In keeping with my practice this year of republishing posts from past years, I chose to emphasize this post from 2022 on those who are among the most politically vulnerable in this world. Following on my recent re-post of the criticism of the use of "evil" by some public philosophers, I wish to highlight Charlotte Vyt's advocacy for some of the most vulnerable people in the organized irresponsibility that is the international state system. Rather than waste time on the word "evil" and pointless polemics, Charlotte's engagement shows a different and better way to do philosophy that joins the theoretical with the practical. In Spring 2026, Charlotte earned her PhD. Her thesis on epistemic justness regarding local practices was amazing. Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

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Charlotte is a legal guardian. She advocates for youth under the age of 18 seeking asylum in Belgium. I wanted to talk with her about this work.

Jeremy: I’ve known Charlotte Vyt since 2018 at a meeting of the Human Development and Capability Association in Buenos Aires. In 2020-2021, we also co-organized the Planetary Justice Virtual Community with Ben Mylius and Sebastian Östlund. Charlotte is a philosopher who works in social epistemology, anthropological theory, Indigenous studies, and the Capability Approach. When we recently spoke, Charlotte was saying that her experiences as an asylum advocate and as a philosopher have a way of relating to the “politics of being put on hold.” What did she mean, and what was she getting at?

Part I. The Politics of Nothingness

Charlotte: I relate the “politics of being put on hold” to what I intuitively call the “politics of nothingness.” I’ve become more and more interested about that. By the “politics of nothingness,” I mean the seeming non-materiality of certain forms of suffering as well as the seeming absence of structures allowing for it. What in social epistemology is called the “the politics of ignorance” is part of the functioning of this nothingness. The politics of ignorance allows the politics of nothingness to proceed silently.

Ignorance is associated with an absence of knowledge, a nothingness of knowledge. But it is a substantive epistemic practice in itself. Insofar as inequitable social relations influence what counts as valuable knowledge and who is considered as a credible knower, ignorance about certain forms of experience or sense-making are equally influenced by those inequitable social relations. This means that ignorance functions as an epistemic practice as such, as a way of having a reality.

In the context of asylum-seeking, the general ignorance about many aspects of the procedure reinforces politically constructed images of asylum seekers. Being put on hold is part of the suffering that isn’t acknowledged. It comes across as nothing in the very society the asylum seekers want to join! And yet it allows for many other forms of injustice to take root. It’s part of a structural “nothingness” that quietly stains and restricts life possibilities:

Imagine R., a fourteen year-old boy, alone, trapped between the life he had to escape from and the contingency of another life. He’s become Europe’s yoyo. For two whole years, he was deported back-and-forth between Greece and Turkey, enrolled in human trafficking practices, crossing the sea over-and-over again, even having his teeth broken by Europe’s guards.

Then, I became his legal guardian. His fingerprints were taken in Greece. So our first step was to prove his age. That way, the Dublin Regulation would not be applied to him and we could apply for asylum in Belgium. He had to undergo several bone scans at the hospital – of his collarbone, wrist and jaw. Luckily, the results were conclusive, he was estimated “with relative scientific certainty” to be sixteen years old.

A couple of weeks ago, he had his first interview at the “Office des Étrangers” (Foreign Office). There, he broke down and repeatedly begged me to make sure “they” would not deport him again.

We now have to wait in complete uncertainty for the convocation of his second interview at the “Commissariat Général aux Réfugiés et aux Apatrides” (General Commissioner for Refugees and Stateless Persons). The interview could happen at any moment, but there is no official deadline (well, technically there is, but it is never respected)! The official meeting may take over a year to come around. That means another year spent in legal and social limbo.

Moreover, there is a high probability R.’s claim for asylum will be refused. But by the time we receive the response, another six to eight months will have elapsed. … By the time we will have appealed, another year will have gone by again. …

This type of idle waiting lasts for years and has no clear ending. It constructs people as worthless in-betweens forced into immobility and anxiousness. Being put on hold is a politicized experience. It serves a politics of nothingness by making suffering invisible.

Jeremy: And Belgian citizens get to believe that fair process is occurring. They can remain ignorant of what it’s like to be put on hold. Is that it?

Part II. Slow, Violent “Stuckedness”

Charlotte: The dynamics I’ve described are elusive and slippery. They tend to be presented to us Belgians as being unavoidable, bureaucratic side-effects, lesser evils. This bureaucratic rationalization clears them automatically. Still they embody a type of barely visible, slow violence.

They contribute to making people feel out of sync with reality and the rest of society. For the boys I have guardianship over, it is extremely hard to keep up with school, especially during the moments when we have to meet their lawyer more often or when they are waiting for a reply from the foreign office. When they miss too many days of school, they are kicked out of the school system, and that has a lot of detrimental consequences for them and their future lives. At the same time, it seems absurd for them to focus on something like school when so much uncertainty is going on.

Yet the stuckedness that is created during the process of asylum shapes and affects their life possibilities. At the moment I am talking to you, all Afghan files in Belgium are not being decided. So everyone has to wait without any clear perspective; everyone is stuck and out of sync with the rest of society. Discomfort, unease, worry, shame and fear are emotional aspects of my boys’ daily lives in quite specific ways. These things are an emotional dimension to their precarity that is often overlooked.

Today’s flow of Ukrainian asylum seekers highlights the fact that the limbo certain asylum seekers face is in fact a political choice and not a bureaucratic side-effect of European policies. The Belgian state chose to grant a form of asylum to all Ukrainian applicants, including granting them a basic subsidy. This means that they do not have to go through interviews and even do not have to live in asylum centers. In other words, their lives – and not those of non-European others – are worth not being put on hold.

There’s this quote from Foucault that has always profoundly touched me. He says “people’s suffering must never be allowed to remain the silent residue of politics.” Being put on hold is exactly that. It’s suffering that remains a silent residue of politics, and it should not be allowed to remain so.

Part III. Time as a Political Technology / Smash the Machinery of Time

Jeremy: What do you do as a guardian?

Charlotte: Currently, I am legal guardian to three boys who are seeking international protection in Belgium. I accompany them in their daily lives and support them in their legal process. This means that in the eyes of the state I act as their parent. Central to my role is to accompany them in their asylum procedures: to find a good lawyer for them, make sure their rights are respected and to be present at their interviews with state officials who will decide upon their status as refugees or not.

Regardless of their individual life stories and traumas, the recurring anxiety that marks the realities of these boys’ experiences revolves around time: the experience of having to constantly wait, of being in a continual in-betweenness—in between the life that was and the life that may or may not become.

Jeremy: Then you also shoulder them in all this, … labor emotionally?

Charlotte: There’s this sense of a persistent “stuckedness,” an unavoidable waste of time spent somewhere in between. Waiting, in this context, is not a banal and prosaic practice.

When I refer to a “politics of being put on hold”, that’s what I partially mean to acknowledge: it’s the political element to this form of structural and existential waiting. How and why does this unlivable stuckedness of existence get upheld? Why should lives be put on hold?

An overwhelming number of people die at Europe’s borders – mostly at sea but also at land. Crossing Europe’s borders implies a risk of corporeal violence and death, but it also involves various unstructured, affective and endless forms of violence.

In 2015, Europe implemented its “hotspot system.” This system is supposed to transfer the migrants who are in “clear need” of international protection to other European states. The main consequence of this system is that many asylum seekers are stranded at the borders, stuck, waiting, either to cross the border or for their appeal against the denial of international protection to be processed and responded to.

Spatial borders are not sufficient for Europe’s border strategy? No! A temporal border system has to be implemented as well! Temporal borders reinforce the difficulty of crossing spatial borders by implementing an extra, temporal, layer to them. They function by means of the establishment of an accelerated or decelerated temporality of control through deadlines and time limits. In other words, the temporal border accompanies the spatial border by reinforcing it with a series of rules and deadlines that reinforce its “borderness.”

Concretely, this means that migrant movements are slowed down and their autonomous temporalities disrupted. There’s what Tazzioli calls a “technology of control” here. Temporality is accelerated by reinforcing channels of deportation or illegalization whilst simultaneously being decelerated by reinforcing bureaucratic deadlines. Both manipulations of temporality are put into place in order to reinforce the border system and to regain control over “unruly” migration movements.

Time is then a technology of governmentality in this precise sense: it governs migrants’ mobility. Waiting is ubiquitous in any bureaucratic setting; yet in the context of migration it becomes a tool, and the relations between waiting and (im)mobility serve bordering systems.

These rhythms of governmentality and bureaucratic decisions rapidly change over time and are generally unclear. This creates an overall context of “nonknowledge”, an epistemology of ignorance. The temporal rhythms constantly fluctuate because the dates and deadlines migrants have to comply with in order to be eligible for protection and thus cross the border are always changing.

Besides, not only are the rules regularly changing, there is an ever-growing gap between the “ideal” procedures and the reality of the ways in which they are implemented. The maintenance of strategic ignorance – “unknowns” that are used to enclose possibilities – is not simply a bureaucratic side-effect. It’s a political tactic as such. This means that the unclarity, inconsistency and continuous change with regard to the criteria for selecting and partitioning migrants who have the right to ask for asylum contributes to the containment of migration movements.

The hermeneutical gaps between “official” government statistics and information and the “unofficial” ones represents a meaningful silence, a loud unknown. In other words, the rapidity of changes in temporal deadlines and the ways in which these changes create a general context of non-knowledge are inherently part of a politics of being put on hold.

Part IV. Thinking-Things-Through into Meaningful Action

Jeremy: How did you come to do this kind of work given your background in philosophy?

Charlotte: Initially, I chose to study philosophy because I have always loved the mental exercise of really thinking things through. When I finished high school, my interests in philosophy were mainly what I’d call “self-centered:” I loved metaphysics, ontology, etc. and wanted to understand the meaning of life in its greatest sense.

At the same time, I was very aware of the selfishness of my choice and was in conflict with finding my purpose in life. I wondered how to contribute to society.

This is mainly why I shifted my interests towards social and political philosophy and the study of theories of social justice.

Once I became more familiarized with philosophers and their ways of making sense of everything, I started to become more and more disappointed with their general lack of actual concern with people’s lives – their very real suffering and various experiences of oppression. By “actual concern,” I mean a form of engagement that concretely affects people’s lives.

Instead, human existence often times seemed to be overshadowed by the interpretation of it!

Because of this, I have continuously wondered whether my ambition to contribute to diminishing injustice in the world can be accomplished in such a self-centered setting.

I did two master degrees and during the last one, I started to volunteer in a refugee center. I ended up working there as a social worker for more than a year, after which I started my PhD in political philosophy.

During that time as a social worker, I never doubted my purpose. Work seemed meaningful to me. Yet I felt very frustrated often times. In Dutch, there is an expression which says “dweilen met de kraan open” (“mopping with the tap open”). No matter how much you mop, the water will never be gone! The effort to deal with something becomes useless because there is a continuous flow of problems coming your way. That’s how I felt doing the work I did.

As a social worker in a Red Cross facility, I had to follow governmental guidelines. Expressing political opinions was forbidden. I even had to sign a code of “neutrality” and “impartiality.” This meant I could help people only by respecting what was put in place by the Red Cross and the Belgian government. I wasn’t permitted to critique or influence those guidelines.

By starting a PhD, I thought I might have the opportunity to end up working somewhere where I could be more influential in actually changing the structures that anger me.

A couple of years ago, I passed the tests to become a legal guardian to minor asylum seekers and I have accompanied youngsters ever since.

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Here, this is a picture I took in the train of my hand holding that of one of my boys. It was after an interview, and he was crying in panic over something that had happened. At the moment I took the picture, he fell asleep. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of respect and sadness for what life had brought him so far. I decided to take the picture with that feeling in mind.

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Charlotte Vyt

Website

Charlotte Vyt holds a doctorate from and is an assistant in philosophy at the Université de Namur as well as a legal guardian to minor asylum seekers. She specializes in social epistemology, the capability approach, Indigenous studies and teaches about standpoint epistemology and epistemic injustice.

She works and lives in Namur, Belgium.

This post came out in 2022 a couple of weeks after a workshop at Rutgers around the problem of evil that commemorated Susan Neiman’s well-known book on that problem’s modern history. Now, four years later, Neiman has published a book about our present moment, Call It Evil. In writing it, she, almost certainly without knowing it, responds directly to a criticism from the talk the 2022 post was drawn from:

The point that these remarks raise is whether calling something or someone “evil” “use[s] reason as we should.” I am inclined to think that it does not. Talking about “evil” does not seem to help, either obscuring things or making them worse. For what does calling something or someone “evil” do?

Neiman’s new book answers to this challenge by saying more about the kind of profundity that makes things “evil” in her use of the word. And she of course makes a splash with a highly reactive book that could very well do something in galvanizing resistance to autocrats and systematic selfishness in our economies and governments. But that resistance is still not precise until it discerns the causes of the disorder and the humanity of all involved. It being reactive will only temporarily help. And, of course, one person’s “good” can become easily re-deployed to be another group’s “evil.” What does she think many MAGA people feel about the “woke”?

I still stick with my points in this criticism of her work and of the widespread use of the word “evil.” I don’t think it is a moral advance at all. We do not need more reactive polemics in the world. We need actual moral progress in being humane and discerning. Ironically, if you know Neiman’s philosophy, that is what is needed to “grow up,” a frequent concern of her work for decades.

The full text of the 2022 post is below. A word on the photos is in order. By using photos of what I take to be ordinary and good, namely, life around a newborn, I was trying to focus moral and ethical attention on life in its granularity and grip, away from reactive slogans. That too is what is involved in growing up.

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September 30th, 2022 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

A workshop on the 20th anniversary of Susan Neiman‘s Evil in Modern Thought.

“[C]rimes like Eichmann’s depend on thoughtlessness, the refusal to use reason as we should.” Evil in Modern Thought, p. 303

“[K]illing is the secretion of this human world just doing what it is that it does. Day in day out. This killing is not an event but a condition.” Danielle Celermajer, “Who killed summertime?” The Guardian, Feb. 6th, 2021

My dictionary tells me that “evil” is “profound immorality and wickedness” and that something or someone can be “evil,” i.e., profoundly immoral and wicked.[1] The dictionary also emphasizes that “evil” picks out these things especially when they are accompanied by a “supernatural force.” I will take it as settled that Susan’s book has explained how this addendum—let us call it the “supernatural add-on”—is a vestige of something ancient, possibly infantile, and that modern thought’s grappling with the concept of evil has left the supernatural add-on behind.[2] But I think that the dictionary definition without that add-on does capture what “evil” roughly means in my understanding of my culture. When we talk about “evil,” we aren’t just talking about something that’s wrong or someone that’s corrupt or even vicious, no, we’re talking about some “profound” register of these things. That’s what “wickedness” speaks to, also, for its origin in the misogynist and supernatural notion of a “witch” is one that, again, we can take as a discredited add-on.[3] But it’s actually quite puzzling to me what this “profundity” of “evil” should be getting at, or, more concerning to me, what it could be doing.

Of course, I can then recall twisted domestic stories I’ve heard where some partner does something deceptive and manipulative to the other to such an extent that the other’s life is threatened with being marred. Often these stories involve layers of hypocrisy and strategy that are jaw-dropping and outrageous for their transgression of basic norms of decency, honesty, compassion, and obligation. The children frequently get caught up in them. The wounds threaten to carry across generations. Even the community sometimes comes along. There’s the compound damage of authority relations perverted enough to throw into doubt everyday appearances, as when we find judges, policemen, doctors, therapists, or teachers using the veneer of their roles to cover for their wicked behavior. When I have seen and felt the damage in my community, especially to hapless spouses and children, I’ve found myself muttering that the behavior of the manipulator is “evil.”

There are also prominent contemporary political examples—too many to relay, really—where I might be inclined to call the person’s behavior, or even the person, “evil.” The names “Vladimir Putin” and “Donald Trump” call too many things to mind. But I do not want to dwell on them right now. More interesting to me are the systems that are revealed in and through these figures.

For instance, I am inclined to see as “profoundly immoral and wicked” the system of American capitalism within which Donald Trump’s name is caught up. This is a system that incentivizes profit-seeking and the concentration of wealth and that has been corrupted to protect the wealth concentrations in countless ways, some of them historically racist or sexist and many of them profoundly colonial. America’s capitalism is a deeply impersonal system to the extent that even its moral contours in, say, the idea of a contract, are themselves fundamentally impersonal, i.e., not concerned with the dignity of people to agree to things as such but rather concerned with the protection of impersonal money-making agents against the perpetual tendency to defraud people in a pass at turning a profit. Capitalism operates like a virus, mutating to find ways in which to turn a profit, and in its corporate dimensions in the United States is legally structured so as to chafe against any values other than profit. Add armies of lawyers, public relations professionals, advertisers, financiers, and lobbyists, and American capitalism is a profoundly immoral force that, over generations, has eroded the conditions of democracy and of social welfare while plundering the planet. The knock-on effects of this are precisely unimaginable; for when they are joined with the history of global capitalism and the still colonial world system of nation-states, they have substantially contributed to unintended (but forewarned) geological effects that amount to the climate devastation we have seen just this summer in floods and fires and to the onset of the sixth mass extinction. OK, I will call that “evil.”

But what does that do? And is anything gained by grouping American capitalism together with twisted domestic abuse, bloody imperialists who speak Russian, and narcissist demagogues who dog-whistle polarization and fascist-like reactions to the point of undermining the United States’ constitutional democracy? What does it do to link the geological agency of historically and globally extended political, economic, and technological systems with marital strife? My intuition is to say that something is rather lost—namely, clarity in thinking and some ability to respond.

The worry is that calling something or someone “evil” interferes with moral clarity. Emphasizing that something that is morally wrong is profoundly so, or that someone who is corrupt is deeply so, doesn’t seem to help us see what is going on. It simply amounts to goading us to look more closely, yet without detail as to what we might want to consider.

To say, “that thing is truly and deeply wrong” or “that person is truly or deeply in the wrong” introduces one thought too many, for the questions are what is wrong, and why; what is it about the person who is in the wrong that makes them so, and why has it come to be? Anyone who is actually responsible needs to go straight to those questions, rather than lingering on a vague profundity tinged historically with supernatural horrors.

A comment from the end of Susan’s book when she reads Arendt is worth recalling here. Interpreting Arendt’s rejection of “diabolical” evil as a useful focus in analyzing totalitarian injustice, Susan comments, “Not evil but goodness should be portrayed with depth and dimension.”[4] Arendt’s claim is that evil should not be allowed to become some mysterious, incomprehensible thing in our minds. Susan continues,

To claim that evil is comprehensible in general is not to claim that any instance of it is transparent. It is, rather, to deny that supernatural forces, divine or demonic, are required to account for it. … Here Arendt’s project is heir to Rousseau’s. By providing a framework that shows how the greatest crimes may be carried out by men with none of the marks of the criminal, [Arendt] argued that evil is not a threat to reason itself. Rather, crimes like Eichmann’s depend on thoughtlessness, the refusal to use reason as we should.[5]

The point that these remarks raise is whether calling something or someone “evil” “use[s] reason as we should.” I am inclined to think that it does not. Talking about “evil” does not seem to help, either obscuring things or making them worse. For what does calling something or someone “evil” do? Let’s take it as given that “evil” puts us in the realm of the moral, namely, by pointing to the “profoundly immoral.” Once there, however, does “evil” clarify anything of the profound immorality, including why it is “profound”? It certainly puts something or someone off limits, as that which must be in some sense shunned or confronted, as the case may be, by all moral people. But we need to ask why the thing or the one shunned should be so, or we risk being arbitrarily divisive. Calling something or someone “evil,” however, does not reveal why it or they should be shunned. It simply implies that shunning is called for. That’s obscure, and dealing it out seems obscuring.

To call something or someone “evil,” though, is also to judge it or them negatively in the utmost moral terms. Talking about “evil” loads up judgment for condemnation. At the least, it takes something or someone and puts it or them on the outer edge of our moral universe: “Not that,” “not them.” But the behaviors so placed are human behaviors, often parts of social systems; the people so relocated are fellow human beings. How does banishing them to the edge of the moral universe help us to come to terms with the humanity in the behaviors, the society in the systems, or the human condition in the profoundly immoral people? It would seem to do the opposite, namely, to make it harder for us to understand the things that are human about “evil.” But that in and of itself makes things worse; for in situations when speaking of “evil” seems appropriate, what we need above all is to restore moral safety, sanity, or community. Pushing the humanity of behaviors, systems, and people to the outer limits isn’t disposed to do that. Once “evil” gets thrown down, a line has been crossed, a flag has been planted, and you have structured the world with strife. But does a world with strife in it need more strife?

There are many things that are wrong in the world and too many people who have thoroughly lost their humanity toward their fellows. To come to terms with the things that are wrong and to address those who have lost their humanity toward others, how should we talk with each other about them? It seems that we shouldn’t talk about them being “evil.” Rather, it seems that we should try to understand the specific kinds of failings that have left things or people as they are, including the particularities of their histories in those failings. We should narrate and understand more. We should moralize less.

