standard can we call actions right or wrong? We normally see this kind of nihilism embodied by anarchic characters in media.
An infamous example is the Joker from the Batman franchise. Especially in renditions like The Dark Knight (2008) and Joker (2019), the Joker is portrayed as someone whose expectations of the world have failed him, whose tortuous existence has led him to believe that nothing matters, the world doesn’t care, and that in the face of that, we shouldn’t care about anything or anyone either. In his words, “everything burns” in the end, so he sees no problem in hastening that destruction and ultimately the destruction of himself.
The Joker, 2019
“Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your useless lives.”
The Joker epitomises the populist understanding of nihilism and one of the primary ethical risks of this philosophical world view. For some people, viewing their lives as lacking inherent meaning or value causes a psychological spiral into apathy.
This spiral can cause people to become self-destructive, reclusive, suicidal and otherwise hasten towards “nothingness”. In others, it can cause outwardly destructive actions because of their perception that since nothing matters in some kind of objective sense, they can do whatever they want (think American Psycho).
Nihilism has particularly flourished in many online subcultures, fuelling the apathy of edgelords towards the plights of marginalised populations and often resulting in a tendency towards verbal and physical violence. One of the major challenges of nihilism, historically and today, is that it’s not obviously false. This is where we rely on philosophy to be able to justify why any morality should exist at all.
Where to go from here
A common thread runs through many of the nihilist and existentialist writers about what we should do in the face of inherent meaninglessness: create it ourselves.
Existentialists like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartretalk about the importance of recognising the freedom that this kind of perspective gives us. And, equally, the importance of making sure that we make meaning for ourselves and for others through our life.
For some people, that might be a return to religion. But there are plenty of other ways to create meaning in life: focusing on what’s subjectively meaningful to you or those you care about and fully embracing those things. Existence doesn’t need to have intrinsic meaning for us to care.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Artificial intelligence has untold potential to transform society for the better. It also has equal potential to cause untold harm. This is why it must be developed ethically.
Artificial intelligence is unlike any other technology humanity has developed. It will have a greater impact on society and the economy than fossil fuels, it’ll roll out faster than the internet and, at some stage, it’s likely to slip from our control and take charge of its own fate.
Unlike other technologies, AI – particularly artificial general intelligence (AGI) – is not the kind of thing that we can afford to release into the world and wait to see what happens before regulating it. That would be like genetically engineering a new virus and releasing it in the wild before knowing whether it infects people.
AI must be carefully designed with purpose, developed to be ethical and regulated responsibly. Ethics must be at the heart of this project, both in terms of how AI is developed and also how it operates.
This sentiment is the main reason why many of the world’s top AI researchers, business leaders and academics signed an open letter in March 2023 calling for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”, in order to “jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts”.
Some don’t think a pause goes far enough. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute has called for a complete, worldwide and indefinite moratorium on training new AI systems. He argued that the risks posed by unrestrained AI are so great that countries ought to be willing to use military action to enforce the moratorium.
It is probably impossible to enforce a pause on AI development without backing it with the threat of military action. Few nations or businesses will willingly risk falling behind in the race to commercialise AI. However, few governments are likely to be willing to go to war force them to pause.
While a pause is unlikely to happen, the ethical challenge facing humanity is that the pace of AI development is significantly faster than the pace at which we can deliberate and resolve ethical issues. The commercial and national security imperatives are also hastening the development and deployment of AI before safeguards have been put in place. The world now needs to move with urgency to put these safeguards in place.
Ethical by design
At the centre of ethics is the notion that we must take responsibility for how our actions impact the world, and we should direct our action in ways that are beneficent rather than harmful.
Likewise, if AI developers wish to be rewarded for the positive impact that AI will have on the world, such as by deriving a profit from the increased productivity afforded by the technology, then they must also accept responsibility for the negative impacts caused by AI. This is why it is in their interest (and ours) that they place ethics at the heart of AI development.
The Ethics Centre’s Ethical by Design framework can guide the development of any kind of technology to ensure it conforms to essential ethical standards.This framework should be used by those developing AI, by governments to guide AI regulation, and by the general public as a benchmark to assess whether AI conforms to the ethical standards they have every right to expect.
The framework includes eight principles:
Ought before can
This refers to the fact that just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean we should. Sometimes the most ethically responsible thing is to not do something.
