Posts Tagged ‘morality’
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts”*…
The (remarkable) George Scialabba on how Middlemarch, “perhaps the greatest repository of moral beauty in English literature,” “teaches us to live faithfully a hidden life”…
… “Moral beauty” is an arresting phrase. Typically, goodness is commended for its effects rather than for its aspect. Perhaps the scarcity nowadays of such lofty sacred eloquence as Edwards’s, the drabness of much preaching and religious writing compared with earlier periods, when sermons were literary performances and widely published, is part of the general verbal aridity of our age, brought on by the ubiquitous toxic blooms of commercial speech that convert our innermost thoughts into advertising jingles. This is by no means only a loss for believers; the religious imagination is a vital part of a living culture. Ceding it – like so much of contemporary culture – to formula and cliché gradually but inexorably hollows us out.
There are, no doubt, plenty of resources within Christian and other religious traditions from which to relearn heartfelt eloquence. But I’d like to propose a secular exemplar: perhaps the greatest repository of moral beauty in English literature, the voice of the narrator in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
George Eliot (1819–1880) was born Marian [often cited as Mary Ann] Evans to an estate manager and his wife in Warwickshire. She was extremely plain, and though this was in some ways unfortunate for her, it was fortunate for posterity: her family considered her unmarriageable, so she received more of an education than most girls at the time. Though painfully rebuffed by her first crush, the then-famous (now largely forgotten) social theorist Herbert Spencer, she eventually found an ideal partner, the writer and editor George Lewes, who worshipped her. Her formal education was patchy, but her intellectual appetites were voracious. When she began as a literary freelancer – writing under a masculine name – she was brilliantly successful. Though a nonbeliever, she was always keenly interested in and sympathetic toward religion, and early in her career translated into English two of the most influential Christian books of the nineteenth century: The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach. In her late thirties, she began writing novels, producing several masterpieces: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.
Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” That may have been, as much as anything, a dig at enormously popular novelists like Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and H. G. Wells; after all, Jane Austen’s, Thomas Hardy’s, and D. H. Lawrence’s novels are arguably grown-up fare. Middlemarch, though, is a book to grow up with: an ideal moral education for a college student (as in my case, and that of thousands of others) or young adult. Eliot’s running commentary explains, admonishes, predicts, praises, rebukes, and excuses with a wit so gentle and a charity so unfailing that her voice might be said to float like a butterfly and rouse her readers not with a sting but with a light, affectionate nudge…
[Scialabba unpacks the elegantly-embodied moral geometry of Middlemarch…]
… For the most part, though, in Middlemarch as in life, character is destiny. Perhaps a more accurate formula would be: character refined by suffering is destiny. Fred’s thoughtlessness must be tempered by the very real prospect of losing Mary. Dorothea’s disregard of the traditional meanings of marriage, making of it instead a pure, disembodied discipleship, teaches her a grudging respect for common sense and a necessary measure of distrust for her enthusiasms.
If there is a master insight in Middlemarch, a touchstone of the novel’s moral wisdom, it is this:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
The most important thing in this famous passage is not the tremendous metaphor – “the roar which lies on the other side of silence” – but the word “stupidity.” In Eliot’s moral philosophy, our original sin is not malice or any other positive evil but our deafness and short-sightedness about the needs and feelings of others. Unwadding our ears – a gradual process, if we are not to be overwhelmed by that roar – can only be the result of chastening experience. Our own pain teaches us to notice the pain of others.
At the novel’s close, Casaubon has died, and Dorothea has married Ladislaw. They live in London, where he is taking a small but energetic part in the ferment of English political reform in the 1830s. Tenderly appraising Dorothea’s once-shining hopes, Eliot draws a moral that fits everyone in the novel – and out of it:
Her full nature … spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
“To live faithfully a hidden life” is a beautiful ideal, a conception of holiness, sacred or secular, that is all the finer because it is accessible to every human soul.
A norishing read for our times: “The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch,” from @plough.bsky.social.
Bonus from the archives: Scialabba on the Determinism – Free Will debate
* George Eliot, Middlemarch
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As we value virtue, we might recall that it was on this date in 1860 that Eliot completed her second novel, The Mill on the Floss, and dedicated it to her “beloved husband, George Henry Lewes.”
“This incompleteness is all we have”*…
The impulse to “systemitize” morality is as old as philosophy. Many now hope that AI will discover and organize moral truths. But Elad Uzan suggests that Kurt Gödel’s work on incompleteness demonstrates that deciding what is right will always be our burden…
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. Unlike human judges or policymakers, a machine would not be swayed by personal interests or lapses in reasoning. It does not lie. It does not accept bribes or pleas. It does not weep over hard decisions.
Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context – qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place.
Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.
But what, exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge. Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth’s centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates – assumptions about motion, force or mass – and derive increasingly complex consequences. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and James Clerk Maxwell’s equations are classic examples: compact, elegant formulations from which wide-ranging predictions about the physical world can be deduced.
Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain – in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems. A consequentialist begins with the idea that actions should maximise wellbeing; a deontologist starts from the idea that actions must respect duties or rights. These basic commitments function similarly to their counterparts in physics: they define the structure of moral reasoning within each ethical theory.
Just as AI is used in physics to operate within existing theories – for example, to optimise experimental designs or predict the behaviour of complex systems – it can also be used in ethics to extend moral reasoning within a given framework. In physics, AI typically operates within established models rather than proposing new physical laws or conceptual frameworks. It may calculate how multiple forces interact and predict their combined effect on a physical system. Similarly, in ethics, AI does not generate new moral principles but applies existing ones to novel and often intricate situations. It may weigh competing values – fairness, harm minimisation, justice – and assess their combined implications for what action is morally best. The result is not a new moral system, but a deepened application of an existing one, shaped by the same kind of formal reasoning that underlies scientific modelling. But is there an inherent limit to what AI can know about morality? Could there be true ethical propositions that no machine, no matter how advanced, can ever prove?
These questions echo a fundamental discovery in mathematical logic, probably the most fundamental insight ever to be proven: Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. They show that any logical system powerful enough to describe arithmetic is either inconsistent or incomplete. In this essay, I argue that this limitation, though mathematical in origin, has deep consequences for ethics, and for how we design AI systems to reason morally…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The incompleteness of ethics,” from @aeon.co.
And as if that were not enough, consider the cultural challenge implicit in this chart:
More background at “Cultural Bias in LLMs” (and here and here).
* Charles Bukowski
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As we own up to it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil received a patent (#2,292,387) for a frequency-hopping radio communication system which later became the basis for modern technologies like Bluetooth, wireless telephones, and Wi-Fi.
Hedy Lamarr made it big in acting before ever moving to the United States. Her role in the Czech film Ecstasy got international attention in 1933 for containing scandalous, intimate scenes that were unheard of in the movie industry up until then.
Backlash from her early acting career was the least of her worries, however, as tensions began to rise in Europe. Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, grew up in a Catholic household in Austria, but both of her parents had a Jewish heritage. In addition, she was married to Friedrich Mandl, a rich ammunition manufacturer with connections to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Her time with Friedrich Mandl was bittersweet. While the romance quickly died and Mandl became very possessive of his young wife, Lamarr was often taken to meetings on scientific innovations in the military world. These meetings are said to have been the spark that led to her becoming an inventor. As tensions in both her household and in the world around her became overwhelming, she fled Europe and found her way to the United States through a job offer from Hollywood’s MGM Studios.
Lamarr became one of the most sought-after leading women in Hollywood and starred in popular movies like the 1939 film Algiers, but once the United States began helping the Allies and preparing to possibly enter the war, Lamarr almost left Hollywood forever. Her eyes were no longer fixed on the bright lights of the film set but on the flashes of bombs and gunfire. Lamarr wanted to join the Inventors’ Council in Washington, DC, where she thought she would be of better service to the war effort.
Lamarr’s path to inventing the cornerstone of Wi-Fi began when she heard about the Navy’s difficulties with radio-controlled torpedoes. She recruited George Antheil, a composer she met through MGM Studios, in order to create what was known as a Secret Communication System.
The idea behind the invention was to create a system that constantly changed frequencies, making it difficult for the Axis powers to decode the radio messages. The invention would help the Navy make their torpedo systems become more stealthy and make it less likely for the torpedoes to be rendered useless by enemies.
Lamarr was the brains behind the invention, with her background knowledge in ammunition, and Antheil was the artist that brought it to life, using the piano for inspiration. In 1942, under her then-married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, she filed for a patent for the Secret Communication System, patent case file 2,292,387, and proposed it to the Navy.
The first part of Lamarr and Antheil’s Secret Communication System story did not see a happy Hollywood ending. The Navy refused to accept the new technology during World War II. Not only did the invention come from a civilian, but it was complex and ahead of its time.
As the invention sat unused, Lamarr continued on in Hollywood and found other ways to help with the war effort, such as working with the USO. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s Hollywood career came to an end that her invention started gaining notice.