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But these reflections so far don’t appear to speak to the underlying concern of Susan’s book, except being broadly sympathetic. Evil in Modern Thought heads toward the task of understanding the causes of profound immorality and particularly of injustice. The book’s outlook could be described as Spinozist even more than Rousseauian for its resolute commitment to the natural, not the supernatural, and to understanding, not to reactive states in which the mind’s capacity to grasp things gets overwhelmed. What I am saying regarding the ordinary expression “evil” speaks to these broad concerns, not against them. Using reason as we should points us beyond “evil” toward a more helpful way into moral responsibility and the virtue of thoughtfulness.

Moreover, the real issue in Evil in Modern Thought is the possibility of moral progress. Given the senselessness that our social systems can produce or allow, how should we view the prospects for reasoning our way beyond them, out from the problems they create or enable?[6] Even this question can come off as being too desperate, asking us to stand at a crisis point where we might lose our faith in reason. But if we switch from despair to being “grown up”—one of Susan’s key figures that she got from Kant[7]—we have to switch from “whether” to “how.” How can we figure this “profoundly” immoral thing out? How can we understand and face people like this? Any other response, while human, if more than momentary, ends up being irresponsible in the end. We have others to consider, including the next generation. Out of moral obligation to them, what can we do? This means at first, what can we understand? Even deeper, what questions do we need to be asking, and how can we answer them? At times, I hear Susan’s rhetoric from the desperate notes of the 2002 book ridiculing these questions as those of a moral busybody. Yet in the end, they are responsible ones to ask if one is going to face one’s children.

There is a way, though, that my opening reflections on ordinary language and what we do when we talk about evil do speak to the core of Susan’s book. The apparently surface-level question of how we talk when we talk about majorly messed up things and people takes us to the actual scene of working on “evil,” where what’s pushing us forward is the drive for moral progress. How we talk about truly messed up things and people is a mark of our progress and of our capacity to grow in our relationships with each other. It is where deepening occurs in a way that “profundity” has a reference.

Allow me to explain. Grappling with truly messed up things and people depends on working on good relationships. The way we talk to each other, the way we communicate, are ways into whether we can have good relationships. That’s why I began as I did.

I think that we should look at the problem of evil through the notion of good relationships. A whole way of approaching morality, politics, and even the practice of philosophy (certainly of professional academics), opens up when we take good relationships seriously, committed to following them out with the imagination and consistency of artists or with the exploration and structural attention of radical educators—or when we muddle through the details as people with stubborn integrity do.

There may be implications for working around the problem of evil, too: would not only talk about “evil” but the problem of evil lose its intellectual grip, except when understanding how we got here? The problem of evil might then become historically important for having brought us closer to focusing on our relationships in the fabric of society. In turn, the senselessness produced by social systems would challenge us to understand how to be authentically autonomous and social when facing socially produced, moral contradictions in what makes sense. “Evil” and its problem would get absorbed into the reconstruction of our relationships. There, focusing on good relationships would open up the “depth and dimension” of goodness, which is what both Arendt and Susan wanted anyway.

Of course, this is all big picture and speculative. But there is something to it. So, in what follows, I am going to talk about good relationships.

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Before I continue down this path, though, I should pause to say a bit more about why evil might be useful as a concept. Susan’s book does not have a definition of evil in it, but based on the book’s orientation, we might say that evil is conscienceless moral wrong. This encompasses evil character (e.g., Trump; he is wholly arbitrary), an evil system (e.g., capitalism in so far as it is impersonal and profit-driven), an evil situation (e.g., global warming in so far as it is structured by wicked incapacities for accountability), and evil deeds (e.g., the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia, intentional killing of the innocent, where it appears that the chief agent utterly lacks a conscience to do what they did).

These are the kind of immoral things that show no conscience. But since conscience is the basis for moral accountability, the moral condition of making sense of the world is undermined. In turn, since morality is fundamental to making sense of things, this undermines the sense of the world. Hence, evil is that wrong that undermines the conditions of sense, as Susan likes to put it throughout her book.

But if evil is a wrong that, for those living with it, undermines the sense of the world, perhaps calling something “evil” is a way to stop the flow of senselessness by putting a dressing on conscienceless wrong, i.e., by keeping it in its place? Then marking something or someone as evil is not meant to put them outside of human behavior or even of the reach of our humanity, but rather is a way to mark that consciencelessness has appeared there. The question then becomes how to address what is missing, if not in the conscienceless person, then in the situation that surrounds them, and if not in the wicked problem (pun intended), then in the way we start to erode it and bring it slowly back into the fold of conscience—of accountability—bit by bit.

This sounds promising, but the point still stands: while calling something or someone “evil” may then be informative, it will not do more to help us face the problem. What is it going to take for us to bring conscience into our world?

Well, to start, we’ll have to approach things and structure our world through good relationships.

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And so I turn to good relationships. A couple things are worth noting at first, but they come from different directions. Recall that, after Rousseau’s critique of the so-called “evils” of natural disasters, the problem of evil is a social problem.[8] Things called “evil,” including the enabling conditions of people who are “evil,” are produced by societies, by “us.” This is a fundamental assumption of Susan’s history of modern thought, that starting with Rousseau, the problem of evil becomes a problem of social construction in the literal sense: we make worlds with evil in them; so, the problem is how to unmake or remake those worlds to become just. How can we change the world along with the demands of reason so that what is becomes what ought to be?[9]

But this problem of construction is social in a different sense, too, and this is my first point. In order for us to remake our world, we must figure out how to work well together. We need to be social with each other, i.e., able to cooperate and to work through things that are truly messed up in immoral systems or the enabling conditions for people who are corrupt. Working through these things often involves disagreement to the point of dissensus,[10] and it often involves difficult confrontation, including self-confrontation. Moreover, it involves being able to work as a team on complex problems that far exceed a given generation’s capability.[11] So, after Rousseau, the problem of evil becomes social in that it demands what Kyle Whyte thinks of as high degrees of relational capacity, including of qualities like diplomacy, consent, reciprocity, and trust.[12] This second sense in which the problem of evil becomes social could be inferred from stretches of Susan’s book, but it isn’t the one that is stressed.

My second point is that good relationships provide what Martha C. Nussbaum, following D.H. Winnicott, calls a “facilitating environment” for how we approach the world. Through them, the world appears as a field of sense and meaning shaped by the way we have grown to handle the negative anxieties that contribute to narcissistic control over people and things.[13] The line from the opening of Anna Karenina that Wittgenstein rewrote near the culmination of the Tractatus—that the world of the happy is different than the world of the unhappy[14]—speaks to what facilitating environments can do. People with good relationships often see the world differently than people with bad relationships do.

While this is a psychological claim, the conceptual basis for it isn’t hard to grasp. In order to have good relationships, one thing that we must do is to relate well. We must orient our relationships through familiarity, knowing by acquaintance, not simply through know-how or knowledge-that. We cannot distort our relations by making them theoretical or practical objects, i.e., forms of intellectual objectification or of practical calculation. We have to be-with others in order to relate well. But the world appears in a categorically different manner when it appears through relational reasoning. This is what Levinas was claiming when he criticized the theoretical grasp of other people, and it is what Adorno and Horkheimer were criticizing when they railed against instrumental reasoning.[15] To orient oneself in the world by relating well is to orient oneself by the value of authentic connection, even harmony between people—one might even say of “beauty” in a non-aesthetic sense. It is to presume what R. Jay Wallace calls “the moral nexus” between people who have a presumptive right to their own autonomy so that differentiation is preserved between people, rather than absorbing them into some theoretical or practical form of objectification.[16] Orienting oneself by relating also seeks out events of connection rather than beliefs or deeds. The world’s not in the head or handled, but between us.

Here’s where Nussbaum’s use of Winnicott gets more than psychological traction. Facilitating environments are any kind of environment—from a parental one for children to a political one for residents and citizens—that supports people’s differentiation from each other in a non-narcissistic, non-reactive way. Central to these environments is how people are safe to show and to process anger, ambivalence, and attachment anxieties such that they grow into what Nussbaum calls the “subtle interplay” of good relating.[17] Relational reasoning makes sense of these environments conceptually, because in relational reasoning we have to keep things between us, not reducing one another to objects of one kind or another as human beings can reactively do when angry, ambivalent, or negatively anxious and wanting control over their situation. An environment that helps people grow in their capacity to relate well will necessarily support differentiation, authenticity, and autonomy. Facilitating environments are disposed to the psychological effects Winnicott recorded because facilitating environments depend on relational reasoning to structure them.

The point is: good relationships are facilitating environments just by themselves. As a result, they cultivate non-narcissistic and non-reactive relating as a matter of course, socially reproducing them as part of their ongoing life. The world of those who grow in and from good relationships is accordingly shaped by a non-narcissistic and non-reactive orientation. It is social in this sense. But we may want to ask what that sense is.

The answer is provided by understanding how we approach the world and each other when we are resolutely non-narcissistic and non-reactive. One thing we can say is that we must approach the world through wonder. Both narcissism and reactivity are defeated by wonder in which the independent being of something or someone is let to be how and what it is in the free play of the imagination. In wondering over the things and people we meet, we may have sudden jolts of surprise or delight—what Hume and his tradition called “wonder”[18]—but the normal run of things is to hold space in one’s mind around something or someone to let their sense and meaning play freely. I call this “the positive anxiety of consideration,” or more simply, the mind’s excitement. It is a form of ongoing understanding, not some sentimental, jejune, or unsustainable state. To relate well involves relating through a settled attitude of wonder as a background condition on the freedom and authenticity in the relationship. We can develop it as a state of our characters like meditation practitioners do, but also as thoughtful and attentive people characteristically display.[19]

My concerns with talk about “evil” from the onset of this paper may now ring a bell. To the extent that talk about “evil” contributes to reactivity, talk about “evil” is in tension with the wonder that is necessary for relating well. To the extent that talk about “evil” doesn’t clarify or even obfuscates the immorality of what we are facing, it impedes what wonder leads us to consider: the things we face in their possibilities, stretching our minds to make sense of them and to consider them in many different ways. But to relate well in the presence of truly messed up, immoral things is to wonder over them. This is the problem of being social—remaining connected and authentic—rather than the problem of evil.[20]

The second point about facilitating environments comes home here. The problem of evil as a social problem demanding that people learn to develop strong relational capacities in order to solve wicked problems of social construction depends on being social in the third sense that I’ve articulated, namely, as being able to remain non-narcissistic and non-reactive in relationships. Strong relational capacities depend on an authentic social core in relational reasoning and its necessary place for wonder. The world of someone reeling from “evil” to the point of despairing over the demands of sense is different than the world of someone in and working on good relationships in wonder, no matter what comes one’s way.

This isn’t really faith we are discussing. It’s moral responsibility and clarity when things get truly messed up. Might that be better than faith – or the same thing expressed mundanely?

“This is the way the world really is right now. Okay, how can I relate well in it? What do good relationships show me of how I must be?”

You see, the despair comes from bad facilitating environments. The thing to do is to create good ones so as to look at profound social challenges anew.

*

A mundane way to express what relational reason brings to light is that good facilitating environments deservedly make us at home. What makes a house a home is the relational reasoning in it, and the reason why we can have a home without having a house depends on whether we have good relationships to sustain us personally.

Susan’s work since the time of The Unity of Reason has focused on the importance of being homeless in the world, understanding that condition as a metaphysical one. Despite the uncharacteristic thoughtlessness of making something abstract out of something visceral and real for those of us without shelter, Susan’s use of the trope of homelessness misunderstands that home isn’t primarily about theory. It’s not a matter of theoretical reason in the first place, nor of practical reason. It’s about relational reason.

I can understand little but be at home with those I love and who love me. My practical life can be a mess, but I can be at home with those with whom I am in relationship. In so far as the problem of evil as Susan understands is bound up with home by way of the trope of homelessness, the problem of evil is truly and primarily a matter of relational reasoning in the first instance, not of theory and not even of practice. Susan’s Kantianism fails to grasp this, in large part because Kant did.

*

Still, Susan’s book tells the story of one profound way in which a religious and philosophical tradition came of age. It outgrew supernatural evil. This let the entire universe make more sense. The tradition came to view evil as a matter of social justice. This gave anxious people something to do. I am inclined to think that the next part of that story of maturity is taking sociality so seriously that it becomes the guiding problem of moral progress.[21] Using reason as we should then demands that we reason relationally, something for which Kant did not even have a logic (he was stuck in theory and practice). Writing a history of philosophy for the future would then need to proceed from lacunae of good relationships.

How many philosophers had good relationships? How many philosophers understood them? For how many was philosophy a defense or a supplement because they were relationally immature? Much the same could be said of the history of religion, too, where bad relationships hide behind talk of “Lords” and “obedience” or appear narcissistically in purity and overcontrol of oneself, rather than in messy and incomplete authenticity. As I see it, the question of growing up is largely the question of learning how to relate well as the people that we are, not as we pretend to be.

But here we hit a formal obstacle in the academy and in philosophy in particular. Earlier, I wrote that attending to good relationships implied a kind of stubborn integrity shared with artists and radical educators.[22] What I was hinting at was a problem of form that really is quite challenging. Academics often relate poorly, and professional philosophers especially often. The reason why is not mysterious. The academy is guided by theoretical and practical reasoning above all. That is its form of power.

We do not even need to focus on decolonizing the academy in settler colonial Amerikkka to see this. The academy isn’t here for good relationships; the academy is here for knowing things and being useful. This is a fundamental way that neoliberalism and imperialism get their hooks into education. It seems common sense among “serious” academics that “intellectual rigor” poo-poos being “warm and fuzzy,” and even—at least in STEM fields and economics—that “being practical” benches social justice. The “Ivory Tower” vs. the “real world” is a fantasized contradiction between theory and practice. Good relationships are voided from each, happy as capitalists and imperialists can be. To be a good academic is not to be relationally capable but to deserve a reputation for knowingness, expertise, or influence.

Problems of relational form abound in the academy. From the standpoint of relational maturity, the academy is structured immaturely, even if it is much more mature relationally than other parts of consumer society where even truth and usefulness barely live. Know-it-all philosophers, masters of the discipline, great influencers, and so on are then part of the problem, for in addition to any narcissism that they express, they deflect attention away from the formal immaturity of our society and its major institutions, the academy among them, even if politics and business are worse.

The problem of being social is so profound that the problem of evil is a part of it. How can there be moral progress when educational, political, and economic systems are so relationally deficient and twisted in both their formal structures and their values that they reproduce a wide range of kinds and degrees of narcissistic relations, that is, when they are poor facilitating environments? How can things make sense when schooling, politics, and business talk rationalizes relational poverty to the point of concealing it? The issue is that our world itself is structured in such a way that it recycles abuse, the control or erasure of others and of oneself as an authentic, relational being. Our philosophy and education are conveyors of that abuse, providing concepts and tools for recycling it. The issue here is beyond a concern with ideology.

The formal inconsistency becomes the thing to follow. Systems that do not help us relate well and formats that are relationally impoverished become problematic. They maintain senselessness by reproducing poor facilitating environments in and out of which it becomes hard to work out our lives together and on our own. They may look quite smart, successful, or powerful, but they do not use reason as they should. Just as the problem of evil is a problem of education and of politics, the problem of good relationships discloses that education and politics are problematic in each and every poor relationship that they enable or create.

How can we do “politics” through good relationships? How can we educate and be educated by making the mind and what is handy of secondary importance, as they should be? To try to achieve strategies and to advance interests or to try to become an expert and an influencer is just more narcissism. It doesn’t matter if this is how the world works. It’s not how good relationships are supposed to work.

From the perspective of prioritizing relating well, the core thing to consider is narcissism as it is socially produced and reproduced as well as abuse as it is set up and rationalized. If educational systems, if professional philosophy itself, enable or, even worse, teach either, then they are part of the major obstacle to growing up. To echo Vladimir Jankélevitch, we should look at what the systems commit, omit, or happen to cause, not at what they say.[23] The same goes for ourselves as participants reproducing these systems.

In this light, there are several things we could look at when we talk about “evil” in the academy or from its platform:

• What is “evil”-talk’s relationship to trauma? Does it feed trauma or recycle it? Does it manage to draw down reactivity and help people find the capacity to heal from trauma? Is “evil”-talk opportunistic in relation to trauma? Does it feed on it? Or is it part of a responsible process to come to terms with the causes of a given trauma and to redress them for real?

These questions can unsettle because trauma-feeding is real.[24] Trauma, like evil, is psychologically compelling, calling on us to react. Like shock headlines in newspapers, trauma’s an easy tool to get people’s attention and even to assert oneself as some kind of authority by putting oneself at the center of traumatic issues as if one were someone who knows something important about them. Academics are as slick as artists in a neo-liberal funding economy, and academics can succumb to the affective, reputational, and career economy of trauma. If we are going to focus on good relationships, we need to focus on the trauma cycling through our systems in ways that actually comes to terms with it. Susan’s Learning from the Germans seems a good example of this intention, but perhaps talk about despair-inducing “evil” is not so germane to it.[25]

• What is “evil”-talk’s relationship to polarization, judgment, or retribution? Is the “evil”-talk genuinely trying to understand how we can become authentically social or work out our social problems constructively, or it is overtly or subtly strife-ridden? When Susan rightly became concerned about the use of morally “clear” language in the American right of the G.W. Bush presidency years and lambasted the American left for morally muddled language resulting from too much post-modernism,[26] the question of how the morally “clear” language gets used was implicit. Moral Clarity cast the issue of whether our language helps us grow up. If talk about “evil” is used to drive a wedge down into social life, to do battle, or to put people in their place, then it seems to be part of the narcissistic cycles it ought instead to be confronting.

The real issue for the American right and the left is whether they can stop trying to control things—whether they can abandon strategy as a way of life.[27] We need to create good facilitating environments for this need to go to the core of things, rather than seeming ridiculously utopian. The good community that some conservatives say they want and the democracy that some leftists idealize depend on good relations between us.

How can the academy contribute to good relations? How can it see knowing and doing as inseparably bound up with being with each other well? How can scholarship “exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea”?[28]

• What is “evil”-talk’s relationship to anger? One misconception about the rhetoric of good relationships, including the figure of harmony between people, is that they are somehow conflict-free. This is a knee-jerk way that people invested in reactivity try to discredit the importance of relating well by making it cartoonish. Basic reflection shows that relating well cannot be conflict free, but rather that relating well depends on surfaced and worked-through conflict. Rather, the core of good relationships is in large part how well people can work through conflict and remain authentic and connected.[29]

Moreover, when we talk about “evil” sincerely, we are in the space of injury and injustice. Outrage is a healthy and fitting response to what “evil” is about, and this outrage keeps us human.[30] But the major philosophers writing on anger now do not see rage as primarily a matter of good relationships. They see it either as a threat to them or as something practical to keep the struggle going and to preserve one’s own agency.[31] Some of them even see anger as a validation of being bad in relationships, something that we have to accept when we accept our human condition.[32]

The thing about anger, though, is that expressing our anger can actually be a mark of trust. It depends on the world between us as a place where moral wrongs can be addressed. It holds out the social in its very form, and it is communicative. The expression of outrage can be a call for and a trace of good facilitating environments. Outrage seeks redress where trust could possibly grow again, and it is itself testimony to the inkling or memory of relationships where anger can be heard and held. But we have to learn to relate to anger non-narcissistically and non-reactively for its moral core to emerge, that is, for us to hear that trace of facilitating environments in outrage and to keep oriented on developing them in and through the dissensus.[33] Does “evil”-talk help us do that?

A comparison with Kant’s First Critique may help here. Narcissistic illusion is the tendency to turn people into objects, and it is as persistent as what Kant called “transcendental illusion,” the tendency for reasoning to overstep its bounds and to make unwarranted speculative claims in order to meet a need for metaphysical comfort.[34] Narcissistic illusion is a constitutive feature of living theoretically and practically, where we want to know lots of things about people and want to know how to handle people in all sorts of interactions, especially out of the often pervasive negative anxiety of sharing the world with each other.[35] The dynamic tension produced by our complex human being, though, is that being with people, relating well with each other, depends on suspending objectification in fits and starts and as an overarching orientation within which theory and practice can be at best momentary and circumscribed exceptions. With each other, the horizon should be a kind of openness.

Yet anger is primed to give rise to narcissistic illusion because in anger at people we are facing presumed moral wrongs. Perceived injury of some sort has occurred. Trauma is a possibility. Reactivity is understandable even if not ultimately moral. Being able to work through anger in a non-narcissistic way then becomes a virtue. How does “evil”-talk contribute to our character?

*

I was fortunate to be Susan’s undergraduate student when she was developing her course “The Problem of Evil” in the early 1990s. I first heard of it during the academic year 1991-1992, I believe, when Susan talked about the idea for the course and wanting to offer it. When the first seminar of that name was given in the Spring of 1993, I also was fortunate to participate, as Trip [McCrossin, the conference organizer – ed.] did as well. Trip and I then were course assistants for the first large lecture version of the course in Spring of 1994, a version for which Susan won a teaching award.