If we have reasonable evidence that a particular AI technology poses an unacceptable risk, then we should cease development, or at least delay until we are confident that we can reduce or manage that risk.
We have precedent in this regard. There are bans in place around several technologies, such as human genetic modification or biological weapons that are either imposed by governments or self-imposed by researchers because they are aware they pose an unacceptable risk or would violate ethical values. There is nothing in principle stopping us from deciding to do likewise with certain AI technologies, such as those that allow the production of deep fakes, or fully autonomous AI agents.
Non-instrumentalism
Most people agree we should respect the intrinsic value of things like humans, sentient creatures, ecosystems or healthy communities, among other things, and not reduce them to mere ‘things’ to be used for the benefit of others.
So AI developers need to be mindful of how their technologies might appropriate human labour without offering compensation, as has been highlighted with some AI image generators that were trained on the work of practising artists. It also means acknowledging that job losses caused by AI have more than an economic impact and can injure the sense of meaning and purpose that people derive from their work.
If the benefits of AI come at the cost of things with intrinsic value, then we have good reason to change the way it operates or delay its rollout to ensure that the things we value can be preserved.
Self-determination
AI should give people more freedom, not less. It must be designed to operate transparently so individuals can understand how it works, how it will affect them, and then make good decisions about whether and how to use it.
Given the risk that AI could put millions of people out of work, reducing incomes and disempowering them while generating unprecedented profits for technology companies, those companies must be willing to allow governments to redistribute that new wealth fairly.
And if there is a possibility that AGI might use its own agency and power to contest ours, then the principle of self-determination suggests that we ought to delay its development until we can ensure that humans will not have their power of self-determination diminished.
Responsibility
By its nature, AI is wide-ranging in application and potent in its effects. This underscores the need for AI developers to anticipate and design for all possible use cases, even those that are not core to their vision.
Taking responsibility means developing it with an eye to reducing the possibility of these negative cases becoming a reality and mitigating against them when they’re inevitable.
Net benefit
There are few, if any, technologies that offer pure benefit without cost. Society has proven willing to adopt technologies that provide a net benefit as long as the costs are acknowledged and mitigated. One case study is the fossil fuel industry. The energy generated by fossil fuels has transformed society and improved the living conditions of billions of people worldwide. Yet once the public became aware of the cost that carbon emissions impose on the world via climate change, it demanded that emissions be reduced in order to bring the technology towards a point of net benefit over the long term.
Similarly, AI will likely offer tremendous benefits, and people might be willing to incur some high costs if the benefits are even greater. But this does not mean that AI developers can ignore the costs nor avoid taking responsibility for them.
An ethical approach means doing whatever they can to reduce the costs before they happen and mitigating them when they do, such as by working with governments to ensure there are sufficient technological safeguards against misuse and social safety nets in place should the costs rise.
Fairness
Many of the latest AI technologies have been trained on data created by humans, and they have absorbed the many biases built into that data. This has resulted in AI acting in ways that negatively discriminate against people of colour or those with disabilities. There is also a significant global disparity in access to AI and the benefits it offers. These are cases where the AI has failed the fairness test.
AI developers need to remain mindful of how their technologies might act unfairly and how the costs and benefits of AI might be distributed unfairly. Diversity and inclusion must be built into AI from the ground level through training data and methods, and AI must be continuously monitored to see if new biases emerge.
Accessibility
Given the potential benefits of AI, it must be made available to everyone, including those who might have greater barriers to access, such as those with disabilities, older populations, or people living with disadvantage or in poverty. AI has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of people in each of these categories, if it is made accessible to them.
Purpose
Purpose means being directed towards some goal or solving some problem. And that problem needs to be more than just making a profit. Many AI technologies have wide applications, and many of their uses have not even been discovered yet. But this does not mean that AI should be developed without a clear goal and simply unleased into the world to see what happens.
Purpose must be central to the development of ethical AI so that the technology is developed deliberately with human benefit in mind. Designing with purpose requires honesty and transparency at all stages, which allows people to assess whether the purpose is worthwhile and achieved ethically.
The road to ethical AI
We should continue to press for AI to be developed ethically. And if technology companies are reluctant to pay careful attention to ethics, then we should call on our governments to impose sensible regulations on them.
The goal is not to hinder AI but to ensure that it operates as intended and that the benefits flow on to the greatest possible number. AI could usher in a fourth industrial revolution. It would pay for us to make this one even more beneficial and less disruptive than the past three.