Around the time Lamarr filmed her last scene with the 1958 film The Female Animal, her patented invention caught the attention of other innovators in technology. The Secret Communication System saw use in the 1950s during the development of CDMA network technology in the private sector, while the Navy officially adopted the technology in the 1960s around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The methods described in the patent assisted greatly in the development of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Despite the world finally embracing the methods of the patent as early as the mid-to-late 1950s, the Lamarr-Antheil duo were not recognized and awarded for their invention until the late 1990s and early 2000s. They both received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, and in 2014 they were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame…
“The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony”*…
As with the heart, so the head… Joshua May, a professor with training in philosophy, the social sciences, and behavioral science, uses scientific research to examine moral controversies, ethics in science (and life), and the mechanics and philosophies of social change. In his teaching, his research, and his recent book, Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science, he reminds us that binary, all-or-nothing arguments often rest on false dichotomies. He elaborates in an interview with JSTOR Daily…
How do moral, social, and political values influence the sciences? The social sciences? How can we become more virtuous in an era of AI, political polarization, and factory farming? These are just a few questions behind Joshua May’s wide-ranging body of research and teaching. In his own words, his work sits at “the intersection of ethics and science,” fed by a desire to understand moral controversies and social change—and the relationship between those things. He encourages us to resist false dichotomies and black-and-white thinking, looking instead for a third, fourth, or even fifth approach to a moral issue (see his discussion of factory farming below for an example). He’s considered the influence of emotions on moral judgement, the emotions provoked by bioethical issues such as human cloning, and the roles of empathy and ego in altruistic behavior. His longstanding interest in free will led to the 2022 co-edited volume Agency in Mental Disorder, which brings philosophical reasoning about limits and culpability to bear on addiction, mental illness, and psychotherapy.
May is also a “public philosopher,” an active contributor to popular debates on neurodiversity, veganism, and politics…
…What’s the best discovery you’ve made in your research?
False dichotomies are everywhere in ethics. Debates about factory farming focus on whether people should strictly omit all animal products from their diet (to go vegan or at least vegetarian) or just eat whatever they want. But I’ve argued, with my collaborator Victor Kumar, that there’s a distinct reducetarian path: most people should imperfectly reduce their consumption of animal products. The appropriate level of reduction all depends on the person and their circumstances. Similarly, does neuroscience show that we have free will or that it’s just an illusion? I think a careful look at the evidence suggests a third option: we have free will, but less than is commonly presumed. When it comes to neurological differences, like autism and ADHD, the false choice is between viewing them as either deficits or mere differences. But they can be one or the other (or both), depending on the person and their circumstances. The same goes for addiction: Is it a brain disease or a moral failing? I’ve argued for a neglected third route: it’s a disorder that nevertheless involves varying levels of control depending on the individual. Throughout moral and political debates, false dichotomies seem to dominate, but in my view, nuance should be the norm…
“Joshua May and the Search for Philosophical Nuance,” from @joshdmay.bsky.social and @jstordaily.bsky.social.
See also: “Stop the ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ snap judgments and watch your world become more interesting,” from @lorrainebesser.bsky.social (and source of the image at the top)
* “The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.” – Rollo May (no known relationship to Joshua)
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As we distinguish details, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the Roman Catholic Church announced, via a notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”), which was originally instituted in 1557. The communique stated that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties. So… read on.
“It is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest, that holds human associations together”*…
… and in its absence? Millie Giles on the state of trust in American professions…
When choosing a career, there are several (often contradictory) factors that determine people’s decisions: pay, of course; personal interests; work-life balance; location; public perception; and how a particular job might weigh on their conscience.
But which professions do Americans trust the most?
A recent Gallup poll, [published last Monday], found that 76% of US adults considered nurses to have high or very high honesty and ethical standards, with teachers, military officers, and pharmacists also scoring highly amongst those surveyed.
Conversely, Americans were skeptical about the ethical standards of TV reporters (55% considered low or very low), members of Congress (68%), and lobbyists (68%) — perhaps because the public perception of professionals in political and media-related fields is that many of them have ulterior motives, as is the case with stereotypically mercenary car salespeople and lawyers, which also ranked negatively overall.
Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, infamously said in November 2009 — with the impacts of the global financial crisis still reverberating loudly — that he and his fellow bankers were “doing God’s work.” Ridiculed at the time, he might be pleased to see his once vilified profession ranked not far behind the clergy, per Gallup.
Zooming out: the average of high/very high ethical ratings across the core 11 professions sunk to just 30% in 2024, with trust in medical doctors in particular having dropped 14 percentage points since 2021…
“America’s most trusted professions,” from @sherwood.news @Gallup
* H. L. Mencken
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As we contemplate confidence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that news of the FBI’s Abscam operation, targeting corrupt Congress members and other elected officials, broke publicly. The two-year investigation had initially targeted trafficking in stolen property and illicit business people, but later evolved into a corruption investigation; it led to the convictions of six members of the United States House of Representatives and one member of the United States Senate, along with one member of the New Jersey State Senate, members of the Philadelphia City Council, the Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and an inspector for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The Abscam operation wass dramatized in the 2013 feature film American Hustle, directed by David O. Russell, which received ten Academy Award nominations.