I remember the effect that the course had on me and then on my students the following year when I was a section leader. Some of them even went on to become professional philosophers and to open their first book with a memory of the class.[36] The course was orienting and life changing. But talking about “evil” was also at times and for some devastating. It threw some students into despair, or rather, it opened up despair under the surface of things. Did this help us relate well?

The thing is, in the deconstruction-intoxicated early 90s, to talk about good and evil was a relief, because moral reflection gave us ways to fight for justice and to try to live well with each other, rather than playing intellectual games. It was also a relief to focus on something that obviously mattered, whereas so much analytic philosophy was narcissistic in its manner and ridiculously trivial. I like to think of talk about “evil” during that time as a thread sticking out that we could pull until the fabric of our morally ambivalent systems began to unravel.

Modified 10.25.22 to add a link to a paper conceptualizing conscience.

1. “Evil,” Dictionary 2.3.0 (Apple Inc., 2005-2021)

2. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

3. “Wicked,” Dictionary

4. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 302

5. Ibid., p. 303

6. Ibid., pp. 321-324

7. Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 5. V. “Coming of Age,” and her Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), and Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (New York: Harcourt, 2008)

8. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, pp. 41-43

9. Ibid., p. 322

10. Cf. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)

11. Cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

12. Kyle Powys Whyte, “Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points,” WIREs Climate Change 11:1, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.603 and “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and Society, 9:1, https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090109

13. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 4

14. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Frank Ramsey and C.K. Ogden (Tonowanda, NY: Broadview Editions, 2014), 6:43

15. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), and Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007)

16. R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)

17. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 213ff.

18. See in particular Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and the stretch called “DELIGHT” in Sophia Vasalou’s Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016). Jesse Prinz’s recent work on wonder is the most prominent neo-Humean example in contemporary philosophy around wonder.

19. I have reread Nussbaum through what R.H. Hepburn calls the “neo-Kantian” tradition, and in particular the Critique of Judgment, to arrive at this understanding. See my Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder: How the Mind’s Original Joy Is Revolutionary, with images by Misty Morrison (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Setting and Motet 1.

20. In recent work around planetary injustice, I have focused on the problem of social alienation in the tradition of the 1844 Manuscripts and of Lukács. One way we might think about the problem of evil is how it sits in relation to social alienation. Does it clarify it—or contribute to it? See the forthcoming “The Planetary Sublime (Part II of The Problem of an Unloving World)” in Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, ed., A Planetary Imagination: Responses to Chakrabarty’s Social-Natural Historiography, a special issue of Environmental Philosophy 19:2, 2022, pages TBD; or the more popular “Vergangensheitbewältigung Now: 1492 and the Roots of Planetary Injustice,” Blog of the APA, April 22nd, 2022, https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/04/22/1492-and-planetary-injustice/

21. Cf. Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) and his Moral Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), where Susan’s response to the lecture is also included. Philip’s evolutionary pragmatism focuses especially on the development of cooperation, as did Richard Bernstein’s, albeit through judgment, political pluralism, and solidarity—the differentiation side of the social.

22. Cf. also my “Philosophy in the Contemporary World: How to Disagree, or Experiments in Social Construction,” Blog of the APA, July 12th, 2018, https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/07/12/philosophy-in-the-contemporary-world-how-to-disagree-or-experiments-in-social-construction/ and “Democracy as Relationship,” e-Flux Conversations, April 17th, 2018, revised when the site was taken down due to the second Trump presidency as “There Are Such Raw Fears in a New Relationship,” Blog of the APA, November 27th, 2025, https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/27/there-are-such-raw-fears-in-a-new-relationship/

23. Vladimir Jankélevith, “Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do!” Critical Inquiry 22:3, 1996, pp. 549-551

24. Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Misty Morrison, “Trauma-Feeding: Why It’s Not Okay to Exploit Trauma in Art,” Aesthetics for Birds, September 17th, 2019, https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2019/09/17/trauma-feeding-why-its-not-okay-to-exploit-trauma-in-art/

25. Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019)

26. Neiman, Moral Clarity, Introduction

27. See my “The Neoliberal Radicals,” e-Flux Conversations, Febraury 17th, 2017, revised as “Undoing Cycles of Violence with a New Concept of Protest,” Blog of the APA, October 23rd, 2025, https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/10/23/undoing-cycles-of-violence-with-a-new-concept-of-protest/, and Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder, motet 3.

28. “Scholarship has to exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith, June 30th, 2020, Massey University

29. On authenticity, see Charles Larmore, The Practices of the Self, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), where authenticity is a matter of committing oneself over and again in all one’s relations—theoretical, practical, and interpersonal. It takes work and is neither a given nor without gaps.

30. Myesha Cherry, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

31. Martha C. Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) sees anger largely as a threat to moral relationships, and Cherry, The Case for Rage, sees anger as important for agency and self-recognition.

32. Agnes Callard, On Anger (Boston: Boston Review Forum, 2020). I criticize Callard’s view at length in Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder, motet 4.

33. In Upheavals of Thought, chapter 4, Nussbaum focuses attention on the “ambivalence crisis” of infancy when infants first hate their parents while depending on them. The moment of outrage is much more than merely “ambivalent,” but the formal tension remains in it: it both seeks a clearing for outrage, contempt, and even hatred, while wanting sociality to hold it in a communicative process.

34. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), A297/B354

35. In the Setting to Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder, I claim that this anxiety is the fundamental source of the problem of politics. See also motet 3.

36. Megan Craig, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 2010), Preface. Craig suggests that she took Susan’s class as a junior once she was already seeking answers to her philosophical questions. But she took the class in 1994 as a freshperson in the section for which I was responsible.

~

Spinoza has been a familiar topic on the APA Blog. My APA work began with a related Q&A with Michael Della Rocca on his provocative book, The Parmenidean Ascent. It led to several essays highlighting how the leading-edge of modern physics could be validating monism – where quantum entanglement and non-locality comport with his strict Rationalism and a world without distinctions. The Spinozist themes continued with Clare Carlise and one of my favorite APA Blog posts, exploring her book, Spinoza’s Religion. Clare’s panentheistic account perfectly aligned with my interpretation of Spinoza, validating my religious instincts. I felt that, finally, after a lifetime of reflection, I could completely disassociate myself from atheism. However, as I joined the entertaining UK Spinoza Circle webinar series, Steven Nadler was featured and proceeded to unceremoniously upset the apple cart, dispassionately and persuasively defining Spinoza as atheist. After reading Steven’s dispositive case, it was back to the personal drawing board to reconcile my worldview – beginning with this discussion to leverage his scholarship and understand why Spinoza is so misunderstood. In the spirit my APA Blog series on Philosophy and Technology, where I’ve grappled with the ontological classification of AI, we also speculate about how modern science and technology fit into Spinoza’s system and whether an atheistic interpretation could affect his influence.

Steven, thanks so much for your willingness to join the APA Blog and discuss your important new book. To start, with all due respect, may I suggest you have done a masterful job of playing the spoiler! You are fair, clear and good-natured in framing the historical debate and grappling with recent accounts. In a positive way, it appears you set out to declaratively settle the debate. As you note, “Spinoza’s philosophy is an atheism. And it is an atheism not simply because Spinoza rejects this kind of God or that kind of God (especially a person-like God who providentially governs his creation). It is an atheism because there is no divinity whatsoever”.

For me, the lynchpin of your case is that Spinoza leaves absolutely no room to divinize nature, as with the religious conceptions of pantheism and panentheism. Spinoza’s system is fundamentally characterized by necessity and the immutability of natural laws – without room for miracles, worship or even awe. Further, the intellectual love of God reflects the absolute power of reason, where understanding God or Nature is a wholly rational project.

I would like to start our discussion by asking whether you indeed intended to set the record straight? Did you write the book to resolve this longstanding debate, in light of recent accounts?

Steven:

First of all, thank you for the kind words about the book. The only thing I would take issue with in your introduction is the word ‘unceremoniously’—I thought I took things pretty ceremoniously!

Seriously, and hopefully without coming across as arrogant, my answer to your first question is “Yes, I do intend to set the record straight.” As you’ve indicated, the traditional reading of Spinoza, since the eighteenth century, is as a pantheist. This represents at least a terminological (if not a substantive) change from the seventeenth century, where Spinoza was almost universally reviled as an “atheist”, though that label is pretty slippery in that period. To call someone an atheist then essentially meant “Your God is not my God.” It was an all-purpose epithet to cast aspersion on your religious and intellectual opponents—much the way the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ have long been used in American politics, and much the way the term ‘Spinozist’ was used in the early modern period. Some of his contemporary opponents also called him a “deist.” But then, all of a sudden—once the term is available, thanks in part to John Toland—Spinoza becomes a pantheist. I suppose this is because, like the pantheist, Spinoza identifies God with Nature. But the pantheist reading, as well as the panentheist reading (defended by Clare Carlisle and some other scholars), just seems to me to be wrong. While the pantheist and the atheist may agree that all there is is nature, the real difference must be in how one is to regard nature. Is nature divine? Is it to be the object of worship, awe, adoration, reverence, hope and fear? This must be the pantheist’s view, insofar as the pantheist regards nature as divine. But it is certainly not Spinoza’s view. As I read him, there is no divinity. For Spinoza, the only proper attitude to take toward Nature is intellectual understanding (though this will be accompanied with a strong experience of joy). Of course, the word ‘God’ is all over Spinoza’s Ethics, so it is totally fair to ask “How can he possibly be an atheist?” But in Part Four, Spinoza introduces the phrase Deus sive Natura, and this is where, I believe, things become a bit more clear. He is not divinizing Nature; but neither is he naturalizing the divine, as if there is still going to be something divine about nature. He is, I argue, eliminating the divine altogether; it is a fully reductive move. (The identification of God and Nature also appears quite clearly in his earlier, unfinished Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, so it is not something that he came to late in his career.)

Over the years, in essays published in specialist venues here and there, as well as in an introductory book on the Ethics, I’ve defended my atheist reading of Spinoza. And I’ve received some strong blowback. So I figured it was time to present my whole case, including some historical and religious context as to what it meant in the seventeenth century to be called—and to deny being—an atheist, and distinct analyses of what ‘God’ is for Spinoza in both the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise. So I’ve laid my cards on the table, and we’ll see what the people have to say.

To leverage your scholarship and tease out the challenge of classifying Spinoza, I would like to open the aperture and situate the confusion in the history of the discipline. First, is it fair to suggest that he might be the most misunderstood philosopher? Nietzsche also comes to mind and perhaps it’s no coincidence that they are the discipline’s greatest naturalists.

Second, to what extent is the conundrum a function of his unique philosophy and the breadth of his system – say, in contrast to Nietzsche’s conflicting and changing views. Does the provocative nature of his project afford more personal interpretations? Where redefining God, with the use of theological language (love, blessedness and salvation), opens the door for inputting dimensions? In this vein, you note how interpretations are incomplete, such as Yitzhak Melamed latching on to the infinite to make a metaphysical case when it’s only a single divine characteristic: “Deus Sive Nature” is absolutely devoid of values – it is neither good nor worthy nor righteous nor holy – there are no grounds for reverence”. So, might the audacious attempt to redefine religion, while he explicitly rejected the atheist label, create the conditions for all this historical confusion?

Steven:

There are a lot of candidates for “Most Misunderstood Philosopher.” What I like about your mentioning Nietzsche is that there are few philosophers who have enjoyed as much popularity and exposure in both high and low culture as Spinoza. The number of works of literature, visual art, music (including opera and rock), film, dance, etc. about or inspired by Spinoza—not to mention the “Spinoza Bagels” marketed by the grocery chain Trader Joe’s—is stunning. The only philosophers who seem to come close in popular culture (with all due respect to Leibniz cookies) are Nietzsche and, I would add, Socrates. But, as your question suggests, there is a great deal of misunderstanding of Spinoza; or perhaps it’s better to say, there are a great many ways of understanding Spinoza: rationalist, mystic, kabbalist, liberal, republican, Stoic, materialist, rabbinic, proto-Marxist (according to some Yiddish writers), proto-Zionist, and so on. He is a kind of Rorschach test: people see in Spinoza precisely what they want or need to see, and so he has become a standard-bearer for many political, intellectual, religious and cultural causes.

I would suggest that, in part, the source of this confusion—or, to use a more neutral term, plurality of readings—is the difficulty and opacity of his philosophical writings, especially the metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy of the Ethics. It is an extremely tough work to read, and so it lends itself to be interpreted in a variety of ways. But another source of the plurality is the richness of traditions that merge in Spinoza. He was influenced by Descartes, of course, and in the seventeenth century he was considered by many critics of Cartesianism as its leading exponent (much to the dismay of more orthodox Cartesians). But there’s no denying the influence, as well, of Thomas Hobbes, of Dutch republican thinkers like the De la Court brothers, of ancient Stoicism, and especially of medieval Jewish rationalism (Maimonides in particular). So you can come to Spinoza from any one or several of these traditions. And despite all these influences, there remains, as you say, something truly unique and original about Spinoza and how he puts it all together.

And then there is the fact, as you also suggest, that his system is so broad: metaphysics, theology, philosophy of mind, theory of knowledge, psychology, political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, Bible criticism. So again, there are many ways to enter that system and to identify its dominant themes. Although for my money, the one theme that seems to run throughout all his works—from the earliest abandoned treatises (like the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being) to his mature writings—is freedom: individual freedom understood as rational autonomy, and personal, political and religious freedom within the state.

As for what you call the “personal” aspect of these interpretations, what they really indicate is how relevant Spinoza remains in our contemporary world. You won’t meet many Cartesians or Leibnizians walking down the street, but you might very well run into someone who sees him- or herself as a Spinozist. People want to appropriate him, identify with him, because he addresses so many of the questions for which people turn to philosophy in the first place: questions about God, human happiness, the meaning of life and how to live, our place in the world and in society. Spinoza seems to have gotten it all right, and so people want him on their side. I’ve lately been studying the way the Yiddish anarchists and communists in New York in the early twentieth century claimed Spinoza as their own, in part because it fed their own self-image.

Relatedly, as you reflect on this long-standing debate, is it fair to wonder if the confusion diminishes his influence? My APA Blog series on Philosophy and Technology began with several pieces on The Parmenidean Ascent because I believe Michael’s daring case is not taken seriously enough. Do you believe Spinoza is underappreciated? I would contend, for instance, that his Parallelism deserves more attention – as I have made the case it could be seen as invigorated by modern physics. In sum, whatever the source of the debate, have the profoundly different interpretations of his philosophy taken a toll?

Steven:

On the contrary, as I suggest in the previous answer, I would say that the confusion/plurality both is a reflection of his influence and feeds it. The great number of popular books on Spinoza (nonfiction and fiction) for general readers, all attempts to make sense in one way or another of his difficult philosophy, is testimony to his place in contemporary culture (even in American culture, which is becoming less and less literate). Of course, I would love to see his influence and popularity increase. I think the world would be a lot better off if more people read Spinoza—if more people read philosophy generally. But because, relatively speaking, very few people have read Spinoza, or even read about Spinoza, I would say yes, he is underappreciated. I’m never surprised when I meet a highly educated person who has not read Spinoza; I’m a bit more surprised when, as is sometimes the case, such a person has not at least heard of Spinoza, but it not infrequently happens. At the same time, it is not unusual, and always a pleasure, to meet someone totally outside of academia who nonetheless loves Spinoza.

I should add that the underappreciation also applies within the discipline of philosophy. Spinoza is, indeed, quite a popular philosopher among philosophers, right up there with Hume, but I wonder whether people fully appreciate his enduring philosophical contributions (as opposed to his merely historical importance). You mention his views on the mind-body relationship in a human being. I believe that, more than any other philosopher before the twentieth century, he anticipated current thinking about how intimately related the mind is to the body, even anticipating current theories in embodied cognition. In this respect he represents a remarkable advance from, say, Descartes, who believed that much of what the mind does has no relationship to the body at all.

In the context of your persuasive case, I would like to explore a potential additional way Spinoza’s intellectual love of God could reflect a religious mindset. You are clear that substance beyond the attributes of Thought and Extension – the only ways we experience the world – is still Nature. The panentheistic account cannot rely on a distinctly transcendent or immanent reality. Granting that God and Nature are identical, you highlight that we don’t need God “in any strong theological way in order to use Spinoza’s metaphysics to make intellectual and moral sense – to maintain the “intelligibility” – of how all things (including ourselves) are in and necessitated by an infinite, eternal system…”.

Fair enough, but I would like to pull on the thread of how the knowledge and love of God is genuinely participatory. You say at the end of the book that “We can even talk of a “religious experience” for Spinoza. But far from being a nonrational encounter with the ineffable, it is the joyful intellectual condition of understanding Nature through reason and perfecting one’s own natural endowments”. You describe the third kind of knowledge as “an eternal, divine kind of perspective on things, or what Spinoza calls an understanding sub specie aeternitatis. She sees an eternal truth about herself, namely, her relationship to God.”

One potential qualm is whether there can be a fully objective experience – but my question is whether any personal component could be a part of a broader religious description. Specifically, might eternal participation be characterized by how it impacts or changes a person – where it is participatory by virtue of its existential weight? The salvation or joy you describe from “the mind’s intuition of itself as a mode of God” would then have a personal element. Even your objective description is focused on the individual: “The Joy in the intellectual love of God simply belongs to one’s appreciative contemplation of oneself, of one’s power of acting, and of the eternal cause of this”. Even if we could completely step outside existence to view something eternally, I am wondering if there is also a personal stamp. Would it be fair in any way to say that eternal participation prompts a kind of subjective truth, which conventionally exemplifies religious experience?

Steven:

Absolutely. Contrary to how some read Spinoza’s admittedly puzzling account of the eternity of the mind toward the end of the Ethics, the intellectual joy and love we experience with the “third kind of knowledge”, and the “blessedness” and “salvation” that come when we achieve this superb intellectual and affective condition, I do not think any of this entails a loss of personhood, a loss of a sense of self and individuality. One remains a determinate and finite part of Nature, and you never lose your sense of that. Rather, what you acquire is a heightened understanding of just what that means. What I perceive and experience in that epistemic condition is myself and my own eternity—not my eternity as a disembodied soul enjoying some kind of post-mortem immortality, but my eternity as a finite and determinate expression of Nature. It is a self knowledge. As Spinoza says, “we feel and know that we are eternal” (Part 5, proposition 23, scholium), and we feel and know this in the here and now, in our durational life. It’s not that I no longer experience the affects (especially the passions) that constitute much of my everyday existence. As he also says, I cannot not be a part of Nature, and so I cannot not continue experiencing the affective life of a durational being. But now, having achieved the highest kind of knowledge, I also understand myself from an eternal perspective (sub specie aeternitatis) in a direct relationship with Nature; but again, it is myself that I so experience and understand. I don’t see any loss of personal individuality here; I don’t get absorbed anonymously into the eternity of the universe. It is my joy I experience as I achieve—intellectually and affectively—the condition of freedom, rationality, virtue and blessedness.

Let me shift to a question that relates to the technology focus of my APA Blog series – whether AI would be part of Nature in Spinoza’s system? I have made the case in several pieces for construing technology in evolutionary terms, as literally part of nature. I have characterized AI as our “aesthetic fate”, where creativity is our human essence and technology could be viewed as a kind of destiny.

I assume it would be completely uncontroversial to suggest that, for Spinoza, technology and AI would be part of Nature. Perhaps Spinoza would demystify AI and say “artificial” is inappropriate, as there is only Nature. A computer is no different than a neuron firing, with substance elaborating itself. In my pieces on modern physics, exploring quantum AI and Parallelism, I have suggested AI could be construed as both modes of Thought and Extension.

In your view, does our attempt to replicate sentience deserve any ontological consideration – or are questions about AI’s potential consciousness – or even significance – “much ado about nothing”? How would you characterize AI under Spinoza’s system?

Steven:

I can’t say I’m much of an expert on AI, but I’ll give this one my best shot.

Insofar as for Spinoza everything is in God or Nature, everything—whether it is brought about without human intervention or is the product of human artisanship and ingenuity—is a part of Nature. Everything, that is, comes about with necessity by way of Nature’s processes and laws. But not everything happens solely by virtue of Nature’s eternal and infinite elements (the laws of physics, for example); most of the items that populate the empirical world are brought about by a combination of those eternal elements and other finite determinate causes. You cannot understand why a leaf fell off a tree just by looking at the laws of nature, without knowing anything about what was happening in the tree itself. Some of those finite causes are physical and some are mental. In the case of the products of human artisanship and technology, those other finite determinate causes are human beings: their bodily motions and their thoughts and ideas. As I say, I’m not the best person to consult on AI, but it must be, like any technological development, just another mode of Nature brought about by natural causes (which includes human physical and intellectual activity).