As a Knowledge Partner in theResponsible AI Network, The Ethics Centre helps provide vision and discussion about the opportunity presented by AI.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
You might be interested in…
Opinion + Analysis Health + Wellbeing, Relationships, Science + Technology
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Ahead of an automation and artificial intelligence revolution, and a possible global recession, we are sizing up ways to ‘work smarter, not harder’. Could the 4-day work week be the key to helping us adapt and thrive in the future?
As the workforce plunged into a pandemic that upended our traditional work hours, workplaces and workloads, we received the collective opportunity to question the 9-5, Monday to Friday model that has driven the global economy for the past several decades.
Workers were astounded by what they’d gained back from working remotely and with more flexible hours. Not only did the care of elderly, sick or young people become easier from the home office, but also hours that were previously spent commuting shifted to more family and personal time.
This change in where we work sparked further thought about how much time we spend working. In 2022, the largest and most successful trial of a four-day working week delivered impressive results. Some 92% of 61 UK companies who participated in a two-month trial of the shorter week declared they’dbe sticking with the 100:80:100 model in what the 4 Day Week director Joe Ryle called a “major breakthrough moment” for the movement.
Momentum Mental Health chief executive officer Debbie Bailey, who participated in the study, said her team had maintainedproductivity and increased output. But what had stirred her more deeply was a measurable “increase in work-life balance, happiness at work, sleep per night, and a reduction in stress” among staff.
However, Bailey said, the shorter working week must remain viable for her bottom line, something she ensures through a tailor-made ‘Rules of Engagement’ in her team. “For example, if we don’t maintain 100 per cent outputs, an individual or the full team can be required to return to a 5-day week pattern,” she explained.
Beyond staff satisfaction, a successful implementation of the 4-day week model could also boost the bottom line for businesses.
Reimagining a more ethical working environment, advocates say, can yield comprehensive social benefits, including balancing gender roles, elongated lifespans, increased employee well-being, improved staff recruitment and retention and a much-needed reduction in workers’ carbon footprint as Australia works towards net-zero by 2050.
University of Queensland Business School’s associate professor Remi Ayoko saysworking parents with a young family will benefit the most from a modified work week, with far greater leisure time away from the keyboard offering more opportunity for travel and adventure further afield, as well as increased familial bonding and life experiences along the way.
However, similar to remote work, the 4-day working week has not been without its criticisms. Workplace connectivity is one aspect that can fall by the wayside when implementing the model – a valuable culture-building part of work, according to the University of Auckland’s Helen Delaney and Loughborough University’s Catherine Casey.
Some workers reported that “the urgency and pressure was causing “heightened stress levels,” leaving them in need of the additional day off to recover from work intensity. This raises the question of whether it is ethical for a workplace to demand a more robotic and less human-focussed performance.
In November last year, Australian staff at several of Unilever’s household names, including Dove, Rexona, Surf, Omo, TRESemmé, Continental and Streets, trialed a 100:80:100 model in the workplace. Factory workers did not take part due to union agreements.
To maintain productivity, Unilever staff were advised to cut “lesser value” activities during working hours, like superfluous meetings and the use of staff collaboration tool Microsoft Teams, in order to “free up time to work on items that matter most to the people we serve, externally and internally”.
If eyebrows were raised by that instruction, they needed only look across the ditch at Unilever New Zealand, where an 18-month trial yielded impressive results. Some 80 staff took a third (34%) fewer sick days, stress levels fell by a third (33%), and issues with work-life balance tumbled by two-thirds (67%). An independent team from the University of Technology Sydney monitored the results.
Keogh Consulting CEO Margit Mansfield told ABC Perth that she would advise business leaders considering the 4-day week to first assess the existing flexibility and autonomy arrangements in place – put simply, looking into where and when your staff actually want to work – to determine the most ethically advantageous way to shake things up.
Mansfield says focussing on redesigning jobs to suit new working environments can be a far more positive experience than retrofitting old ones with new ways. It can mean changing “the whole ecosystem around whatever the reduced hours are, because it’s not just simply, well, ‘just be as productive in four days’, and ‘you’re on five if the job is so big that it just simply cannot be done’.”
New modes of working, whether in shorter weeks or remote, are also seeing the workplace grappling with a trust revolution. On the one hand, the rise of project management software like Asana is helping managers monitor deliverables and workload in an open, transparent and ethical way, while on the other, controversial tracking software installed on work computers is causing many people, already concerned about their data privacy, to consider other workplaces.