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable”*…
Over the last decade there has emerged a growing and influential intellectual movement focused on progress— how it happens and how to speed it up. Fomented by thinkers like Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collison, the movement has raised tantalizing prospects… and some real fears about the risks that experimental, entrepreneurial efforts to accelerate advancement might entail: will enthusiasm outrun safeguards? And who gets to define what represents “progress” anyway?
Jason Crawford, another leader of the progress movement addresses these concerns…
In one sense, the concept of progress is simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial. In another sense, it contains an entire worldview.
The most basic meaning of “progress” is simply advancement along a path, or more generally from one state to another that is considered more advanced by some standard. (In this sense, progress can be good, neutral, or even bad—e.g., the progress of a disease.) The question is always: advancement along what path, in what direction, by what standard?
“Scientific progress,” “technological progress,” and “economic progress” are relatively straightforward. They are hard to measure, they are multi-dimensional, and we might argue about specific examples—but in general, scientific progress consists of more knowledge, better theories and explanations, a deeper understanding of the universe; technological progress consists of more inventions that work better (more powerfully or reliably or efficiently) and enable us to do more things; economic progress consists of more production, infrastructure, and wealth.
“Scientific progress,” “technological progress,” and “economic progress” are relatively straightforward. They are hard to measure, they are multi-dimensional, and we might argue about specific examples—but in general, scientific progress consists of more knowledge, better theories and explanations, a deeper understanding of the universe; technological progress consists of more inventions that work better (more powerfully or reliably or efficiently) and enable us to do more things; economic progress consists of more production, infrastructure, and wealth.
But this form of progress is not an end in itself. True progress is advancement toward the good, toward ultimate values—call this “ultimate progress,” or “progress in outcomes.” Defining this depends on axiology; that is, on our theory of value.
[Crawford unpacks humanist and biocentrist values as examples…]
… What are we talking about when we refer to “progress” unqualified, as in “the progress of mankind” or “the roots of progress”?
“Progress” in this sense is the concept of material progress, social progress, and human progress as a unified whole. It is based on the premise that progress in capabilities really does on the whole lead to progress in outcomes. This doesn’t mean that all aspects of progress move in lockstep—they don’t. It means that all aspects of progress support each other and over the long term depend on each other; they are intertwined and ultimately inseparable…
David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity, is even more explicit, saying that progress includes “improvements not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare.”
Skepticism of this idea of progress is sometimes expressed as: “progress towards what?” The undertone of this question is: “in your focus on material progress, you have lost sight of social and/or human progress.” On the premise that different forms of progress are diverging and even coming into opposition, this is an urgent challenge; on the premise that progress a unified whole, it is a valuable intellectual question but not a major dilemma.
“Progress” is also an interpretation of history according to which all these forms of progress have, by and large, been happening.
In this sense, the study of “progress” is the intersection of axiology and history: given a standard of value, are things getting better?
In Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, the bulk of the chapters are devoted to documenting this history. Many of the charts in that book were sourced from Our World in Data, which also emphasizes the historical reality of progress.
Not everyone agrees with this concept of progress. It depends on an Enlightenment worldview that includes confidence in reason and science, and a humanist morality…
[Crawford reviews critiques of “progress” and unpacks the disastrous history of “progress” thinking– which contributed to totalitarianism– in the 20th century…]
… To move forward, we need a wiser, more mature idea of progress.
Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It depends on choice and effort. It is up to us.
Progress is not automatically good. It must be steered. Progress always creates new problems, and they don’t get solved automatically. Solving them requires active focus and effort, and this is a part of progress, too.
Material progress does not automatically lead to moral progress. Technology within an evil social system can do more harm than good. We must commit to improving morality and society along with science, technology, and industry.
With these lessons well learned, we can rescue the idea of progress and carry it forward into the 21st century and beyond…
Agree? “What is Progress?” from @jasoncrawford.
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we analyze advancement, we might spare a thought for George Westinghouse; he died on this date in 1914. An engineer, inventor, and industrialist, he built his first fortune marketing the railroad air brake that he invented. But he soon turned his attention to the emerging electrical industry– of which he became a pioneer. He acquired the rights to inventor Nikola Tesla‘s brushless AC induction motor (the initial “engine” of everything electric from industrial motors to household appliances) along with patents for a new type of electric power distribution, polyphase alternating current… which put Westinghouse into direct competition with Thomas Edison, who was promoting direct current. (In the end, AC came to dominate.)
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