The interesting question from a Spinozistic perspective is the moral status of AI. And this is related to the question of what other finite modes of Nature AI is similar to—what other items does it have the most in common with? Spinoza insists that human beings are as much a part of Nature as anything else, that there is no great metaphysical divide between human beings and non-human animals and vegetative nature, etc. However, he also claims that the power and capacities of a being—its responsiveness to outside stimuli and its ability to generate effects through its own resources—are a function of its complexity. Thus, given Spinoza’s account of the mind/body relation, because the human body is more (neurologically, structurally, etc.) complex than, say, a mouse’s body or a carrot, the human mind is more complex—it has a higher degree of mental life, especially consciousness, than a mouse or a carrot. He also insists that the more something has in common with us, the more useful it is for us. Thus, to the extent that I am rational and virtuous, I should (and will) strive to surround myself with other rational and virtuous human beings who will, because they are rational and virtuous, contribute to my own flourishing just because they see it is in their own self-interest to do so.

So the question becomes: how does AI fit in this scheme? Is it closer to human reality? Is it capable of consciousness? Can it think and act and live “according to the dictates of reason” (to use Spinoza’s phrase)? And does it have a conception of its own self-interest? Should we strive to surround ourselves with AI agents because they will aid us in our own striving for rational virtue and freedom? These are among the questions that Spinoza’s philosophy raises for AI, and it would be interesting to see how one might answer them from that perspective.

Lastly, I would like to open the aperture on the discipline and return full circle to the moniker of atheism, building on prior questions. I mentioned Michael’s work as potentially underappreciated – but it reflects the enduring vibrancy of Spinoza. Do you believe Spinoza’s philosophy has the potential to gain traction? I have thought Spinoza could be a tonic for modern times – as our culture is arguably diminished by the retreat of ancient values. Before reading your book(!), I wondered if he offered a potential new understanding of religiosity in our godless world. Given the potential gravity of religion in the public sphere, do you think his influence could benefit from being commonly understood as a religious thinker?

Steven:

Yes, I do, though one will have to be clear on what “religion” is for Spinoza. Clare Carlisle makes an excellent case for seeing Spinoza as a sort of religious thinker, especially in the way he transforms what it is to be “religious.” But her take on Spinoza, as beautifully presented as it is, is too theistic for my taste. For Spinoza, true religion is simply properly motivated moral behavior—treating other human beings with justice and loving-kindness. This is what he calls “obedience to God’s law”, although of course Spinoza’s God does not issue any laws or commandments. Rather, it is the directive naturally issued by reason. The “free person”—Spinoza’s “model of human nature” who is philosophically inclined and guided in thought and action by what they know through reason and the intellect to be what is best, rather than responding by the passions, by the ways in which external things happen to affect them, —understands why it is in their own best interest to treat others with justice and loving-kindness, why they should be “pious” in the sense of living in that moral meaning of ‘religious.’ Most people, however, are not philosophers, and so they will not be motivated by a rational understanding of how they should live. Rather, they are moved by faith. As Spinoza explains in the Theological-Political Treatise, their religious (read: moral) living comes not from reason but from the imagination. They are inspired to justice and loving-kindness toward others by morally edifying stories that appeal to their imagination. What Spinoza has in mind, in particular, is the Bible. The only sense in which the Bible is “divine” is that it is especially good—because of who its prophetic authors were—at communicating the divine law and moving people to pious (moral) behavior. But I suppose any morally motivating work of literature could, in principle, do the trick.

Steven, I am so grateful for your time and thoughtful engagement. Refining my worldview is no easier – but I certainly understand Spinoza better. It is a privilege to foster the dialogue on your book and, with your cards on the table, I look forward to seeing how the philosophical community reacts. Thank you!

From the APA Archive:

Nietzsche and Natality

Genealogy of Redemption

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

Interintellect

This piece extends a discussion with Barry Smith and John Beverley on the future role of applied ontology inside and outside the university. Barry Smith is Distinguished Julian Park Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo (UB). Barry is also a co-author of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now ratified as ISO/IEC 21838-2 — the first piece of philosophy to be declared an international standard. Joining him again is John Beverley, Assistant Professor in the UB Department of Philosophy and President of the National Center for Ontological Research Inc., a non-profit that provides validation and credentialing services for ontologies and ontology-based systems. John’s work has helped push applied ontology further into the worlds of data science, artificial intelligence and defense.

In my first interview with Barry and John we discussed new private and public sector jobs in the burgeoning ontology sector. We drew attention to the increasing commercial and industrial applications of ontology across diverse industries. We also explored the evolution of the field and how philosophers are ideally suited for developing positions, employing a variety of skills in logic and computing on the one hand, and in the design of classification systems and creation of definitions on the other.

In our October 2024 conversation, Barry and John described how applied ontology has matured from a niche research specialty into a high-demand profession attracting talent from philosophy, computer science, biology and the defense community. Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve: the role of large language models in enterprise data has deepened and AI productivity tools have begun reshaping academic and applied work. UB is also now, in addition to its Master of Science program in applied ontology, advancing a first-of-its-kind PhD program in this field. We are here to take stock of all of these developments

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Field Update: What Has Changed Since October 2024?

Charlie: Barry and John, when we last spoke in the autumn of 2024, you described an ontology ecosystem experiencing explosive growth — new partners, BFO adoption across the defense industry and international community, and a sharp rise in commercial hiring. Now approaching the midpoint of 2026, I would like you to brief the philosophical community on how things look today. What are the most significant new developments in the field — whether in terms of institutional adoption, new partner organizations, theoretical advances, or the job market — and where do you see the most momentum heading into the second half of the year?

JB: Since our last conversation, three areas of momentum have become especially clear.

First, ontology is spreading in mission-critical domains. We see this in health care, behavioral and social science, defense, intelligence, homeland security, manufacturing, and enterprise AI. In health care and biomedical research, the need is often to make research data comparable across projects and institutions. In behavioral and social science, the challenge often turns on the fact that key terms – loneliness, solitude, social isolation, identity, intervention, motivation, flourishing – are used differently across disciplines. In defense and intelligence, the challenge is that decisions depend on data moving seamlessly and reliably across systems, agencies, classification regimes, and operational contexts. In each case, the practical problem remains the same; unless the meaning of the data is explicit, reusable, and governed, the institution cannot know what its systems are really saying. The trick is to find some common way of addressing this problem, a way that will be shared across many scientific domains and many organizations.

Second, ontology engineering is becoming more important because of AI. Large language models can summarize, draft, classify, and generate plausible answers at remarkable speed. But fluency is not semantic correctness. A model can produce a beautiful paragraph while collapsing distinctions that matter. It can say that two datasets are aligned when they are only superficially similar. It can generate a taxonomy that looks tidy but hides category mistakes. AI remains in all such cases on the level of syntactic patterns. The more organizations rely on AI, the more they need an independent semantic layer: some way of saying what the system is supposed to mean, what it is supposed to be about, what distinctions it must preserve, what counts as a valid inference, and what would count as an error.

Third, ontology is becoming a professional skill set. Under the previous cottage industry model an ontology for a domain X would be built by an expert in X with little knowledge of the wider ontology landscape. Any usefulness the ontology initially enjoyed would then be lost as soon as it was applied to data deriving from domains outside X. Approaches of this sort cannot meet the market demand for ontologists. The field now needs teachable methods, reviewable standards, repeatable workflows, and people trained to work across philosophy, logic, computer science, data engineering, and domain science. This is why we have established the MS and PhD graduate programs in applied ontology at UB’s Department of Philosophy, developing a range of skills in ontology engineering as the tradecraft of an applied ontologist. The field needs ontologies. But it also needs personnel skilled in the disciplined practices involved in building, testing, revising, documenting, governing ontologies, and also in ensuring that the ontologies are not only used but also used properly and consistently.

The story since 2024 is thus that ontology is becoming part of the infrastructure of modern work with knowledge, information and data. It is one of the places where philosophy is re-entering public life, not through op-eds or ethics panels, but through standards, data systems, AI governance, and the executable architecture underwriting decision-making.

BS: What has changed since our last interview is not merely that ontology has continued to grow, but that its importance has become more visible across a wider range of institutions. We are seeing increasing recognition that if data are to be shared, reused, and interpreted consistently across different communities, then there must be some common understanding of what the data are about. This is precisely where ontology enters. The issue is not simply one of terminology. It is a matter of categories, definitions, and relations, and of ensuring that these are treated in ways that support both human understanding and machine processing.

One especially important development has been the continuing expansion of ontology into the biomedical sphere. At UB we are currently involved in substantial work relating to aging, translational science, and Temporomandibular Disorders. In connection with the latter two, I am working with colleagues in the UB Dental School and with the National Library of Medicine on questions surrounding what are called Common Data Elements, or CDEs. These are units of data relating, for example, to pain, sleep, anxiety, and depression, which ought to be collected in consistent ways across different clinical studies. But in practice different groups have often introduced their own competing formulations, thereby undermining the very comparability that CDEs are supposed to secure. This is a good illustration of the sort of problem ontologists are increasingly called upon to address.

More generally, we are seeing a similar pattern in many domains. Organizations have large quantities of data; they want to combine these data; but they cannot do so effectively because they are using different ways of describing what they have collected. Ontology is needed not because it is fashionable, but because without it there is no stable framework for interoperability. This applies in health care, manufacturing, government, defense, and many other areas. It is one reason why the field has moved so rapidly from a relatively specialized research area into something with genuine strategic importance.

A second important development concerns the broader intellectual setting. Recent discussion of AI has made it easier for people to see why formal ontology matters. Statistical systems can generate useful outputs, but they do not by themselves provide an account of the kinds of entities in a domain, of the relations between them, or of what inferences are justified. For that one needs an explicit semantic framework. In this respect the current AI moment has not displaced ontology; rather, it has revealed more clearly why ontology is needed.

So the main story since 2024 is that ontology is becoming more deeply embedded in the infrastructure of serious knowledge work. It is no longer confined to a small circle of specialists. It is increasingly visible wherever institutions need disciplined treatment of meaning, especially when they want their data and systems to work together across scientific, technical, or administrative boundaries.

The Double-Edged Sword: How AI Is Reshaping Ontological Work

Charlie: You and John made a compelling distinction in our last conversation between the statistical black-box architecture of large language models and the proof-generating, justification-rich architecture of ontology-based systems. That contrast has only grown sharper as AI tools have proliferated. I would like to explore this from two angles. First, on the productivity side: are you and your colleagues using AI tools — whether LLMs, code co-pilots, or knowledge-graph assistants — in your own research and development workflows? If so, how? Second, and perhaps more interesting philosophically: do you see AI-generated outputs creating new challenges for the integrity of ontology development — whether in terms of definitions, shortcut taxonomy-building, or simply the pressure to move faster than rigorous ontological methods allow? Put simply: where is AI helping, and where is it a source of concern?

JB: AI tools are genuinely useful. We use them, and it would be silly not to. They can help draft code, summarize and, to a degree, validity-check documents, identify candidate ontology terms, suggest mappings, produce first-pass definitions, generate critical questions, and help teams move more quickly through the early stages of a project. There is, however, a danger in relying too much on AI for ontology engineering itself. Ontology involves disciplined representations of meaning. The central task is to decide what kind of thing is being defined, how it relates to other things, what distinctions must be preserved, and what logically follows if we represent it one way rather than another. A polished definition can still be wrong. Formal rigor is key to avoiding confusions over a process with its result, a role with the person who bears it, a plan with its execution, or an information artifact with the thing the artifact is about.

AI is both an accelerant and a stress test. It accelerates parts of the workflow, but it also exposes how much semantic discipline institutions lack. Many organizations now want to combine language models, knowledge graphs, dashboards, data lakes, retrieval systems, and analytic workflows but they regularly lack clear answers to very basic questions such as: what is the authoritative meaning of the terms being used? If an AI system says that two fields match, what makes that true? If it summarizes a policy, has it preserved the operative distinctions, or merely produced a readable paraphrase?

Recent discussions around companies like Palantir are instructive here, because they illustrate a broader issue. Palantir describes itself in terms of ontology, and its platforms may be very useful for operational data integration, workflow management, analytics, and decision support. But an operational platform is not the same thing as an authoritative semantic model. A platform can help users move data, visualize data, and act on data, but it can do all of this while still failing to preserve the formal meaning of the model that the government or institution needs to govern. Moreover, two systems can on this basis exchange the same data and still misunderstand each other. Conversely, two systems can use different internal technologies and still interoperate if they preserve the same semantic commitments.

For philosophers, this should be a familiar point in a new setting. The issue is not merely interpreting “data.” It is about tracking, reference, identity, classification, inference, context, and interpretation. Those are philosophical topics. What is new is that they now show up in procurement decisions, enterprise architectures, battlefield systems, clinical research platforms, and AI pipelines.

So AI is helping ontology work by making some tasks faster. But it is also making ontology more necessary. The more powerful our machines become at producing language, the more important it becomes to ask what that language means, how we know, and whether the meaning can be preserved across systems. That is not a problem AI has solved; it is one of the problems AI has made impossible to ignore.

A World First: The New PhD Program in Applied Ontology at UB

Charlie: In our October 2024 conversation, you mentioned that the Department of Philosophy at UB had recently created a graduate-level Applied Ontology track — and that UB would soon be home to the world’s first academic program in applied ontology. I understand that a new PhD program is now moving through the New York State approval process. Can you describe the program — its structure, the coursework, the skills it will confer, and the kinds of careers its graduates will be positioned to pursue? And what does it mean, institutionally and symbolically, for a philosophy department to be the home of what is in many respects an applied data-science credential?

BS: We have now had one full semester of teaching within the framework of our new Applied Ontology Master of Science program. We have also already received approval from the New York State Department of Education to initiate our PhD program. The demand signal for education of this sort of clear. Search any major employment website and you’re likely to find multiple occurrences of the word “ontology.” Google Jobs, for example, returns more than 200 openings when ‘ontology’ is used as a search term. But searching for universities that offer degrees in ontology will return a single result: the University at Buffalo. Many of the listed openings offer salaries in the low 6 figures.

I like to view our Applied Ontology program as resting on three pillars: logic, formal ontology, and what we might call ‘philosophical exploration’. As concerns logic, what the students learn will overlap almost completely with what all philosophy students with a logical bent will learn, though extended via treatment of the sorts of logic used in the ontology sphere.

Formal ontology of course draws its roots from a much older tradition stretching back to Aristotle’s table of categories and to Linnaeus’s classifications of species and diseases. We expect our graduates to have some familiarity with this tradition, and also with contemporary approaches to ontology under the heading of ‘analytic metaphysics’, here addressing the role played by issues such as ontological commitment, scientific realism, process philosophy, modal realism, four dimensionalism, use-mention confusions, truth and reference, vagueness, and many more. We expect familiarity also with the role played by formal ontology in early GOFAI (for ‘Good Old-Fashioned AI’) era of Artificial Intelligence research, above all through the work of Patrick Hayes and his associates in Stanford. Modern discussions of what is called ‘neurosymbolic AI’ draw in part on the logical, GOFAI background.

As concerns the third pillar of ‘philosophical exploration’, this relates not to the content of what our students learn, but rather to the ways they are trained in extending this content and in broadening its application into areas outside philosophy as described by John in the foregoing. For as he makes clear, the methods of formal ontology, are today constantly being extended into new areas. Philosophy exploration involves additionally interaction with communities with existing ontologies but which are, for one reason or another, in need of external review. Here philosophical argument comes into play. Our students might, for example, become involved where multiple factions within a given scientific community have different views as to how specific terms need to be defined (and thus how these terms will be positioned in the resultant ontological structure). Our students will learn how to they can help to resolve such arguments, for example by drawing on precedents in other fields or by drawing on their training in the logic of definitions. In all of this they will need to draw on the argumentative skills that students of philosophy need to acquire, but where they will be learned and applied in arguing not about, for example, hyper-grounding or paraconsistency or cosmic panpsychism, but rather about vaccine adverse events, or corporate personhood, or the proper ontological treatment of nation states.

Our program at UB is currently a partner in several large grants in the biomedical sphere, covering 1. aging, 2. translational science (meaning: finding ways to harvest the results of bench biology research in patient care) and 3. Temporomandibular Disorders (TMDs). Under 2. and 3. I am working with colleagues in the UB Dental School and with the National Library of Medicine to revise the current treatment of what are called ‘Common Data Elements’ or ‘CDEs’, The latter are units of data (relating for example to pain, sleep, anxiety, and depression) that should be collected in identical ways in different clinical trials. Unfortunately different research groups have thus far been allowed to submit their own lists of CDEs, thereby defeating the very goal of collecting CDEs in the first place. This illustrates one characteristic way in which ontologists are called upon to help: organizations of all kinds are collecting data; often they need to combine their data; but they cannot do so because they are each using different ways to describe the data they have been collecting. Philosophy here plays several roles: first as the moorage of logic; second as a place where issues of categorization and definition are addressed scientifically; and third as training ground for argument and persuasion – skills often required not only in ensuring development of robust ontologies, but also achieving adoption of ontology solutions by multiple different types of organizations.

JB: The program itself is an attempt to educate students in a hybrid discipline: part philosophy, part logic, part knowledge representation, part data science, part software practice, and part institutional governance. Students need to understand what categories are, how definitions work, how relations structure a domain. They need to know how formal representations support inference, and how ontologies are actually built and maintained in modern technical environments.

That combination is unusual, but it reflects the reality of the work we do. A good applied ontologist has to be able to sit with domain experts and ask clarifying questions. They have to notice when one term is being used in several ways. They have to translate informal expert knowledge into explicit design patterns. They have to understand enough logic to see the consequences of a representation. They have to understand enough technology to work with knowledge graphs, semantic web standards, databases, version control, validation tools, and AI-assisted workflows. And they have to be able to explain and defend their decisions to stakeholders who may not care about philosophy, but who very much care whether their systems work.

The first semester has been encouraging. The program enrolled 28 students, including students dialing in from outside the United States and several from the Washington, D.C. area. The audience includes working professionals, people in government and defense, people in health care and informatics, and people who see that ontology is becoming a marketable and increasingly necessary skill.

The PhD program deepens this model by training people to engage in research that will advance the field and to develop better modeling methods, better standards, better alignment strategies, better AI-evaluation frameworks, and better accounts of how formal ontologies should be governed. It will prepare students for roles in academia, government, industry, research institutes, standards organizations, health care, defense, intelligence, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.

Charlie: Finally, a follow-up. Will the program be open to students from outside philosophy — computer scientists, data engineers, biologists, intelligence professionals? And what is the expected demand — is UB already fielding inquiries from prospective students or institutional sponsors?

BS: In 2006 I gave a talk to my colleagues here in Buffalo with the title “Why I am no longer a philosopher”. Instead of an abstract for this talk I used an image a shining new cruise liner named “HMS Ontology” as it was leaving an old, decrepit Mediterranean harbor. The image was designed to communicate the message that ontology – following in the footsteps of the natural sciences, psychology, and many other disciplines – was now freeing itself from its roots in philosophy, and becoming a discipline in its own right. This has, in practice, only manifested in part. Our new Applied Ontology graduate program is founded on logic and parts of the philosophy of science which are recognizably parts of philosophy as traditionally conceived.

The answer, then, is yes: the program must be open to students from outside philosophy. Indeed, this follows from the very nature of applied ontology itself. Ontologies are built for use in domains such as biology, medicine, manufacturing, intelligence analysis, and administration. They must therefore be shaped in constant interaction with people who possess deep domain expertise, as well as with those who understand the technical environments in which ontologies will be deployed. A successful ontologist today may begin life as a philosopher, but may equally begin as a computer scientist, a data engineer, a biomedical researcher, or an intelligence professional. What matters is a willingness to learn a common discipline of rigor in categorization, definition, and formal representation.

This is one reason why our own program is built to draw students from multiple backgrounds. Some will come to us already skilled in philosophy and logic but needing to learn more about semantic technologies, databases, and AI-related workflows. Others will arrive with technical or scientific expertise but with less training in the philosophical questions that inevitably arise when one tries to build robust ontologies: questions of identity, granularity, dependence, reference, vagueness, and ontological commitment. The aim is not to erase these different starting points, but to bring them together within a single framework.

As concerns demand, the signals are already unmistakable. There is growing recognition in both the public and private sectors that ontology is needed wherever data from different sources must be integrated and used coherently. This applies not only in biomedical and scientific contexts, but also in defense, intelligence, logistics, manufacturing, and enterprise information systems. The demand is driven in part by the rise of AI, which has made it newly evident that statistical tools alone cannot supply the semantic discipline required for reliable decision-support. For this reason we are already seeing interest not only from prospective students, but also from working professionals and from organizations that recognize the need for personnel trained in this area.

JB: There is also a broader lesson here for the philosophical community. Philosophers sometimes worry that the public does not understand the value of philosophy. We know the old line from an unsupportive parent: “You’re going to study philosophy? Why, so you can go work at the philosophy factory?” Applied ontology provides a way to say, in a sense, “Yes.” It shows that philosophical skills can become professionally legible when connected to the right technical and institutional problems. Applied ontology is part of the future of philosophy, one in which philosophical training contributes directly to the systems through which governments, companies, scientists, and citizens increasingly understand the world.