It is important to recognise that the relationship between employer and employee is not one-sided and the reciprocation of trust is essential for creating a work environment that fosters productivity, innovation and wellbeing.
While employees now anticipate flexibility to maintain a healthy work-life balance, employers also have expectations – one of which is that employees still contribute to the culture of the organisation.
When employees are engaged and motivated they are more likely to contribute to the culture of the organisation which can inform the way the business interacts with society more broadly. Trust reciprocation is not just about meeting individual needs but also working together on a common purpose. By prioritising the well-being of their employees and empowering them to contribute to the culture of the organisation a virtuous cycle is being created. Whether this is a 4-day working week or a hybrid structure is for the employer and employee to explore.
CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella says forming a new world working relationship based on trust between all parties can be far more powerful for a business than building parameters around workers. After all, “people come to work for other people, not because of some policy”.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
You might be interested in…
Opinion + Analysis Business + Leadership, Politics + Human Rights, Relationships
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Nothing is certain, except death and taxes. We can’t make the former fair but we can at least try when it comes to taxation.
Tax is fundamental to government. It is essential to fund the services we require to live in a modern society, including military, police, judiciary, roads, healthcare and education. It has also become more important in recent decades. At the time of Federation, the Australian tax system collected around 5% of GDP. Today this number stands at around 29%.
But is it fair? Are we paying too little or too much tax? Should those with greater means pay more? These are questions that must be asked of any tax system, and two works by philosophers offer very different answers.
The first is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia. It argues that individuals (and, by extension, the corporations they own) ought to own 100% of their income. Individual property rights are paramount, and any taxation beyond what is required to protect borders and protect these property rights is unjust. In short: only public expenditure on the police and military can be justified.
One of Nozick’s more colourful claims is that taxation is on par with forced labour. Tax forces workers to work in part for themselves, and in part for government.
But while Anarchy State and Utopia is a cult favourite of many modern-styled libertarians arguing for lower taxes, most people consider its position on tax unfair. Many find the consequences of the gross inequalities Nozick permits objectionable, while others argue a child’s right to public education, or a citizen’s right to universal healthcare, outweighs the right individuals or corporations have to their pre-tax wealth and income.
An additional issue for Nozick is how to determine who funds the military and police. Should it be a fee for service? And if so, does this mean only the very wealthy who pay tax should enforce property rights, given they have the most to benefit and lose without military and police? Or should everyone pay an equal amount of tax, regardless of their income or wealth or their ability to pay? (The fallout of this was seen in the 1990’s in the UK when a Thatcher Government head tax proposal was met with violence and riots in the street).
The other side of the tax coin
The second perspective comes from Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy in their book The Myth of Ownership. They tackle the definition of tax fairness in a nearly opposite way to Nozick. They argue that it does not make sense that citizens have full (or any) rights to their pre-tax income and wealth because income and wealth cannot exist without government. Individual and corporate incomes, and the level of incomes, occur because of the existence of government, not despite it.
They have a point. A successful Australian economy requires the enforcement of law, market regulation, monetary policy (not least for the currency we use), and regulation that prohibits collusion, intimidation and other forms of business malpractice. A banker earns money because the government has mandated a currency – and she keeps her money because property rights exist. A lawyer’s income occurs because of the legal system, not despite it. We might also argue that a successful Australian economy requires investments in public education and public healthcare.
Yet, while individual and corporate income may be contingent on the existence of government, and markets might not be considered perfectly fair nor free, it doesn’t follow that market determined outcomes are completely arbitrary. We often say that someone deserves to earn more if they work harder. So if someone decides to go to university or undertake a trade, rather than surf all day, we might think they deserve a higher salary.
This very simple point (not to mention the very real practical issues with discarding market-based outcomes) mean Nagel and Murphy, like Nozick, fail to provide a complete blueprint for us to determine tax fairness. Nozick fails because he assumes market distributions are 100% fair; Nagel and Murphy fail because they assume market distributions (and any and all inputs that determine these distributions such as hard work and effort) are irrelevant.
And yet both philosophies help us focus on important tax fairness elements. Nagel and Murphy show it is important to focus on people’s post-tax positions and effectively highlight that pre-tax market determined income and wealth are not necessarily “fair”, largely because these incomes and wealth cannot exist without tax and government. Nozick effectively highlights that income and corporate tax can only be justified if associated government expenditure can also be justified.
Even if you find that neither of these perspectives to be the right one, they help establish the parameters of a fair tax system. It’s then up to us to inject our values to determine which system is right for the kind of society we wish to live in.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
You might be interested in…
Opinion + Analysis Business + Leadership, Health + Wellbeing
Joshua Pearl is the head of Energy Transition at Iberdrola Australia. Josh has previously worked in government and political and corporate advisory. Josh studied economics and finance at the University of New South Wales and philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics.
Do we all have a right to protest? And does it count if it doesn’t result in radical change?Grappling with its many faces and forms, philosopher Dr Tim Dean, and human rights lawyer and chair of Amnesty International UK, Dr Senthorun (Sen) Raj unpack what it means to ethically protest in our modern society.
In the wake of 2023 World Pride and Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Raj and Dean reflect on a fundamental question present in all protest: What is it you’re protesting?
The first challenge is in agreeing on what the problem is: Is it freedom we’re fighting for? Equal rights? Sustainability? From there, you’ve got to expose the fault to enough people who are motivated to join in on the resistance.
“We can hope for a better future, but is it enough to just hope?” – Sen Raj
Even if a protest is small in numbers, it can be lasting in impact; just consider Sydney’s first Mardi Gras. It was a relatively modest event that’s now grown to nearly 12,500 marchers and 300,000 spectators. But it began with a fraction of those numbers. Late in the evening on 24 June 1978, a group marched toward Hyde Park with a small stereo system and banners decorating the back of a single flat-bed truck, like a scaled-down parade float. The march intentionally coincided with anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, which remains a symbol of resistance and solidarity among the gay and lesbian community. As the night progressed, police confiscated the truck and sound system. Eventually, 53 people were charged – despite having a permit to march – after they fought back in response to the police violence. To this, Ken Davis, who helped lead the march, said, “The police attack made us more determined to run Mardi Gras the next year.”
‘Gay Solidarity Group / Women marching, morning of first Mardi Gras’, 24 June 1978, photo by Sallie Colechin
“Protest” has multiple meanings
A meaningful protest doesn’t have to be major like Mardi Gras. Sometimes, protests by brave individuals alone have extraordinary impacts.
Thích Quảng Đức, a Mahayana Buddhist monk, famously burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Vietnam on 11 June 1963. In the height of the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Quảng Đức performed this self-immolation to protest Buddhist persecution. The harrowing photo of him calmly seated while burning alive touched all corners of the globe and inspired similar acts of sacrifice in the name of religious freedom.
Protests need not be so drastic, though, to have an impact. On 16 December 1965, a group of American students protested the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands with peace signs on them to school. When administrators told the students to remove the bands and they refused, they were sent home. Backed by their families, the Iowa school’s barring of student protest reached the Supreme Court. The famed Tinker v. Des Moines decision held that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
The Tinker case is proof that protests, no matter how minor, can give rise to reformation. But we shouldn’t enter all protests with an expectation of radical change. Dean and Raj agree the assumption that transformation is the mark of a successful protest ought to be re-examined, as a clear outcome isn’t the only metric of success. As Raj said, “There is a tendency at times to assume that a protest will have a very clear message – a defined endpoint or outcome.”
Dr Senthorun Raj and Dr Tim Dean, The Ethics of Protest, 2 March 2023, photo by Carlita Sari
Though progress might prove slow, it’s progress, nonetheless. We should act with the intention of spreading a message and entering a larger conversation that may or may not modify the status quo. Does a protest count for nothing if it doesn’t result in sweeping change? Is it not enough to ignite the spirit of defiance in just one soul? Or to simply express your authentic self even if it has no impact?
“For me, being queer, being trans, being part of a community that is marginalised and stigmatised for who you are or what you do, in itself, is a form of protest.” – Sen Raj
For members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Raj highlights how, “by virtue of existing, these individuals are being policed.” He says, “For me, being queer, being trans, being part of a community that is marginalised and stigmatised for who you are or what you do, in itself, is a form of protest.” So by refusing to conform and loving who they want, not holding themselves to gender or sexual norms, LGBTQIA+ people protest every day. It’s not a large mass gathering, but it’s a kind of protest, nonetheless. Authentic expression begets liberation; we ought not trivialise the importance of any protest, big or small, as it takes real courage to take part in something larger than yourself.