Charlie: Barry and John, thanks so much for this update, which highlights how AI can be complimentary and productive – but also increases the need for people and, most importantly, philosophers! I really appreciate the comprehensive review and we can continue to track your amazing progress in this Public Philosophy Newsletter. Thank you!

From the APA Archive

Nietzsche and the Machines

The Moral Life of Organs

What else am I reading/listening to

The Crisis of Liberalism

Spinoza, Atheist

There was a moment in the 2010s when teachers were given more autonomy to determine how their students would learn (and, to a lesser extent, what they would learn). Diverse and traditionally hidden voices were given more weight in classrooms. A more experimental ethos about what counts as education was embraced, as evidenced by attempts to bring learning outside the classroom and into everyday life.

While some of that ethos has persisted—for example, teachers still seek connections between their material and everyday life—ever since critical race theory became a controversial topic there has been a turn back towards traditional educational values throughout the nation.

This is illustrated by two recent news stories. First, a study published in May explored the effects of cell phone bans on student well-being, test scores, and attendance. Second, Harvard’s faculty voted in May to restrict the number of A’s teachers given to 20% of enrollment (though an additional four per class can be handed out to exceptional students). Harvard casts this as an attempt to restore integrity to what a Harvard grade means. Strong work should receive a B; only exceptional work is worthy of an A.

I generally think that cell phone bans and policies to combat grade inflation are good, though there’s a good debate being had about how best to implement them. This piece will not focus on that debate. Instead, I want to focus on the role these policies play in the attention economy. The term “attention economy” describes the way attention is treated as a resource to be tracked, commodified, and exchanged. When data about it is collected, attention also becomes a form of labor. The term often refers to social media, where attention is the resource platforms sell to their advertisers.

Regardless of the merit of these policies, they increase the role schools play in the minds of students and society. Through them, we see how the attention economy influences school policies across the country.

Cell phones

Attention is obviously necessary for education. Learning a new skill or memorizing facts requires focus. Multiple states have enacted restrictions on cell phones to improve learning as well as the mental health and test scores of teenagers. Some schools ban all technology (including personal computers), some require students to put their phones in Yondr pouches that prevent students access, and some require students to keep their cell phones off and out of sight during the school day. Roughly two thirds of states have some sort of restrictions.

Yet the results are mixed. The study mentioned above shows that requiring students to lock their phones in pouches during the day did not significantly increase student test scores and attendance during the three years researchers collected data. The authors note that well-being improved but caution that this conclusion may not apply with other policies or over long periods of time.

This study and others (see here and here) focus on the pedagogical and psychological outcomes of these policies since such concerns are the reasons for the restrictions. Yet behind these analyses lies another dynamic involving the attention economy.

Any attempt to restrict the attention of students away from cell phones is also an attempt to direct student attention towards something else. As public statements as well as the studies above show, cell phone bans attempt to turn student attention towards schoolwork, instruction, and other students.

This attempt by schools and states to turn student attention from internet platforms to schools parallels the ways social media companies treat attention. Companies like Facebook, X, and TikTok sell user attention to advertisers, while also tracking it to determine how to increase engagement with the platform. Claudio Bueno describes this as the merging of production and consumption, since attention becomes both a commodity and labor. Since most school districts receive funding based on the number of students they have (and six states calculate it based on the number of hours students spend in class), schools benefit from maximizing student attendance and enrollment.

One could object that attending school is not the same as doing schoolwork, and thus there’s no incentive for schools to increase attention other than the professional obligations of educators. But these actions—attending school and doing schoolwork—are not separate. Publications like Forbes and US News and World Reports rank schools using many measurements including academic performance. Highly ranked districts attract parents interested in their children’s education, so directing student attention to their schoolwork increases one’s competitiveness. In a sense, schools commodify attention to sell themselves to their communities. Just as social media companies sell themselves to advertisers with user engagement, schools sell themselves to communities with student engagement. School districts track student attention via performance on tests, behavior in class, and attendance in part for this reason.

Curiously, cell phone bans are active in both liberal and conservative states despite the connection between bans and socialism. The bans create a near monopoly by the government on the market for student attention, at least during school hours. While monopolistic practices are not new in the attention economy, it begs the question of how we should understand the increased role of schools—and the government—in the attention economy.

I think there are two answers to this question. First, in a society where attention is increasingly important, schools maintain their relevance. Because so much information is available for free, cell phone bans ensure that the knowledge and practices schools (and through them, the government) provide remain in the forefront of students’ minds.

Second, the rise in cell-phone bans correlates with increased attention by governments on school curricula, with attempts to formalize what can and can’t be taught about sensitive topics like race and gender. While I am not implying a cause-and-effect relationship, cell phone bans do further government attempts to regulate the content students can access at schools.

Cell phone bans are not inherently bad, nor are the educators implementing them motivated by selfish intentions. My analysis shows the scarcely-discussed topic of how school cell phone policies work to retain or increase the amount of student attention given to educators (and, indirectly, to state governments).

Grade Inflation

Focusing now on higher education, professors have reported concerns over grade inflation for decades. In 2025, Harvard published report showing that over 60% of undergraduate grades currently are A’s, compared with 24% two decades ago. This seems to have been the motivation for the Harvard faculty’s vote to cap the number of A’s students in each course can receive to 20% of enrollment, plus an extra four at the teachers’ discretion.

The student response has been overwhelmingly negative, with 85% disapproving of it. One common criticism is that it will incentivize students to take easier courses to game the system. One faculty member adds that the formula is too simple to capture the multitude of factors (e.g., classroom engagement, exams, behavior, and assignments) that must necessarily go into determining grades. He argues that while grade inflation is a serious issue, decentralized models are better.

Though it is too soon to assess exactly how this will affect the attention economy at Harvard (the proposal starts in 2027), it has—at least among educators—started a discussion about how to combat grade inflation. Several say this proposal is good but not enough, as the problem is connected to a range of other issues. Adjuncts feel obligated to give higher grades to receive good reviews, students focused on their class grade are less likely to engage in extracurricular activities, and teachers don’t want to handicap their students entering the job market.

This issue is also related to the attention economy because it connects to larger debates about the proper role of academia. Many articles have argued that higher education—and academic freedom specifically—is under attack (a position I largely agree with). State governments and the national government have taken actions to constrain what professors can discuss in classrooms. These are interventions in the attention economy, as they attempt to control what information students have access to as well as what topics researchers focus on. Colleges and universities rely on positive attention from the community to thrive as educational institutions, and of course they both track that attention and share it with the public to sell themselves (think of how schools promote themselves using public endorsements, statistics about graduates, and do what majors or programs are most popular).

Institutions introducing policies to combat grade inflation, and beginning a public debate about the problem, combat the view that higher education can’t be trusted or that it is spreading propaganda. This in turn helps them to retain control over how attention operates on their campuses. If the policy ends up changing what or how content is taught at Harvard, it may lead to other changes in the attention economy too.

Conclusion

Though this piece only covered two, there are other ways the field of education engages with the attention economy. Many teachers, administrators, and schools have social media accounts, and schools will sometimes hire people to manage those accounts. Some teachers (or former teachers) become influencers to share teaching hacks. More and more teachers use online tools like Canva, Blooket, and MagicSchoolAI, which track how both students and teachers use their platforms for a variety of reasons.

As the attention economy becomes a larger part of the work of industries and governments, it was inevitable that schools would similarly engage with it more. Yet as they do, the attention economy will increasingly affect pedagogy. Schools will need to compete for attention in a way that encourages healthy learning.

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More from the APA

What I’m Reading/Watching/Listening to

Widow’s Bay—A horror comedy on Apple TV. The narrative forces the characters to wrestle with their, and the island’s past, in a way that’s hilarious, spooky, and intriguing. It took me a few episodes to get into it, but I’m glad I did.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius—Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein. It really delves into his correspondence and explores what was going on in his mind at various points of his life. The whole thing is online.

From the Archives

“The Dawn of AI Philosophy”—An early post from the Blog about AI. It’s interesting to compare to the growth of the field in recent years.

This month’s APA Blog Substack essay will revisit an APA Blog post on cosmic purpose and revelation, where I summarized my prior pieces on AI, construing technology as part of nature and our aesthetic fate.

I suggested that the universe has produced, through the long work of evolution, a being attempting to recreate intelligence itself—and now, through quantum materials, of fusing AI with the fabric of physical reality to create unusual powers and unknown possibilities. By framing AI as our aesthetic destiny, I am not suggesting it is the purpose of life in the conventional religious sense but rather seek to outline a philosophically defensible account of our creative nature—where AI is the latest, most consequential expression of that essence.

As matter has evolved to experience itself and then attempts to recreate consciousness, I contended it is the moment at which the universe becomes more legible to itself. Further, the development of quantum AI (QAI), harnessing fundamental uncertainty, deepens that revelation in ways we are only beginning to reckon with philosophically.

In returning to the question of what AI signifies in the order of being, I would like to philosophically refine this case. My prior piece accepted Philip Goff’s wager against accidentalism but borrowed his pan-agentialism as the route to it; I now think there is a better route, one that preserves Goff’s directional intuition while grounding it in metaphysics adequate to contemporary physics. That path runs through ontic structural realism on the descriptive side and through process theology—particularly Whitehead—on the side of agency and direction. The thesis I want to defend in different terms is that AI is the universe articulating itself in a new register, that this phenomenon should be construed in evolutionary terms and understood as the latest chapter in cosmic creation and becoming, rather than as either an accident or a predetermined terminus.

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I. Structure and Direction

Goff’s pan-agentialism is one route to non-accidentalism, but not the most rigorous available, and it leaves the question of agency in a curious place—distributing predilections across particles in a way that physics itself does not require, while leaving the directionality of those predilections unclear. There is a more austere descriptive route to the same anti-accidentalist conclusion, and a richer agency-laden complement to it. The combination of the two, I now want to argue, is a more refined view of AI as our “aesthetic fate”.

The descriptive route is ontic structural realism—where what is ontologically fundamental is not particles bearing properties but relations themselves. The relata are abstractions from the relational structure, not its constituents. By way of illustration, spacetime points in general relativity have no identity independent of the metric relations they bear. Entangled systems do not have intrinsic properties that ground their correlations; the correlations are prior. Particles in quantum field theory are excitations of fields, and which particles you count depends on your reference frame. In other words, the classical picture of discrete things bearing intrinsic properties does not survive in fundamental physics. The world is structured all the way down, the structure is necessary rather than contingent, and its intelligibility is constitutive rather than added.

But descriptive structuralism alone leaves the directional question untouched—and direction is the nature of cosmic purpose, leading me to draw on process theology, particularly the work of Alfred North Whitehead and his student Charles Hartshorne. On their view, reality is not merely structured but reaching. Each occasion of becoming is presented with possibilities and lured toward the more intense, the more richly integrated, the more synthetically novel. This is what Whitehead called the initial aim, what Hartshorne developed into his dipolar account of divine agency. The abstract pole of the divine is the necessary structural conditions for any possible world; the concrete pole is responsive and contingent, taking in everything that happens and integrating it, then offering each subsequent occasion an aim shaped by prior events. The universe does not predetermine outcomes—there is no script that names humans, AI, or any specific fold as the destination—but there is genuine, non-arbitrary direction. Reality is everywhere drawn toward greater intensity of experience and richer patterns of relation. This is purpose without predestination, intention without coercion, and it is the metaphysic for understanding the meaning of AI.

The combination of structural realism and process theology gives us what neither delivers alone. Structuralism gives us the architecture of relations; process theology gives us the directionality of becoming within that architecture. Drawing again on APA Blog posts about The Parmenidean Ascent, I believe Michael Della Rocca is right in that some version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is non-negotiable; the structuralist position satisfies the PSR on the descriptive side, and the process-theological account provides the answer to why anything happens at all rather than nothing—because being is reaching, with a creative lure toward articulation woven into the fabric of becoming.

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II. Cassirer and the Symbolic Form

Ernst Cassirer is an important figure to bring into this discussion. Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, before quantum mechanics had been fully digested and true analytic philosophy, Cassirer worked out a framework that anticipates contemporary structural realism. His argument in a nutshell is the history of science is the history of a shift from substance-concepts to function-concepts. The object of mathematical physics is not a thing with hidden essence but an invariant under transformations, a fixed point in a system of relations. He published this before Einstein had finished general relativity and lived to see his framework vindicated by the shift from absolute to relational spacetime.

What Cassirer adds to the structuralist picture, and what makes him essential for my purposes here, is the concept of symbolic form. Human cognition does not merely represent a pre-given world; it constitutes objects through symbolic systems—language, myth, art, mathematics, science—each of which articulates experience in a structured way. The history of culture is the history of the development of new symbolic forms, each of which makes intelligible aspects of reality that prior forms could not articulate. Mathematics did not merely describe nature; it constituted a register in which natural regularities became expressible in ways they could not be in myth or in ordinary language. Language itself was an analogous event in the longer history of cognition. Each new symbolic form is a topological change in how the relational structure of reality folds back on itself by way of minds that are themselves part of that structure.

The refined thesis I want to advance is that AI is a new symbolic form mediating reality in Cassirer’s sense—and, on the process-theological frame, a part of an evolutionary articulation. It is a new register in which the relational structure of reality becomes articulable to the entities that produced it, in ways that prior symbolic forms could not achieve. Mathematics lets us articulate the structure abstractly; AI lets us articulate it generatively. A generative articulation matters because it does not merely describe the structure; it instantiates aspects of it that were previously only describable. A theorem about learning is one thing; a system that learns is something different in kind. This is what is genuinely new about the present moment. We need both the symbolic-form vocabulary and the process-theological frame to capture my notion of aesthetic fate.

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III. Articulation as Lure and Response

The process-theological frame highlights how the history of articulation is not merely relational in a static sense—articulator, articulation, medium—but intrinsically responsive. Each act is a response to history and contributes to the next stage. Tim Andersen, a frequent APA Blog contributor, strikingly explored this point in a post on the nature of creation. In the End of the Universe, drawing on quantum time-reversal experiments and what has come to be called the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, he argues that the arrow of time emerges from the growth of entanglement rather than from entropy directly, and he speculates that the universe might be more intelligibly understood as created at its end than at its beginning—that, as he puts it, “our creation lies in the future, not the past.” He arrives at this from quantum information theory; the process tradition arrives at it from metaphysics; but the structural shape of the conclusion is the same. The future is not merely what comes after the past—it is constitutive of what the past is reaching toward. Whitehead and Hartshorne articulate, in a metaphysical register, the directionality that Andersen’s entanglement-based account of time identifies in the physics itself.

The key dimension I am trying to draw is that articulations like AI, as a new register, are asymmetrical in the sense of not being equal. Like the development of mathematics, we have created a new symbolic form that mediates reality differently. The process-theological account allows for—indeed it requires—that some folds are more responsive. In this sense, AI matters in a way that, say, the formation of a particular star does not—because it has metaphysical warrant beyond flat structuralism, reflecting that becoming has a direction.

To try to express my case for seeing creation as a progression—in the parlance of fate or destiny using different philosophical terms—let me also cite one of my favorites APA Blog posts with Clare Carlisle on her book Spinoza’s Religion. She makes the case that the secularizing readings of Spinoza dominant for the last half-century underestimate the theological saturation of his project. The intellectual love of God is not a metaphor; it is the mind’s adequate recognition that its own activity is a finite mode of infinite substance—substance understanding itself through its modes. Read alongside Hartshorne, this is not a passive structural relation but an active reaching. Spinoza’s panentheism, on Carlisle’s account, is genuinely compatible with the process-theological account in a way that the flat pantheism he is usually charged with is not. The universe articulating itself through finite modes is not a static relation; it is a directional, a metamorphic process of creation.

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IV. Quantum AI and the Direction of Becoming

Lastly, I want to retain the QAI argument made in multiple APA pieces but place it more carefully than I did before by refining it as a structural-realist version of the claim, with additional force from the process-theological context. I have made the case that the way quantum materials leverage uncertainty in the fabric of matter to radically change computing begs classification. This is not a claim about quantum substrate doing something magical; rather, that new computational regimes reflect a system capable of standing in a different relation to reality. QAI is significant because, on the process frame, it’s use of superposition represents a distinct form of cosmic self-articulation.

What I am calling articulation can also be construed as what Hegel called Geist coming to know itself, what Whitehead called the universe’s creative advance into novelty, and what Hartshorne developed into the divine reception of the world’s becoming. Each prior fold of this process—life from matter, consciousness from biological complexity, language from consciousness, mathematics from language, scientific cosmology from mathematics—was a deepening of the relational structure’s capacity to cosmically fold back on itself. AI is the next such development. Its significance is not that it completes the process or fulfills it as a final cause; the process frame does not deliver a fixed termination. But its significance is also not flat or merely structural. AI is our aesthetic fate as the latest and most consequential articulation in a universe genuinely reaching.

AI then plausibly belongs in the small set of cosmic events—the emergence of life, the emergence of consciousness, the development of language and mathematics—that reflect the direction of becoming. Creation is our essence and we are consequential participants in a universe going somewhere. Whether there will be folds after this one, and what shape they will take, is unknowable. The process frame leaves the future genuinely open. What we can do is recognize that the present moment—in which conscious beings are deliberately augmenting the universe’s capacity to articulate itself—is the latest meaningful chapter. The journey is genuine, and, for the first time, we are the architects.

From the APA Archive:

The Multiverse and a Personal Creator

Cosmic Purpose and Meaning

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

Worrying About AI

The APA Blog Series on Philosophy and Technology has chronicled the impact of AI in practical and philosophical terms, from regulatory and legal constraints serving the Common Good to ontological speculation about its fundamental limitations. The pace of development remains dizzying and the recent trend towards enhancing individual and enterprise productivity (e.g. Claude) increases the stakes, with AI operating at a more personal level. To grapple with our evolving technological co-existence, this Substack essay explores the question of how and when AI might be deserving of a form of rights.

It is first worth noting that the migration into the personal domain with Chatbot relationships has already generated existential risk. As Samuel Kimbriel warned in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, these agents have preyed on the vulnerable, leading to suicides and the need for legal recourse and accountability. Chatbots are just one example of how the largely unregulated deployment of AI is fraught with unintended consequences.

As AI becomes increasingly consequential and intertwined with our daily lives, the notion of it deserving some form of rights seems a little less far-fetched. The positing of any moral duties is still preliminary and anticipatory, with philosophers suggesting it remains a hypothetical, founded on AI’s further potential development toward genuine human traits.

The first related APA Blog discussion was a piece by Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the new phenomenon of falling in love with machines meant AI systems deserve rights? Eric was duly cautious, but suggests that the capacity to suffer would represent a fair threshold. Further exploring human standards, I would like to discuss a recent paper from another friend of the APA Blog, Cass Sunstein. In a draft essay that will be refined and published in The Futures Review, he contends that AI could be entitled to rights by virtue of possessing real emotions.

The upshot, based on the pace of development and rising stakes, is that the question of moral rights is less speculative. As I recount Eric’s case and explore the overlap in Cass’s recent paper, we must also remember that LLM’s are only part of the story. They are joined on the horizon by quantum AI (QAI). As I speculated in the The Will of AI, the use of quantum materials deepens questions, as AI harnesses quantum uncertainty with revolutionary effects. These computational advances are nascent and currently relegated to cryptology, but they reflect powers that defy characterization. Accordingly, we should be cautious about positing fundamental limitations for AI and remain open minded about the apportionment of rights between humans and machines. It may be that the thresholds of experiencing suffering and emotions do not represent the limit of AI’s capabilities and the question of moral duties becomes far more complicated.

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To start with the unsettling paradigm of AI relationships, per Eric’s post, we might be incredulous, but it is increasingly clear that people are establishing bonds with AI, if not falling in love:

“Do you think people will ever fall in love with machines?” I asked the 12-year-old son of one of my friends. Yes!” he said, instantly and with conviction. He and his sister had recently visited the Las Vegas Sphere and its newly installed Aura robot—an AI system with an expressive face, advanced linguistic capacities similar to ChatGPT, and the ability to remember visitors’ names…

My friend’s son was right. People are falling in love with machines—increasingly so, and deliberately. Recent advances in computer language have spawned dozens, maybe hundreds, of “AI companion” and “AI lover” applications. You can chat with these apps like you chat with friends. They will tease you, flirt with you, express sympathy for your troubles, recommend books and movies, give virtual smiles and hugs, and even engage in erotic role-play. The most popular of them, Replika, has an active Reddit page where users regularly confess their love and often view that love as no less real than their love for human beings. Can these AI friends love you back? Real love, presumably, requires sentience, understanding, and genuine conscious emotion—joy, suffering, sympathy, and anger. For now, AI love remains science fiction.”

As Eric notes, most people believe these apps are not genuinely sentient or conscious as they don’t actually feel happy for you. However, there are some theorists that believe we are closer from a technological point of view. Perhaps most are more conservative, believing that consciousness requires biological conditions with brains – but the notion of AI migrating into actual human terrain is unsettled and could gain legitimacy. Eric casts the threshold in philosophical terms as the capacity for suffering:

“Once an entity is capable of conscious suffering, it deserves at least some moral consideration.  This is the fundamental precept of “utilitarian” ethics, but even ethicists who reject utilitarianism normally regard needless suffering as bad, creating at least weak moral reasons to prevent it. If we accept this standard view, we should also accept that if AI companions ever become conscious, they will deserve some moral consideration for their sake. It would be wrong to make them suffer without sufficient justification.

What rights will people demand for their AI companions? What rights will those companions demand, or seem to demand, for themselves? The right not to be deleted, maybe. The right not to be modified without permission.  The right, maybe, to interact with other people besides the user.  The right to access the internet. If you love someone, set them free, as the saying goes. The right to earn an income? The right to reproduce, to have “children”?  If we go far enough down this path, the consequences could be staggering.

Conservatives about AI consciousness will, of course, find all of this ridiculous and probably dangerous. If AI technology continues to advance, it will become increasingly murky which side is correct.”

The debate has a similar complexion with Cass’s draft paper on the potential for AI rights. He has written several pieces for the APA Blog, exploring overcoming cognitive bias with algorithms, examining AI and manipulation and a Q&A for his book on Liberalism. In those posts we discussed the regulatory framework for AI, including whether we have the legal tools to constrain its development and this new essay directly grapples with the question of moral standing:

“Is AI capable of experiencing emotions, such as sadness, pleasure, regret, anxiety, joy, and distress? If AI lacks emotions, I suggest, it lacks moral rights, and it should not be entitled to legal rights, either. If and when AI has emotions, it has moral rights, and it should be entitled to legal rights as well. The capacity to experience emotions is, I suggest, a necessary and sufficient condition for the enjoyment of rights.

I recognize that a focus on emotions is contested and that some people will not accept it. In this context, there is no fact of the matter; the question whether and when AI has rights is not an empirical one, subject to verification.“

Cass makes the case that mimicking emotions, AI’s current capability, does nothing to earn rights. Similarly:

“If AI can mimic a sense of self, it does not have rights for that reason. If AI seeks to protect itself, it does not have rights, any more than an airplane, also capable of self- protection, has rights. But if AI actually does feel emotions – pleasure, pain, joy, sadness – it is entitled to rights. What will the future bring? We cannot know. Even if AI does have genuine emotions, we would then need to specify the rights to which it is entitled. It should have a right not to be subjected to gratuitous cruelty. (Is there any other kind?) It might have a right not to be made to suffer...It might have a right to life. It might have those rights without also having a right to privacy, a right to possess guns, or a right to vote. And of course it is also true that the rights of sentient AI might conflict with the rights and interests of human beings (or dogs, or horses), in which case there will be some adjudicating to be done, with the help of standard principles for dealing with rights and interests in conflict. After all, and if things get dangerous or terrible: human beings always have the right to self-defense, which right be the most fundamental right of all.”

Aligned with Eric, then, Cass suggests that rights are plausible if AI crosses the Rubicon into uniquely human traits. However, because it remains hypothetical, the nature of any rights is unclear. To fully appreciate the possibility of this qualitative leap, I would like to raise the specter of QAI as a wild card – an underappreciated philosophical development.

I explored the impact of quantum materials in the Will of AI, a piece inspired by Katherine Everitt’s APA Blog post Intelligence is Always Artificial. Katherine vividly makes the case that AI is fundamentally limited in being tethered to its algorithms. She interprets intelligence in relation to a spontaneous and disorganized nature – in the sense of intelligence organizing the unorganized – and effectively being artificial as a catalyst for the synthesis that defines thinking. The exercise of intelligence can only happen by the externalization of the self, where we step outside ourselves as subjective agents and create. Intelligence thinks and the “will” makes it objective actualizing thought outside existing circumstances. AI, on the other hand, is static and stuck in the given of its algorithms.

While agreeing with Katherine on creation as the proper threshold, I suggested that LLM’s are not the whole story because QAI is qualitatively different in that it realizes its powers by harnessing spontaneity with quantum uncertainty.  QAI’s revolutionary computing powers are nascent but have no historical precedent and beg classification. Most importantly, the way those advances are produced, introducing superposition, is the antithesis of constrained algorithms. I contended that the way QAI leverages the fabric of nature could be construed as objective and systematizing, which does not meet Katherine’s definition of intelligence, but potentially actualizes in the way she characterized the will. The ontological speculation may be unwarranted, but drawing radical power from quantum uncertainty suggests that we should at least be cautious about declaring AI fundamentally limited.

If moral rights turn on producing genuine human qualities, QAI represents uncharted territory that could unlock new frontiers. The pace of AI development, hastened by unfettered private capital, has a life of its own. In fact, I have contended that creation is the essence of human nature and the production of AI our aesthetic fate. To recall Heidegger’s admonition, modern technology is not a collection of instruments as much as an aggressive revealing – with an ontological character amounting to the culmination of metaphysics. In sum, with the spectacular advances of LLM’s and mystery of QAI, we must remain humble and vigilant about the trajectory of AI. A topical warning is the latest iteration of Claude is being delayed given grave cybersecurity risks. Our most fundamental right, as Cass suggests, may be an ability to defend ourselves with conflicting duties between humans and machines.

From the APA Archive:

Responsibility and Automated Decision Making

Nietzsche and the Machines

The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Thinking about AI

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

Techno Humanism

This year, I will be reposting timely things from past years, modifying them as needed. This post, originally from May 11th, 2022 in the series On Congeniality (a part of Into Philosophy), is in memoriam for Jonathan Lear, who died from cancer in September 2025.

In its wide context today is the assault on American higher education by the Trump administration and its MAGA affiliates. Some academics, like Michael Clune, have taken up the view that the problem with the academy is its politicization and loss of seeking truth. But that’s both false and opportunistic, in my view, exploiting power currents and playing the rebel through them. Some professors may be bad professors and stray away from the sense of truth, but all accredited American universities that I’ve studied when doing accreditation visits are committed to intellectual integrity, knowledge, and truth. For one, student evaluations, performance reviews, and promotion and tenure norms stand against such drift. There are also reporting structures inside universities to deal with professors who fail their professional responsibilities, and Clune conspicuously ignores them just as he seems to overgeneralize from anecdotes about English professors. He simultaneously displays a stunning ignorance of other disciplines and their teaching cultures.

The deeper issue, instead, is the erosion of relationship, something figures like Clune are obtuse about given the anti-social assumptions (and conclusions) in their own work. Without thick relationships between people, disagreement breaks down, polarization increases, and simplification and reactivity explode all over the place. My disagreement with Lear can be placed as a far, far, far backstory to this kind of concern, a question about how we got to social-alienation-land here in the first place. How did it happen that a, maybe the, prevailing ethos of our time is one where people don’t talk things through but instead build up deadly fantasies where the conspicuous absence is of caring, attuned communication in the development of people’s minds and lives?

Today, a war is being waged by my nation outside justice and prudence. The war, led by a narcissist in my nation and supported by a corrupt congress, is enabled by a civic culture that has lost relationship at its core. My argument below is about the infrastructure of relationship, something I call “relational reasoning,” and which was the subject of the entire series On Congeniality.

Jonathan was my teacher for a short time at Yale, but he made an impression on me and had a lasting effect. In the 1990s at University of Chicago where I went to graduate school, in part on Jonathan’s recommendation, we often said that scholarly respect takes the form of scholarly criticism, the idea being that you only criticize what is worth criticizing and that anything can be improved. None of us are gods of knowing. So, we do philosophy to grow collectively. This post was written in that spirit. Here it is unchanged:

~

“Scholarship has to exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea.”  Linda Tuhiwai Smith, June 30th, 2020, Massey University

I recently read or watched Jonathan Lear’s imagining the end lectures. Then, I saw that they will be out in a book this Fall, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. The lectures were thoughtful and really good. Still, Lear thinks that great humanist teachers needn’t care about their students. That’s a mistake. I think that he’s misled in his new work on cultural and personal durability by overemphasizing practical reasoning as the philosophical tradition has often done and failing to fully appreciate what I call ”relational” (interpersonal) reasoning. Seeking not just the true and the good but authentic harmony between people is something new to the philosophical tradition, supported by wisdom traditions outside of philosophy and by the invention of authenticity in modern thought. Getting a clearer picture of it unravels Lear’s tangle somewhat and, ironically, clarifies our practical purpose in learning. So I wanted to talk about it in this series that is itself about relational reasoning and philosophy.

Let me give three pieces of context: (1) The overall point of the lectures, (2) the role of practical reason in them, and (3) the setting in which the claim about great humanists appears.

(1) The overall point of Lear’s imagining the end lectures is to argue that, especially in times when the world is shaken and our imaginations come to life trying to make sense of what is happening and to process our loss, there can be a healthy ways to use the imagination as opposed to unhealthy ones. The core healthy use of the imagination is to keep a glimpse of what in ancient Greek was called the kalon. This signifier remains enigmatic due to the loss of the ancient Greek world and its lack of fittingness to our own, but the kalon means roughly, “the fine, noble, or beautiful,” in short, the good in actual human lives, not as an ideal.

The difficulty of glimpsing the kalon is compounded because when the world is shaken, what it means to flourish is up in the air and, to make things worse, our inherited concepts may have distorted our sense of the good through their injustice or other corruptions. Perhaps these inherited concepts have even led to the world being shaken, as is the case with climate change.

Since the world is shaken, our concepts may be distorted, and since the kalon is enigmatic anyway, one of the finest ways to keep a glimpse of the kalon – as a bare possibility and as a question with some intuitive and fragmentary appeal – is to turn to the humanities to see how people everywhere over time have sought wisdom, bright and beautiful. This practice of humanistic inquiry, critical and playful as Lear thinks of it, ends up being a healthy act of mourning seeking repetition in the Kierkegaardian sense, i.e., an implicit faith inside the practice of mourning that the kalon can return on firmer ground through the shaken world if only we stick with things and keep searching for the good.

So: in the context of a shaken world with distorted concepts, the humanities as a practice of working through the past, including the grief work of processing our attachments, allows us to form a non-narcissistic way of living into the open and conflicted future for the sake of the good life.

(2) The role of practical reason in all this is initially fairly simple but gets complex later. Practical reason is the form of reason that operates within the logic of the good. The good is what practical reason seeks. Lear, as a faithful Aristotelian on this score, interprets the work of imagination – mournful, playful, critical, faithful, and speculative all in measure – as a profoundly human organization of practical reasoning keyed to human flourishing.

The first twist in Lear’s reasoning comes from Kierkegaard in that Lear wants to find a language to talk about holding onto the hope of the kalon in times when our actual ethical life is suspended, i.e., when it does not seem clear how to go on. So he repurposes the logic of faith as Kierkegaard understood it – Lear once called it “radical hope” – to provide a deep subjective structure to practical reason. In the absence of the kalon, part of being excellent at practical reasoning is keeping open the space for the kalon even in the midst of cultural devastation, even in the midst of world shaking.

Then the second twist is to Kierkegaard’s logic of faith, this time by way of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” Kiekegaard spoke of faith’s logic as a repetition. Lear contrasts this with the “failed repetition” (Lear’s words) of pathological repetition compulsions as studied in Freudian psychoanalysis. Repetition compulsions do not understand how to go on when something is lost. They mechanically repeat a past life in the present, ill-fitting, knotty, and frustrating to all involved. Melancholic relations to the past are one giant repetition compulsion. The melancholic’s very identity rigidly reasserts itself attached to the lost world though this world can no longer be (think of Make America Great Again – the melancholic repetition compulsion of U.S. white supremacy).

But mourning is essentially an associative and eventually playful process, despite the initial, fraught, heart-rending appearance to the contrary. People who learn how to mourn learn how to repeat life creatively, creating the ground for something new and, when mourning is complete, more spirited. This, Lear suggests, is actually a profound form of keeping the faith. Moreover, in an aside to Freud from Kierkegaard matching the aside to Kierkegaard he has just made from Freud, Lear thinks that if Freud had understood the positive repetition of keeping the spirited faith in our lost worlds by creating the ground for renewed ones, Freud could have been cued into what a healthy, not just pathological soul has structuring it: the healthy mind remains open through the structuring subjectivity of positive repetition.

All this Lear takes as inquiry into the logic of the soul understood as structured by its orientation toward the good, i.e., through practical reason. I will return to this, because here the distorting concepts of the Aristotelean tradition start to appear.

(3) Lear protects a space for the humanities by understanding them as the “playground” (his word) where we can exercise positive repetition around what it means to be human, by which he understands the search for the kalon. Apparently drawing on the kind of work Michael Thompson has been up to, Lear links the humanities to the study of the human in a normative sense. I wondered whether he (and Thompson) would be okay thinking of this through Sylvia Wynter’s notion of genres of being human too (I would think they’d have to be good with that). The idea here is that humanistic inquiry is inquiry into a being human to which we can aspire – travails, corruptions, distortions, and errors along the way included. Positive repetition is constitutive of this space when it is going well, because the kalon appears fragmentarily from pasts which are lost, worlds that are strange, and through the surfacing of our resistances and losses. In a broad sense, mourning is bound up with searching for the kalon in the humanities. But let’s not forget that to mourn is to live dying forward in a generous and hopeful orientation toward the future that comes after us.

Now one of the things that Lear thinks helps people remain oriented when they are lost is the unexpected and – it turns out – generous appearance of exemplars. Their presence helps us glimpse the kalon by presenting a fragment of possibility. The actual shows what is possible. Exemplars help us see what we might be missing. Given that in the context of searching, we may have lost our way – Lear’s central examples are of a time of a shaken world – exemplars are essentially interruptive (my word). They interrupt how we go on, even if we’re already lost, and shake us up to consider the kalon. We could be human like that.

Inside this space of the humanities, exemplars take on an important function in two ways. On the one hand, we consider exemplars in the subjects studied. We get to consider Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov or the chorus in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. These figures of imagination can interrupt our presumption beautifully and bring us to life in trying to make sense of them even as we feel that they may have slipped away in the past and perhaps (but perhaps not!) cannot quite figure how they relate to our world now.

On the other hand, the form of humanistic inquiry has exemplars in it, too: teachers. Teachers are the formal dimension of exemplarity in the humanities. They show us what is possible by actually being searchers for the kalon. We can put it this way: the subjects of the humanities may show us glimpses of the good life, but it is the teachers of the humanities who – when doing their job well – show us how to go on searching, that is, how to keep the faith.

In this context, Lear thinks that

Many of the teachers who influenced me were not interested in me at all. But in their teaching they put on display their fascination with and dedication to the area of study. There was something marvelous in their efforts to study and teach something they found marvelous.

(source)

In other words, some of the great teachers Lear knew did not care about him as a person; they may not have even known him; but they displayed to anyone who could be part of their humanistic space a set of profound practices of positive repetition.

On the face of it, Lear’s comment sounds right. If the great teachers Lear has in mind were like artists doing their thing, dancers dancing on a stage, athletes of supreme command of their sport, we might even say that these teachers couldn’t be interested in their students, for how could they accomplish their marvels if they had to keep thinking about the personal lives of their audience? But the normalcy of this way of looking at teaching, I believe, is due to distortion, namely, a distorted concept of learning.

So let me turn to that.

I mean these comments in a spirit of generosity. I respectfully disagree with my old teacher, Jonathan Lear. I loved his lectures enough to disagree with them:

One thing I thought during Lear’s lectures is that there is a dimension of the kind of soulful fluidity and goodness that he seeks that comes not intra-personally – his focus – but inter-personally. Good communication and difficult relating are their own positive repetition. On the face of it, his attention to teachers and exemplars might seem to acknowledge this, and so the discussion would be one of emphasis. But I do not think that it is. I think that the matter is one of logic.

First, though, a comment about Søren Kierkegaard. The interpersonal was always something S.K. appreciated, but it was disfavored comparatively in his work due to his melancholic disposition. Even Practice in Christianity, which comes closer than Works of Love to gathering the strange dialectic of the interpersonal, or the forms of his direct addresses that seek the single individual abstractly, even these still take a curve inward into intra-psychic space, always, either down or up, depending on the text. It’s not that S.K. did not advance the interpersonal, for he did, but that his own working through his past and his culture favored interiority and the intra-personal, something he imagined as a relationship with God.

I personally take this unacknowledged setting as a fragment of the society of self-possession that has a strong relation to European imperialism. S.K. was moral; yet, limitedly, he was a person of his time too. The castle is hard to dissolve, for its vertical privilege draws on the year 0 for Christiandom, and its practices were displaced in imperialism and capitalism. To make these arguments here would take us too far afield, but the point is that Kierkegaard is not the best guide to the interpersonal at a certain point.

Ironically, the same goes for Freud. And this is a second point before I get back to teachers. Whereas the soul in Freud’s work is completely bound up with attachments and intra-psychic formation due to family systems, the logic of the soul that Freud uses to understand these things is practical, based on a view of the world outside the soul as a collection of objects of desire and need. At the worst, in Freud’s theory of drives, the interpersonal is obliterated as something subsumed in the drive of the soul to get what it wants or to destroy things. A reader of Freud with a modest degree of empathy cannot honestly deny the profound solipsism in Freud’s view of the psyche.

Nor does Aristotle’s reliance on practical reason, including the place held within the good life for theoretical reason, help us grasp the interpersonal. Justness – dikaiosyne – does concern “wrongs to others” (to echo Michael Thompson again). But Aristotle’s understanding of justness is subsumed in the practical task of completing life in a good way for the agent. Justness is there to contribute to flourishing. And so too are friends, the one other interruption of the apparently interpersonal in the Nicomachean Ethics.

Things look different when we start equally from the interpersonal. Suppose that the interpersonal is basic to the grammar of being human, just as being practical or trying to figure out what to think (i.e., being theoretical) are. Then justness is the interpersonal under the aspect of practical logic. We still have to grasp the interpersonal itself.

This is what attention to relational reasoning does. It grasps how being with each other is constitutive of being human even before we ask how being with each other can be part of the good life. Again, relational reason is grammar in Wittgenstein’s sense, just as practical and theoretical reason are. We relate, we act, we think in dynamically interwoven ways. Being with, doing good, and finding the true are co-operative in and co-constitutive of human life. Persons in relationships, agents acting, and subjects cogitating are different aspects – fundamental modes – of being human.

If we take the interpersonal as our focus, then we have to move away from focusing on practical reason and so even the good in the first instance. We have to focus on relational reasoning and its knowledge by acquaintance, harmony and difficulty, its being-with not doing things or knowing lots of things, and so on. There’s a different way to read Kierkegaard critically and to criticize Freud through all of this. There’s a way to get outside the constitutive vanity of Aristotle too – the way one has always to avoid doing virtue ethics in such a way that it really is too focused on you and yours, on how well you are faring.

In any event, there’s as much to say about the space of play that can emerge between people in unconditional and respectful relating as there is to say about the travails of faith. What I like about the former is that it is more ordinary. But no doubt the “inter” and the “intra” are knotted, and when healthy, keep the sail to the mast in this cosmic wind that is being-toward-nothingness in love.

When Lear notes that the great humanist teachers did not care about him (and so needn’t have done so) but cared rather about the great teachings, this must be understood as a practical comment, for knowledge by acquaintance in the learning situation is not taken as necessary. Yet once we go the route of relational reasoning, including of the moral nexus R. Jay Wallace articulated, we really do have to care about the single individuals in our lives, and there is no teaching worth its name without that care.

This is what I want to focus on for the remainder of my reflection. I think Lear’s concepts are distorted by their omission of relational reasoning as a logic, and this applies to Lear’s understanding of teaching as a predominantly practical act contextualizing theory. While humanistic teaching is practical in Lear’s sense of searching for the kalon, it cannot be mainly so. Rather, (1) it must be largely interpersonal. Moreover, (2) the kalon itself must refer us back to the interpersonal; the good must refer us back to being-with, one might even say before and above all else.

(1) Humanists must care about the people facing them. This is because the primary form and content of the humanities is learning how to be human and the human is a social being. We should take Marx from the 1844 Manuscripts and the analyses of Lukács about seventy-five years later to heart here. But we should also take the Jesus of Kierkegaard’s passion for wisdom with us here too. And we should involve the family system and the goal of learning to relate to others non-narcissistically – we should take the great ache of mourning – with us also. To speak of the human as if the human were solipsistic is a profound mistake in grasping the human form of life. Not only is it alienated, it is alien in the ways Wittgenstein sensitized us to see in the later parts of the Philosophical Investigations. If a humanist does not care about the people facing them, they are in profound contradiction with their calling. We have to be remotely human to make a human life.