Does violence have a place in protests?
Just as protests can manifest in many forms, they can also be carried out differently.
Because tragedy and injustice are what usually catalyse protests, they’re often charged with strong – and sometimes overwhelmingly negative – emotions. It’s no surprise, then, that some protests turn violent.
But is violence ever permissible in a protest? And if police instigate it, do protesters have a right to protect themselves?
Police in Birmingham, Alabama sprayed protesters with high-powered hoses during a civil rights protest, 1963, photo by Charles Moore
During the racial tensions in 1960s America, many protests ended in violence, especially by police. Images capture the savage behaviour in Birmingham, Alabama, where police unleashed high-powered hoses and dogs on Black protesters. In spite of such violence, they had no space to defend themselves; fighting back meant certain arrest. As Dean and Raj detailed in the discussion, sometimes authorities use this tendency towards self-defence to provoke violence and thus justify further oppression. Race riots persist in America as the fight against systematic racism and police brutality continues. The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), founded in 2013 and popularised after a policeman wrongfully killed George Floyd in 2020, continues the fight for Black rights.
The fragility of protesting
The right to protest isn’t guaranteed and must be protected. In the absence of protest, the government and other institutions could operate unchallenged.
In Hong Kong, China enacted a new national security law in 2020 that’s a major barrier to protesting. Already, hundreds of protesters have been arrested. On paper, the law protects against terrorism and subversion, but in practice, it criminalises dissent. In the absence of protest, the powerful can ignore and silence the concerns of the masses. If a system is broken, binding together and protesting is an essential step in fixing it. Without protests, a broken system will remain broken.
“That’s what gives rise to protests, is that refusal. That refusal to allow for social or political worlds that oppress you to continue unchecked, and to say ‘Enough’.” – Sen Raj
Anti-protest laws aren’t a uniquely Hong Kong phenomenon. In April 2022, the New South Wales government passed more stringent legislation that punishes both protests and protesters that illegally dissent on public land. By blocking protests that prevent economic activity, critics say it’s an extremely undemocratic measure and threatens protests at large. Plus, it creates a hierarchy among protests, where some are viewed as valid while others aren’t. This raises the larger question of whether it’s the government’s place to determine which protests should be allowed. Does asking permission to protest do an injustice to the demonstration?
A way forward
It’s important to note that there’s no one way to protest. The textbook protest of a group of angry, fed-up citizens waving signs and shouting in the streets doesn’t always hold true. And so we’ve got to remember that protest need not look a certain way or foster radical change to be successful. It need not be a grandiose display of floats and intricate costumes parading down Oxford Street, like today’s Mardi Gras; sometimes it’s enough for one person to speak their mind.
Raj reminds us that protest ought to be messy, joyous and painful but should include care, respect and solidarity. He encourages us to abandon the stereotypical depiction of protest and embrace the possibility of many protests. It’s limiting to try and definitively define what it means. “Protest” is encapsulating of so many movements, minor and mammoth. Instead of trying to box it into one definition, let’s find beauty in its vastness.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
Cameryn Cass is a curious writer and an editor-in-training who studied at Michigan State University. Her primary focus is environmental storytelling, as she deeply loves the natural world and intends to use her voice to defend it. Outside of work, she loves to hike, rock climb and practice yoga.
Parental leave policies are designed to support and protect working parents. However, we need to exercise greater imagination when it comes to the roles of women, family and care if we are to promote greater social equity.
In October 2022, prime minister Anthony Albanese announced a major reform to Australia’s paid parental leave scheme, making it more flexible for parents and extending the period that it covers. Labor’s reforms are undoubtedly an improvement over the existing scheme, which has been insufficient to address gender-based disadvantage.
Labor’s new arrangement builds on the current Parental Leave Pay (PLP) scheme. This entitles a primary carer – usually the mother – to 18 weeks paid leave at the national minimum wage, along with any parental leave offered by their employer. It runs in parallel to the Dad and Partner Pay scheme, which offers “eligible working dads and partners” two weeks paid leave at the minimum wage. Recipients of this scheme are required to be employed and recipients of both need to be earning less than ~$156,000 annually.
Albanese’s announced expansion of the PLP will increase it to 26 weeks paid leave by 2026, which can be shared between carers if they wish. Labor claims that this will offer parents greater flexibility while retaining continuity with the existing scheme.
Labor’s new scheme is an improvement over the older arrangement, but is it enough to move society closer to the goal of social equity? To do so, we need to do more to reduce the marginalisation of women economically, in the home and in the workplace, and to expand our imagination when it comes to parenthood and caring responsibilities.
Uneven playing field
Gender-based disadvantage is a global occurrence. Currently, being a woman acts as a reliable determining factor of that person’s social, health and economic disadvantage throughout their life. Paid parental schemes are one type of governmental policy that can facilitate and encourage the structural reform necessary to address gender-based disadvantage. Certain parental leave policies can help reconfigure conceptions about parenting, family and work in ways that better align with a country’s goals and attitudes surrounding both gender equity and economic participation.
Paid parental leave schemes that provide adequate leave periods, pay rates, and encourage shared caring patterns across households, can fundamentally impact the degree to which one’s gender acts a significant determining factor of their opportunities and wellbeing across their lifetime.
The Parenthood, an Australian not-for-profit, emphasises that motherhood acts as a penalty against women, children and their families. This penalty is experienced acutely by women who have children and manifests as diminished health and economic security, reducing women’s social capacity to achieve shared gender equity goals. Their research highlights that countries that offer higher levels of maternity and paternity leave, such as Germany, in combination with access to affordable childcare results in higher lifetime earnings and work participation rates for women.
Australia’s existing PLP scheme, on the other hand, works to both create and foster conditions that reduce the capacity for women to achieve the same social and economic security as their male peers. It hugely limits women’s capacity to return to work, to remain at home, and to freely negotiate alternative patterns of care with their partners. This in combination with a growing casualised workforce who remain unable to access adequate employer support emphasises the need for extensive policy amendments if we hope to realise our goals of social equity.
Labour’s proposed expansion incrementally begins to better align the PLP with the goals set forth by organisations like The Parenthood.
Providing women and their families with more freedom to independently determine their work and social structures may mark the beginning of a positive move against gender-based disadvantage. However, the proposed expansion is not a cure-all for a society that remains wedded to particular conceptions of women, parenting, and labour more broadly.
The working rights of mothers
We can see how disadvantage goes beyond parental leave by looking at how mothers are treated in workplaces such as universities. Dr Talia Morag at the University of Wollongong advocates for the working rights of mothers employed within her university. Prior to Albanese’s announcement, Morag emphasised the cultural resistance, or rather a lack of imagination, when it came to merging the concept of motherhood with an academic career.
Class scheduling, travel funding and networking capacities are all important features of an academic career that require attention and reconfiguration if mothers, especially of infants and young children, are to be sufficiently included and afforded equal capacities to succeed in university settings.
Even under expanded PLP schemes, mothers who breastfeed, for example, face difficulty when returning to work if they remain unsupported and marginalised in those workplaces. As Morag emphasises, many casual or early-career academic staff are unentitled to receive government PLP or university funded parental leave.
Critically, the associations between being woman and being taken to be an impediment to one’s workplace is not an issue faced solely by those who become mothers.
As Morag remarks, “it does not matter if you are or are not going to be a mother, you will be labelled as a potential mother for most of your career. And that will come with expectations and discrimination.”
The gender-based disadvantage emergent from these cultural associations will remain if broader cultural change is not sought alongside expanded PLP schemes.
Expanding our imaginations as to how current notions of motherhood, family and caring patterns can look will require the combined efforts of expanded PLP schemes and the creation of more hospitable working environments for parents. Women may remain being seen as potential mothers and potential liabilities to places of work, however this liability may slowly begin to shift.
We historically have, and seemingly remain, committed to reproducing our species. This means we continue to produce little people who grow up to experience pleasure, pain, and everything in between. If we also see ourselves as committed to managing some of that pain, to expanding the opportunities these little people get, as well as reducing how gender unfairly determines opportunity on their behalf, we will require policies that assist parents to do so.
Affording families this chance benefits not only mothers, or parents, but also their children, their children’s children, and all others in our communities. Granting parents the capacity to choose who works where and when can help us, incrementally, along a long path to a world that is perhaps more dynamic and equitable than we can even begin to envision.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
Georgia has an academic and professional background in applied ethics, feminism and humanitarian aid. They are currently completing a Masters of Philosophy at the University of Sydney on the topic of gender equality and pragmatic feminist ethics. Georgia also holds a degree in Psychology and undertakes research on cross-cultural feminist initiatives in Bangladeshi refugee camps.