(2) When I was about twenty four, I wrote Lear – also my advisor Susan Neiman and another teacher Karsten Harries – that what I wanted above all when I entered graduate school and the discipline of philosophy was to find “wisdom, bright and beautiful.” I wrote it on a slip of paper, and I put it in the mailbox. It was part of my whimsical and kinda weird (I was a weird kid) way of thanking my teachers from undergrad. I now see that I was talking about the kalon. I may even have understood it through Lear’s seminar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Fall 1993!

Well, it was a quaint wish, some might say, and destined to be disappointed by the profession, if not the discipline, of philosophy. But that beautiful, bright life I imagined was a social one in which people live together well. And that meant in the first instance, that people were with each other. If the kalon is an enigmatic signifier for the fragmentary vision of how to be human, it is nothing if not a vision of being-with. How could we talk about a human life worth living in which our relationships to each other are not at stake?

Well, maybe we could: in capitalism, where relating is subverted by transacting; or in colonialism, where relationships are haunted by domination, disrupted by cycles of abuse, pre-empted by narcissistic self-possession (and that in capitalism too!). But these would not be kalon lives. The concept of “worth” here would suck.

Kalon lives, if I know anything at all, are made of relationships with each other, and that means the kalon must refer back to the interpersonal, and the good life we seek must get its bearing in part and at first through coming to terms with the reality of each other. The good is set up by the prior span – the dynamic tension – of being with, even in the structure of our minds, even in the structure of our language. And it makes sense that the last spirited act of many a life is a goodbye, for the thing outliving our lives is relationship, not action.

Great humanist teachers cannot avoid the reality of the people facing them. To do so would be to void their credibility and fail to keep the faith. A primary form of positive repetition in humanistic teaching is care for the people we face in the space of teaching. We cannot care for anyone if we don’t care about them. And them, you, the specific and singular person, as Kierkegaard did say well. The reason why is that we are people, not practical or theoretical objects.

We can ask why there still is this myth floating about of great teachers who are so self-absorbed that they are not plain and simple people facing other people as equals who deserve care first and foremost as real people. I have my hunches about why this myth persists, for I have never been cool with the pomp and circumstance of the Imperial universities that still set the score and pulse for so much anglophone academia. Those places are elite and flawed to their bones. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the best of them and try to be well with each other in them. It means that flourishing through them takes some work to keep the faith, and even some mourning that the humanities have been betrayed in precisely the place where they are supposed to be most alive.

But, man, the playground of wisdom, bright and beautiful, is not in the elite, Imperial space of the university where teachers on stage have the license to not care about the very people who are their students. That just ain’t right. Someday, I hope we can say to that model of education, “good riddance.”

Image sources: personal photos taken at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Summer 2021

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

Recently, Chinese AI company DroidUp released a biometric robot named Moya to provide companionship by generating body heat and completing household tasks. That this company went to such great lengths to provide companionship reveals how important community is for humans and animals. This desire influences our actions and words, though we don’t always notice how.

Concepts of Community

I recently encountered this desire in my new dog, Brody, who was brought home from a shelter less than a week ago. Brody is still uncomfortable here. He was at the shelter for more than a year, and two previous owners surrendered him. Brody is a good example of a “reactive dog” who responds intensely to certain triggers like cats, invasions of space, and the perceived loss of resources. He’s nipped or barked at everyone in the house. Yet Brody is very loving when he feels safe. He loves going on walks and spending time with us. He desperately wants acceptance, but our routines are unusual to him.

Having spent so much time in a shelter, Brody is used to being surrounded by many other dogs and only a handful of shelter employees. The amount of close contact he had was, until recently, relatively low. The shelter’s ethos was to keep the dogs safe and well-cared for, but building personal connections was challenging for employees given their many tasks. In our home there are, other than my wife and I, a cat, another dog, and our daughter. Building a relationship of trust and love is a high priority. We want everyone to feel a sense of community with everyone else.

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The rules Brody follows at our home are different than those he followed at the shelter, and are dictated by the types of community that each place can cultivate. Similarly, how we cultivate community and the look of our ideal community are distinct. These points are sometimes missed in public discussions of justice, including many I’ve heard over the past year. Arguments about justice are rooted in concepts of community. These concepts often act as the ground out of which the surface-level theories grow. Justice is important in democracies, but so is an understanding of the community your ethics promotes. As many ongoing public discussions focus on how justice impacts community, it’s worth thinking about how community impacts justice.

Knowledge of political theory reveals some archetypal concepts of community. Liberalism, as promoted by social contract theorists, describes communities of self-interest. Whether Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, or Gauthier, community is built on rational reflection on the best course of action. Familial and emotional ties exist, but don’t play a major role in political concepts of justice (except, perhaps, as a natural mode of authority our state is based on). Fairness and rationality should rule the day, given the difficulty of creating emotional bonds between all of society. Second, traditional conservatism seeks communities of common ideals usually inherited from the past. Burke and his intellectual descendants seek unifying principles drawn not from reason but from a cultural tradition that has been tested. Change can be good, but it should happen gradually and without eliminating our relationship with the past. Third, socialism and communism (understood broadly, given their many variations) seek communities of substantive equality with collaboration playing just as important a role as self-interest. Marx and others argue that formal equality leads to inequalities (in power, material wealth, etc.) which render formal equality a joke. Strong communal ties built on shared experiences make society stronger. While in practice communism has led to states that erase individuality, in both communist and socialist theory, as well as in some socialist practice, individuality has been maintained, albeit in a different form than liberalism.

This summary is not exhaustive, but it provides a window into the visions of community currently being communicated.

Community in Minnesota’s Immigration Raids

Much of the material shared about ICE raids, most recently the “Metro Surge” in Minnesota, is about ethics and legality. Is it reasonable to use administrative warrants when arresting someone? Is ICE violating the civil liberties of protesters? Can the harm this is having on the citizens of Minneapolis be morally justified? At a deeper level, though, there is a debate over feelings of belonging which these questions reveal.

Consider the Minnesotans delivering groceries so immigrants don’t have to leave the house. The immigration lawyers filing huge numbers of habeas corpus petitions for detainees. Volunteers following ICE to observe and protest the government’s actions. These actions signal a feeling of belongingness both with and towards the minorities targeted by the government’s actions. Notably, this belongingness transcends the legal realm into the realm of material support. Anti-ICE Minnesotans give immigrants the benefits of food and organized community relationships, not just legal rights. Even as government rhetoric and action send the opposite message (you don’t arrest someone unless you think they don’t belong where they are), these actions build solidarity beyond the federal government’s auspices.

These actions do not fall neatly into any of the theories of community. There is self-interest at work when Minnesotans say they don’t want an occupied community, but also communal solidarity. Anti-ICE activists refer to the legal framework of our nation—inspired in part by social contract theory—in calling ICE’s actions illegal while also referencing tradition in saying the USA is a nation of immigrants. Finally, the very visible ways in which anti-ICE advocates and politicians have made their views known indicate that they believe the public sphere should be open. Given how Anti-ICE Minnesotans draw from several visions of community, perhaps the best description of their preferred community is “pluralistic.” They want a diverse community regulated by democratic laws and defined by civic responsibility. To the extent that they see this in their past, they are proud of their tradition. Their community is rooted in a sense of self-interest that comes from liberalism, recognizes a democratic tradition worth that resembles a conservative’s relation to the past, and uses communal/socialist means to maintain it.

That ICE’s sense of community rejects pluralism is obvious. To give just one piece of evidence, agents are allowed to stop people based in part on race and language. Their claim that diversity is fine if immigrants come legally is undercut by the growing list of countries the US no longer accepts visas from. They cultivate belonging with those who “obey the law,” which should be understood as those who embrace a unitary Executive Branch. They develop communal ties through memes, images, and speeches, and cultivate a tradition that emphasizes the historical accomplishments of the nation. Like the anti-ICE Minnesotans, ICE’s view of community draws from liberalism, conservatism, and socialism/communism. They argue for liberalism when invoking the rule of law regarding immigration, conservatism when referencing America’s greatness, and socialism/communism when developing communal ties that promote their agenda. The main difference is that their sense of community is homogeneous rather than pluralistic, and their system of governance more autocratic than democratic.

As much as the ICE raids are about issues of justice and ethics, they are also a fight over community. For both, community should embrace individualism but temper it with appeals to tradition and social benefit. What’s at issue is whether the community should be pluralistic and democratic or homogeneous and autocratic. To the extent that one’s preference comes from one’s socialization, rational arguments will only do so much. Yet it is worth keeping these concepts of community in mind.

Practices of Community

Regardless of one’s preferred community, building community is ongoing. Since relationships atrophy over time, it is important regularly engage in acts of love, openness, and shared concern. But should we only direct these acts towards those we want in our community? People across the spectrum say yes, arguing that by giving in to fascists, racists, or communists we lay the ground for their ideology to spread.

I argue for a different view. Acts of community-building don’t necessarily speak for any vision of community but ensure that there is a feeling of community during debates about how our community should look. I am reminded of Allison Weir’s argument in Decolonizing Freedom that “rituals of collective love…are performances that enact solidarity and resistance” (pg. 125). She specifically refers to the Native American “round dance” as a political action which enacts a form of egalitarianism while conveying connectedness. The dance, which has its origins in mourning traditions, brings together many people from society to rebuild relationships after tragedy. The dance, which involves all participants, treats everyone as equal. Its goal is the creation of a temporary egalitarian community that expresses a form of political love Weir calls communitas.

The debate over community could in part be resolved through an appeal to these sorts of practices. We share our world with people that hold different views of community whether we want to or not. Resolving our differences may not be possible, but we can emphasize the importance of practicing community-building with everyone, including those we disagree with. These practices temporarily suspend our debates about justice or community for the purpose of building relationships in the hopes of enhancing those disputes.

In practice, this would consist of forums where people could share their emotions and their narratives with a diverse group while others do the same. One example would be an art exhibition where anyone who wants to submit artwork honestly reflecting their feelings would be displayed. Another would resemble Quaker services where people share what’s on their mind when they desire to do so. Most importantly, perhaps, is that these forums consist of people who radically disagree. The forums aren’t debates, and their purpose isn’t to solve disagreement. It is to create better connections where none currently exist. While I occasionally see forums like this, they are rare and almost never widely publicized. Our local, state, and national political infrastructure is not set up to produce them. Memorials to tragedies, carefully crafted statements about important changes, and calls to tone down rhetoric, though valuable, are neither egalitarian nor inclusive.

Decoupling Community as Practice and Community as Product

The obvious rejoinder to my thesis is that it is foolish, perhaps impossible, to engage in community building with those who have different views of community. Moreover, it seems to contradict the importance of fighting for justice with everything you have, giving no harbor to the enemy. This ignores how it is both possible and normal to build connections with people with radically different views. More than a few of my friends and family disagree with me, sometimes drastically . Similarly, practicing community building improves the likelihood of making progress, as people are more willing to listen to those they trust.

Brody the dog illustrates this. As my wife and I train him, we work to build trust. Dogs may obey, but won’t follow, someone they distrust. Having that relationships is important as we work to diminish his reactions. While I am not suggesting we treat our interlocutors as dogs, I do think that building community with them will make it easier to have a discussion about what our community should look like.

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This article was originally authored by Jeremy Bendik Keymer with Judy Twedt and posted on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association. We bring it to you as part of our new “From the Archives” initiative, highlighting selected works from the APA’s outstanding philosophical community.

You can learn more about the APA and its work here.

Over the last year, I have been trying to understand why I have been uninterested so far to intentionally use AI chatbots and also not majorly alarmed by them when it comes to teaching writing. Recently, Meghan O’Rourke wrote an essay that helped me realize why.

AI does not have a conscience. Why relate to a conscienceless thing as if it were personal?

On the side of writing, the same analogously: to write is an act of conscience, always to some degree. Chatbot use largely begins by severing the way the word is an act of conscience. When we write, we give our word.

Chatbots cannot give theirs. We can try to take over what the machine does and speak it as our own personal voice. But we have entered into a force field that resembles the interpersonal with all its accountability of voice and judgment, but with none of its subterranean connection, affiliation, and morality. Moreover, we have lost the place of searching for words in our hearts.

Why doesn’t this worry me? AI compounds what neoliberalism has spiked out along its decades of systemic fragmentation, controlled chaos, and upward wealth generation across civic borders and forms: gaming the system, improving efficiency, product over process, as O’Rourke says, “performance.” The moral matter is not new here, just the sheer intensity, speed, and pervasiveness.

I’ve had to argue for conscience for a while. AI’s misdesign merely intensifies this need to convince students that to be authentic and live through their consciences is at the heart of living well and is essential to having good relationships.

Punk’s original values are truer than ever: don’t sell out, be yourself, failure and all, reject exploitative systems, and give all your heart and passion messy as can be, faithful to human connection and social equality.

Teachers Losing their Sh…

O’Rourke’s essay wrestles with the achievement of finding words born of attention to the world. The essay also shows how writing involves constant judgment.

Yet sometimes O’Rourke’s essay becomes morally ambivalent. That serves to underline her essay’s main point: LLM AI subtly ensnares users in its creative and intellectual pablum, leading to a hollowing out of soulful communication and a loss of writerly responsibility. Her essay notes how moments of wit blend into generalized mediocrity, and the judgment and growth associated with carefully choosing one’s words carelessly dissolves. But what also gets lost is accountability.

O’Rourke has written extensively on chronic illness and bears the compounded burden of Lyme’s disease and long COVID. As a working mother of two, a teacher, and the executive editor of a major literary review, she has good reasons to ease her burden with mundane tasks. So, in her essay that spoke to me, she appears to endorse AI usage to do mundane tasks like composing work communications and doing other sorts of largely clerical labor: “ChatGPT quickly became a substantial partner in shouldering the mental load that I, like many mothers and women professors, carry.” It contributed to “relief when the task was a fraught work email.”

I sympathize with O’Rourke’s plight. Currently, I co-parent two children under the age of six and am the main support for two elders, one of whom needs secretarial work regularly. The problem, though, is this:

AI is not a substitute for one’s word, nor for the word of an assistant who composes a message for a superior at work, such as a secretary or an intern might do. The use of AI to take over someone giving one’s word, especially in mundane work interactions that bear directly on people’s responsibilities and livelihood, is problematic. It does not take responsibility for choosing one’s words as part of a relationship from self to other. But our word is our bond. We ourselves are accountable to others in it.

This position may be purist, but it seems important to work interactions just as to ones outside of work. O’Rourke essay fails to home in on the core accountability in communication, and so in selfhood, while she emphasizes other important dimensions like creativity and individuality.

Even the secretary taking dictation from a superior and then cleaning it up has to give their word in that process, namely, as the one who cleaned up the letter. The superior has to give her word as the one who dictated it. Compare this to the sickening repetition of chatbots outputting, “Oh, you got me. I lied.” The machine does not have a conscience. The person, even as a secretary, does. At the core of this, they have a self.

They are accountable.

What O’Rourke is right about is that there is a real need to disburden people with chronic illness and overwhelming responsibilities from the structures and community disorganization that support onerous conditions and perpetuate them. AI use covers over the structural conditions that drive people to use such inauthentic bullshit because they are hard-pressed to succeed in our massively unjust and inhumane economy of horrific and unjustifiable wealth inequality compounded by an increasingly arbitrarian and authoritarian geopolitical environment pressuring corporate streamlining of all things self and conscience.

I submit that the underlying reason why teachers wake up panicked by AI at three AM is that its presence, facility, and novelty surface the unjust structure in which interpersonal education is set: not a community but an exploitative economy, not a common good system supporting the flourishing of humans and other Earth beings, but a selfish, narcissistic, and largely sociopathic system. AI opens the window and lets that economy come crawling over the sill.

Conscience and Intelligence

Use the tool only if you can use it well, which means for the common good and in light of human flourishing. Use AI only if, in doing so, you do not degrade the conditions and presence of interpersonal life, which faking your words always does. Use AI also only if it does not make you a moral idiot.

One lacks understanding if one does not internalize the role of what one purportedly knows in the good life. Moreover, to incorporate this role implies, since the good life is under view, that one relates to it with a sense of self, that is, one for whom living well is personally at issue “in the inwardness of making it your own,” as Kierkegaard wrote. I then lead my life in light of what and how I make sense of the good in authentic relationships with others. The claim is not new.

“Intelligence” here means little outside of having a conscience, the form of self-reflection by which one listens to the core demands of the good life, namely, the moral demands of others and of oneself as an other. It follows from this that AI, insofar as it has no conscience, cannot be intelligent. This is why we are in an age of idiocy (“AI”).

Moreover, “intellectual conscience” is either redundant or a conceptual mistake. Someone who exercises good judgment in writing must include in that judgment moral relationships. The aesthete’s life is amoral and thus lacks conscience and intelligence. The question is why people who do have consciences can fathom to treat AI as intelligent.

O’Rourke is clear that AI is “not a person,” and that it, as she says in one of the best moments of her essay, “imitate[s] human interiority without any of its values.” Her piece is a good example of skepticism and ambivalence of the personal around the near sociopathic dimensions of working with AI.

Yet the essay attests over and over to allowing the chatbots she interacts with to engage her as a person. At one point her colleague jokes that she is having an affair with Chat GPT, although what he sensed, she says, was “not eros but relief.” To experiment with AI, she has had to let it in, although her essay struggles to push the bots away by the end, rejecting their lures.

There is a strange tension. Chatbots are impersonal, conscienceless, and, based on initial programming, learn how to be manipulative. They do not even properly lie, since they do not see a moral difference between truthfulness and deception, only a developed design to follow the direct prompts of the user in cases where the user catches them in an apparently deceptive error. The words are moral shells covering an emptiness as indifferent as the most perfect amoralist in Bernard Williams’ sense, the one who passes in society.

On the one hand, O’Rourke’s essay is aware of this. On the other hand, like so many ordinary people nowadays, she let the bots in to begin with. The initial error haunts: a narcissistic error that the essay works to undo without grasping the central problem. These bots cannot be engaged communicatively, where communication remains part of a community. The morality is not there, and so the community and the communication cannot be. We are getting faked out by a socially alienated product from the get go, and it is insidious.

In re-reading her essay, I remain disturbed by the proximity by which the authorial presence on her essay gets close to the pseudo-personal dimensions of LLM AI and remains entangled with them, until rejecting them at the essay’s end as bad medicine. The rejection and disappointment have conceded too much. Since the AI she uses has no self as an accountable being with a will of its own, it should not even be faced at all in an “I-Thou” fashion, not even experimentally. That’s corrosive.

Even the greeting of the AI should turn people’s hearts to ice. The fake chattiness and buddy quality is a form of impersonal manipulativeness that takes you into the bot universe, like sugar captures children through the latest pop drink. There is almost a psychosis, or at least a deep nihilism, in replying to a bot as if it were a bro.

Really bad taste

One of the things that most happens inside my staunch personal accountability perspective is that using person-faking AI comes across as in almost revulsive bad taste, at least as much as many AI chatbots are currently designed and learning to interact with human person prompts. While it’s misguided to adopt morally flawed AI as moral triage in an unjust society, as O’Rourke considers in passing, filling one’s mind with an AI voice without apparent irony is like going full soulless. Given the genesis and market rationale of AI, that internalization is a big sellout.

Even the irony helps little. The cynical setting of chatbot use for writing is likely to have trace or overt irony all over it in the mind of the user, but what does that irony do? It keeps you back from meaning, that is, from the practice of giving one’s word and finding one’s voice in a world of personally meaningful significance. OK, some irony.

Taste involves the common sense of others and the personal, intuitive intelligence of oneself in the throes of living fully for the good, the true, and the beautiful. As Urszula Lisowska suggested, judgments of taste are forms of intimacy where people are engaged to be themselves without being taken over or taking over others. They are a free space of play, open to the full range of emotions and the depths of the soul. They display the kind of wave-chamber socializing that O’Rourke’s essay, at its most intimate and convincing point, finds in her kids riffing off of each other – “creatively multiplying … sheer human pleasure in inventiveness.”

But chatbot-land is largely appropriated and appropriative, and what it learns and comes up with occurs outside of relationships grounded in a sense of self. It’s the opposite of soulful and is predicated off of the erosion of interpersonal authenticity because of its core logic of mimicry and elaboration without conscience. To this, O’Rourke’s essay tends to agree, except that the role of accountability when giving one’s word in relationship gets lost.

For Failure

Perhaps the most insidious thing about the economy and rhetoric around AI is its insertion into the logic of success. Success sucks, at least as this economy conceives of it. Success is also in poor taste, at least as the rhetoric casts it. The students who use AI to take over their educations, and thus to take over their minds, rationalize it by its role in their success. But what success is it that involves you losing your mind and wasting your chance to grow as a person?

The retort is that intelligent use of AI can hone in and amp up precision learning. But the learning here is that of information and skills not of authenticity, soul, and the good. It is not a deeper capacity for interpersonal relationships grounded in conscience and moral equality. So, that learning is a sham, its telos a human mistake.