If a computer responds to questions in an intelligent way, does that mean it is genuinely intelligent?
Since its release to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Anyone can log in, ask a series of questions, and receive very detailed and reasonable responses.
Given the startling clarity of the responses, the fluidity of the language and the speed of the response, it is easy to assume that ChatGPT “understands” what it’s reporting back. The very language used by ChatGPT, and the way it types out each word individually, reinforces the feeling that we are “chatting” with another intelligent being.
But this raises the question of whether ChatGPT, or any other large language model (LLM) like it, is genuinely capable of “understanding” anything, at least in the way that humans do. This is where a thought experiment concocted in the 1980s becomes especially relevant today.
“The Chinese room”
Imagine you’re a monolingual native English speaker sitting in a small windowless room surrounded by filing cabinets with drawers filled with cards, each featuring one or more Chinese characters. You also have a book of detailed instructions written in English on how to manipulate those cards.
Given you’re a native English speaker with no understanding of Chinese, the only thing that will make sense to you will be the book of instructions.
Now imagine that someone outside the room slips a series of Chinese characters under the door. You look in the book and find instructions telling you what to do if you see that very series of characters. The instructions culminate by having you pick out another series of Chinese characters and slide them back under the door.
You have no idea what the characters mean but they make perfect sense to the native Chinese speaker on the outside. In fact, the series of characters they originally slid under the door formed a question and the characters you returned formed a perfectly reasonable response. To the native Chinese speaker outside, it looks, for all intents and purposes, like the person inside the room understands Chinese. Yet you have no such understanding.
This is the “Chinese room” thought experiment proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980 to challenge the idea that a computer that simply follows a program can have a genuine understanding of what it is saying. Because Searle was American, he chose Chinese for his thought experiment. But the experiment would equally apply to a monolingual Chinese speaker being given cards written in English or a Spanish speaker given cards written in Cherokee, and so on.
Functionalism and Strong AI
Philosophers have long debated what it means to have a mind that is capable of having mental states, like thoughts or feelings. One view that was particularly popular in the late 20th century was called “functionalism”.
Functionalism states that a mental state is not defined by how it’s produced, such as requiring that it must be the product of a brain in action. It is also not defined by what it feels like, such as requiring that pain have a particular unpleasant sensation. Instead, functionalism says that a mental state is defined by what it does.
This means that if something produces the same aversive response that pain does in us, even if it is done by a computer rather than a brain, then it is just as much a mental state as it is when a human experiences pain.
Functionalism is related to a view that Searle called “Strong AI”. This view says that if we produce a computer that behaves and responds to stimuli in exactly the same way that a human would, then we should consider that computer to have genuine mental states. “Weak AI”, on the other hand, simply claims that all such a computer is doing is simulating mental states.
Searle offered the Chinese room thought experiment to show that being able to answer a question intelligently is not sufficient to prove Strong AI. It could be that the computer is functionally proficient in speaking Chinese without actually understanding Chinese.
ChatGPT room
While the Chinese room remained a much-debated thought experiment in philosophy for over 40 years, today we can all see the experiment made real whenever we log into Chat GPT. Large language models like ChatGPT are the Chinese room argument made real. They are incredibly sophisticated versions of the filing cabinet, reflecting the corpus of text upon which they’re trained, and the instructions, representing the probabilities used to decide how to pick which character or word to display next.
So even if we feel that ChatGPT – or a future more capable LLM – understands what it’s saying, if we believe that the person in the Chinese room doesn’t understand Chinese, and that LLMs operate in much the same way as the Chinese room, then we must conclude that it doesn’t really understand what it’s saying.
This observation has relevance for ethical considerations as well. If we believe that genuine ethical action requires the actor to have certain mental states, like intentions or beliefs, or that ethics requires the individual to possess certain virtues, like integrity or honesty – then we might conclude that a LLM is incapable of being genuinely ethical if it lacks these things.
A LLM might still be able to express ethical statements and follow prescribed ethical guidelines imposed by its creators – as has been the case in the creators of ChatGPT limiting its responses around sensitive topics such as racism, violence and self-harm – but even if it looks like it has its own ethical beliefs and convictions, that could be an illusion similar to the Chinese room.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
You might be interested in…
Opinion + Analysis Science + Technology, Society + Culture
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