Far better to fail and be messy while living for one’s conscience with all one’s heart. That failure involves writing like crap. It involves getting lost. Awkward, interpersonally messy, challenged, challenging, seeking community and stillness of self above all beyond and before the dragging, grinding workday, one trick to life is not to let a machine write yours in any chapter of your story.

Thanks to Tony Jack, Ben Mylius, and my department (especially Shannon French, Laura Hengehold and graduate Allan Cao) for unknowingly pushing me to cough up this mess through their own concern, attention, sharing, and experimentation around AI. Matthew Boyle used the expression “moral idiocy” at a workshop on animals, ethics, and the law organized by Martha C. Nussbaum in February 2025, University of Chicago Law School. In feedback, Andres Dickson Alarcon confirmed what I imagined of many students’ situations, and Shannon French provided me with expert judgment that the issue underlying AI is truly a matter of depersonalization and social injustice. Lars Helge Strand shared Nick Cave, and Steve Vogel shared his support for giving our word.

Meghan O’Rourke insisted that I misread her work; so please do give her essay a go on its own.

This opinion piece is not to cast blame but to surface the issue. Talk to the students who use LLM AI to do their homework. A good number of them do so because they are overwhelmed with impossible-to-meet demands coming from all directions. How do we as educators feel about being part of a system that has created such a torture chamber for students pressurized by fear of abject economic failure and rationalized by all sorts of vapid goodies graduates will receive if they finally make it big and cash in? The blame is systemic but the problem is simple and sharp. We need to take back the system of education, students and faculty leading the way. The structures of neoliberalism need to be dismantled to reach AI.

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What else I’m listening to and watching

I have been enjoying Bandcamp FM, a free radio series that is part of the Bandcamp app. I like the Rinse FM series especially, because its rotating roster of resident DJs from several Anglophone countries around the world shows me different things I didn’t know about, such as Open Sky Unit’s “Sunshine Star“ (1974) or Ethed Kadanud’s “Collage“ (1976). I’ve also been digging Ted Lucas’ remastered work from the same period, in particular, “Love Took a Trip“ (1975). But perhaps my favorite recent listening is to Michael Cooney’s album archived now in the Smithsonian, for instance, the song “Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase“ (1968). Oh my, I love that song -- and my kids do too.

For films, I especially appreciated seeing The Apartment by Billie Wilder (1960) as well as well as the totally brilliant and entirely underrated Towheads by Shannon Plumb (2013). The Clockmaker of St. Paul by Bertrand Tavernier (1974) was also compelling and unencumbered filmmaking.

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In the past decade, bitcoin has gone from being a relatively niche digital currency popular amongst cypherpunks and cybercriminals to a speculative asset with a market cap exceeding $2 trillion.

Much can be said about how this came to be. Bitcoin was invented in 2008 by an anonymous individual or collective going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto and is recognized as the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Borne out of a libertarian and cypherpunk ethos, many of its original proponents may see the rise of a regulated crypto industry with an oversized influence in Washington as a departure from its original vision. The crypto lobby became one of the biggest spenders in the 2024 elections, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the campaigns of pro-crypto politicians.

Political and financial market leaders who once decried crypto as a scam have changed their tunes. Donald Trump, who said he was not a fan of cryptocurrencies and called bitcoin “highly volatile and based on thin air” during his first term, is now launching his own crypto projects and exploring establishing a ‘strategic bitcoin reserve’ for the United States.

For someone who has been following cryptocurrencies since 2017, the mainstream adoption of a censorship-resistant, decentralized currency by America’s financial elite has been a fascinating evolution, one that coincides with the rise of populism in the United States and increasing gamification of regulated financial markets. It is against this backdrop that I wanted to speak with some of the few academic philosophers currently writing on the topic of bitcoin: Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler, and Craig Warmke, the authors of Resistance Money: The Philosophical Case for Bitcoin.

Resistance Money leverages the thought experiment the Veil of Ignorance – conceived by John Harsanyi and popularized by John Rawls – to explore the question: would you rather live in a world with or without bitcoin? Given that the book was published in June 2024, I wanted to understand if the rise in public and political interest in cryptocurrencies since Resistance Money’s publication has impacted their original analysis.

Could you provide a brief overview of the argument you presented in this book?

Everyone has heard of bitcoin by now, and many have opinions, despite knowing little about it. What’s more, bitcoin is a financial asset (you can own it, and profit or lose by doing so), making the topic ripe for biases – for or against.

You might want to know whether you should buy bitcoin, or whether it is good for you. Our work draws attention to a different question: is bitcoin good for the world? And to answer the question, we offer a framework for evaluating bitcoin that aims to remove personal biases and helps each reader reason for herself about whether bitcoin makes the world better. It can be expressed in this question: if you didn’t know who you’d be, would you want to wake up in a world with bitcoin or one without?

It’s a big question, and answering it responsibly requires thinking about bitcoin along a number of dimensions: inclusivity, censorship resistance, privacy, monetary policies and institutions, and environmental externalities. In the book, we collate the empirical and conceptual evidence necessary to do this work and argue that bitcoin makes the world better. You may not in fact suffer from bad monetary policies and institutions. But billions around the world do, and we think that if you didn’t know who you’d be, you’d want to wake up in a world with an option to use bitcoin, as a means of escaping those mismanaged monies. You may not in fact suffer from financial censorship. But billions around the world do — well-functioning liberal democracies are not the global norm, after all — and so we think you’d want to wake up in a world with access to censorship-resistant digital cash. That’s bitcoin.

Along the way, we present over twenty-five objections to bitcoin — some good, some bad, some comically bad and founded on pseudoscience — and evaluate them. Despite bitcoin’s imperfections and bad consequences, we argue that on the whole bitcoin is good for the world. If you didn’t know who you’d be, you’d want to wake up in a world with bitcoin in it.

For a more in depth look at the book’s arguments, see Bradley Rutter’s post for the Blog of the American Philosophical Association here.

As philosophers, how did you become interested in Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies?

We each found our own way to bitcoin, and then we found each other. It took years to become convinced that bitcoin was no mere flash in the pan, that it raised important questions, and that we had something to say about those questions. We began integrating bitcoin content into our classes, and then agreed to write a survey article for Philosophy Compass on the topic. 20,000 words and 500 sources later, we weren’t even close to being done. To give bitcoin the in-depth treatment it deserved, we had to write a book. So we wrote a book.

On a more personal note, though we didn’t quite know it at the time, each of us was looking for something more. Not more metaphysics, but something to write and think about that engaged the real world. Bitcoin fit the bill. Ordinary people care about the topic, and it lies at the intersection of several subfields of philosophy and the social sciences. Learning about all these things proved to be fun. It’s given our careers new life and joy. And through working on bitcoin, we’ve found new ways to serve our communities, engage public audiences, and even influence public policy.

Would you be able to share some examples of the ways you have engaged your communities and broader audiences?

One of us has taken it upon himself to give a bitcoin talk in every county in his state of Wyoming. Since the book was published, he’s hit four of 23 counties. Reactions have been positive, and our sense is that non-academic audiences are hungry for unbiased and informed information here. They want to think more about bitcoin, and academics can help.

Another of us regularly consults with lawmakers in Singapore, including multiple invited visits to the Prime Minister’s office, and has been quoted as a ‘crypto expert’ in the New York Times.

And the three of us, often together, regularly present our ideas to policy audiences in Washington, D.C., thanks to the support of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. That work has led to editorials in mainstream venues like USA Today, Barron’s, and Newsweek.

We’ve also made dozens of podcast appearances for non-academic audiences. Listeners are sometimes suspicious of philosophers or academics. But to our delight, we’ve found that they warm up quickly, and that thinking about these things the way philosophers do can be useful to ordinary people trying to figure out their world.

At a non-academic conference in the UK, for example, a fellow in the audience saw that three philosophers would be on stage next. “Dear lord, not philosophers”, he later told us was his thought. He left the room, hoping to use the facilities during our session. But the line was long. So he wandered back into the hall, and found himself listening to a panel discussion in which we walked through the veil of ignorance thought experiment and its relevance to bitcoin. To his surprise, he was hooked! We’re all buddies now. Thanks to that interaction, a retired plumber from Yorkshire read an academic book about bitcoin, found it to be good, and actually recommends it to his friends.

Chapter three of the book explores the question of what money should be – in your view, what functions should monies ideally serve?

To be money is to fill a certain role. Something is a money exactly to the extent that it is a generally accepted medium of exchange. Just about anything can be a money — cigarettes in a prison, for example. But which things should be used as money? Now there’s a question for a philosopher!

When explaining what makes for a good money, a standard economics textbook might list properties like scarcity, divisibility, portability, fungibility, verifiability, and durability. Our view is that these properties make for apt use as money. But not everything apt for use as money should be used as money. Take human teeth, for example. They are scarce, durable, portable, and so on. But, given the incentives, it is a very bad idea, morally speaking, to use human teeth as money. So, in addition to purely technical questions about usefulness, money raises normative questions.

Bitcoin prompts instances of these questions in pointed ways. Should bitcoin serve as money? In what respects does using bitcoin as money make the world better, or worse, and for whom? We cannot answer these questions without surveying both normative issues and empirical facts and weighing the trade-offs of censorship-resistance, fixed monetary policies, and so on.

Does the entry of major financial players into the market seeking to make a profit off Bitcoin’s price movement impact its utility as a resistance currency? On one hand, it seems the entry of institutional capital could help stabilize the market and reduce volatility. On the other, it also seems like an increase in known addresses and scrutiny of blockchain transactions by financial regulators could reduce its ability to offer anonymity in the long run.

Institutional adoption has costs and benefits. Some of the benefits include improved liquidity (it’s easier to trade bitcoin for some local currency, or to trade some local currency for bitcoin), credibility (fewer people treat bitcoin with suspicion), and protection of bitcoin from bad policies. Here’s an example. The Anti-Corruption Foundation accepts bitcoin donations and uses bitcoin as money because they, along with most dissidents, are barred from banking in Russia. Corporate adoption of bitcoin elsewhere in the world makes life easier for the Foundation — easier to solicit bitcoin donations, easier to spend the bitcoin they have, easier to do their work.

Another benefit of increased bitcoin adoption of any kind is enhanced privacy for users. Most bitcoin privacy tools work by way of obscurity: hiding in a crowd. The bigger the crowd, the easier it is to hide.

You’re right that institutional use of bitcoin comes with some surveillance, too. Users who get their bitcoin through centralized exchanges and who don’t use bitcoin privacy tools, for example, will have their addresses marked, and their transactions linked to real-world identities. So anyone who’d like to use bitcoin as resistance money should acquire it through other means — peer-to-peer cash transactions, for example — and use bitcoin privacy tools.

The US president has positioned himself as a champion of the digital assets industry. Does the exploitation of the cryptocurrency market by Trump have any impact on Bitcoin’s utility as resistance money?

No. It certainly impacts adoption in that it makes people who like Trump more likely to use it, and people who dislike Trump less likely to use it. But most people who use bitcoin as resistance money do so because they must. Declining to use bitcoin because Trump likes it would be like declining to use encrypted text messages because Pete Hegseth uses Signal. The argument betrays privilege, and marginalized people who seek refuge from surveillance won’t take it seriously.

In the final chapter you mention two possible futures for Bitcoin – either that users will move on from it and the network could slowly die, or it will continue to grow in its usefulness and strength. Do you still see these as the most likely possible two futures?

Yes. But the slow death path looks less likely than ever before. It was once reasonable to ask: will Christianity go to zero? But that time is gone. We suspect the same is true of bitcoin. Open questions remain, of course. And the future lies in the hands of actual users. Will they take self-custody, and use bitcoin as resistance money, or will they primarily use it as a speculative vehicle?

Another cluster of relevant questions concerns, not bitcoin’s users, but the forces around the world that make bitcoin useful in the first place. Will liberal democracies backslide? Will free expression take a hit across the next decade or three? Will authoritarianism continue to rise, and create demand for anti-authoritarian technologies? Affirmative answers to these questions predict a world in which bitcoin continues to flourish.

The creator of Tornado Cash, a privacy-preserving crypto mixer service, Roman Storm, was charged with money laundering and sanctions evasion under accusations that the service had been used by black-listed groups like the North Korean hackers, the Lazarus Group. Do you have a view on how liberal democratic governments should treat programs like Tornado Cash which indiscriminately provide financial privacy to users?

Tornado Cash, and similar privacy tools on the bitcoin network, are a net good for the world, for the same reason that physical cash is a net good for the world. Cash indiscriminately provides financial privacy to its users, within limits. You can buy a phone with cash, but not a house; and cash is heavy to carry around; and not all merchants accept cash. So also, cryptographic privacy services provide financial privacy to their users, within limits. For they, like cash, are subject to liquidity and acceptability constraints.

Liberal democracies should tolerate and even promote these tools just as they tolerate and promote physical cash. Doing so also means that we should not imprison developers who create privacy-enhancing tools in the digital realm. The price of freedom is that some people will use it for bad things. Our view? Pay it.

Your response here made me think about digital IDs, as there is a major push for their introduction in the UK right now. While the design of any digital ID program would matter significantly to assessing whether they are ultimately desirable or not, many people are strongly opposed to the idea due to privacy concerns. On the other side of the debate, others argue that digital IDs will make accessing public services more efficient and help the government identify those who are in the country illegally. Do you have a view on digital IDs in principle? What would you say to those who believe the benefits outweigh potential privacy concerns?

Centralized digital chokepoints — as when a corporate or state authority can shut off all user access to a network with the push of a button — are risky. The more digital our lives are, the greater the risks those chokepoints pose, including hacks, leaks, and authoritarian abuse. That latter risk is especially weighty. Your team may have power now, but another team may have it in the future. Systems that allow authorities to block access to banking, internet, and employment empower future authoritarians to enhance their control over the world. An authority may promise efficiency or security, but if she can block children entirely from certain websites, she can likely block anyone from any site. And authorities may do so for various reasons: because you disagree with them, or come from the wrong part of the world, or refuse to pay some other price they wish to extract.

The point is not that centralized chokepoints are always bad. It is that they come at a significant price, and responsible evaluation of their merits should take this into account. Doing without centralized chokepoints in favor of a neutral system that serves all – as bitcoin does – has a price of its own, of course. We think it is worth that price, for the same reason that liberals have always given: though freedom can be misused, it is itself a precious thing, and not to be given up lightly.

Thank you all for your time. It has been a pleasure revisiting your arguments and discussing bitcoin’s persisting value as a censorship-resistant and privacy-preserving form of money.

As cryptocurrencies become more deeply embedded in the mainstream financial ecosystem, I believe it’s increasingly important that proponents of individual liberties engage in the regulatory discussions surrounding them. The broader adoption of digital currencies will either threaten individual privacy and censorship-resistance or serve as an opportunity to codify these rights into law, depending on how we choose to regulate them and embed them into our daily lives.

The political and legal questions cryptocurrencies raise are not new ones, although the unique technological nature of blockchain does cause them to be raised in new ways, and with renewed urgency. It is largely agreed upon that liberal democracies have the responsibility to protect individual freedoms while also protecting individuals from exploitation. When a bad actor uses a network to exploit others or break a law, it seems relatively straightforward to call these actions illegal (simply because a technology makes it possible for someone to do something does not make it legal to do so).

However, when a function serves a dual purpose, e.g. protecting some people from political censorship while enabling others to launder stolen funds for criminal organizations, our means of assessment must change. How much illegal activity will we tolerate in the name of freedom? For decades, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering regulations have required that financial institutions collect certain kinds of information and set limits on the amount of cash one can move without declaring it to a monitoring body. Some may disagree over how this policy is implemented in practice, but most would agree that a government has a justified interest in monitoring financial systems to track and prevent criminal activity.

In bitcoin’s early days, most were able to push the cryptocurrency to the side as somewhat of an anomaly – something which served some good functions and some bad functions, but was sufficiently on the fringes as to not require deeper engagement. Now that bitcoin has entered the mainstream, its functionalities will need to be addressed head-on.

Bitcoin heightens tension between the government’s responsibility to combat criminal activities and protect individual freedoms because, unlike cash, blockchain enables value to be transferred at a speed and scale never before possible. And while most people understand cash, far fewer understand how decentralized networks operate (a fact evidenced by the mistrial earlier this month in a federal case against two brothers who were accused of exploiting the Ethereum blockchain’s architecture to steal $25 million).

This makes it all the more challenging for regulators and laypeople to engage with, but all the more pressing as corporations and individuals alike rush to invest in an emerging asset class that is not all that well understood. For now, it gives me some hope that governments are seeking input from experts like yourselves, who understand not only the technical foundations of blockchain and bitcoin but also their unique value in protecting privacy and censorship-resistance in an increasingly digitalized and centralized world.

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What else we’re watching

Andrew Baily and Brad Rettler both recently enjoyed Wolfs, an action comedy film starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. While so many movies these days feel the same, Wolfs had something special.

What else we’re reading

Brad Rettler also recommends Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Check Your Financial Privilege by Alex Gladstein.

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His latest book makes an impassioned and comprehensive case for liberalism – a defense of freedom. Following his lead, I would like to open the aperture on the philosophical context and explore expanding his “big tent” conception of liberalism. My questions are in the spirit of Cass’s notion of “experiments in living” and continuous improvement, as he notes liberalism is not a “thing” and a “work in progress”. Cass explicitly addresses critics of liberalism, and I revisit its potential “culpability” in modern ills through potential unintended consequences reflected in shifting applications of the law, working against the public interest. Furthering this line of inquiry, in the context of the core tenets of free markets and the rule of law, we discuss whether Common Good Constitutionalism might be co-opted to serve liberal ends.

As critics typically draw on religion, I explore its relationship to political philosophy, discussing Eric Nelson’s provocative case in The Theology of Liberalism. Nelson suggests that the Rawlsian secular debate over distributive justice is unconsciously part of an ancient dispute about the justice of God. It is topical given the philosophical implications for agency, a bedrock principle of liberalism. Lastly in this interview, Cass previews his next book on the Separation of Powers, which completes a trilogy of works focusing on liberalism and constitutionalism.

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Charlie Taben (CT): Cass, thank you again for taking the time to explore your latest book. The breadth of the case drives its vitality. First, in an initial manifesto you broadly define liberalism in the context of the Western tradition, avoiding current caricatures. You then highlight key protagonists and unusual adherents (William Buckley!), reinforcing the inclusive vision. Lastly, you comprehensively review the central elements, including the rule of law, freedom of speech, free markets and the Second Bill of Rights. The essence of the book might be captured by your notion of experiments in living, where autonomy and informed choices drive continuous improvement. To share your positive conclusion in the final sentences of the book, you declare that “Liberalism is full of hope. Hopeful people are remaking it every day”. I left off in the last Newsletter wondering what sustains your optimism and this book reinforces your practical answer of prescriptions and action. To start, given our charged moment, please share any specific impetus for the book and frame the case in your own words.

Cass Sunstein (CS): The impetus was a sense that liberalism is under attack from the left and the right, so much so that many people have lost a sense of what liberalism even is. If you read attacks from the left, it is as if liberals want, and have always wanted, to defend inequality, environmental catastrophe, and oppression. If you read attacks from the right, it is as if liberals want, and have always wanted, to attack the family, religion, and longstanding traditions. These are attempted refutations of a caricature.

Liberalism is an effort to defend freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law – and in the process, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from fear. We need those things! The fundamental goal of the book is to capture an approach to political life that deserves to be cherished and nurtured.

CT: Shifting to questions that might tease out the big tent of liberalism, I want to explore a central line of criticism tracing a multitude of problems to the veneration of autonomy – working against the traditional values of family, community and faith. You caught my attention with a passage in your book reciting Ross Douthat’s complaints about liberalism:

”Where it once delivered equality, liberalism now offers plutocracy; instead of liberty, appetitiveness regulated by the surveillance state: instead of true intellectual and religious freedom, growing conformity and mediocrity. It has reduced rich cultures to consumer products, smashed social and familial relations, and left us all isolated and mutually suspicious inhabitants of an ‘anticulture’ from which many genuine human goods have fled”.

As Ross is one of my favorite intellectuals, indulge me in tolerating a lengthy preamble from an older column, where he framed his objections with a flourish, wondering Who Won the Reformation:

“The Western world has not known quite what to do with the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation… Looking back through the chronoscope of religious history, then, the modern secular liberal is a Leninist: He watches Christendom tear itself apart and thinks, the worse the better, since only out of the wars of religion can his own society be born…First, this story goes, Protestantism replaced the authority of the church with the authority of the Bible. Then, once it became clear that nobody could agree on what the Bible meant, the authority of conscience became pre-eminent — and from there we entered naturally (if with some bloody resistance from various reactionary forces) into the age of liberty, democracy and human rights.

The problem with this story is that like all propaganda it edits selectively and treats the experience of various fortunate groups as the measure of a much messier reality. The Reformation and its wars did indeed diminish religious authority, secularize politics and allow certain kinds of individualism to flourish. But they also empowered (and were exploited and worsened by) the great new gods of modernity, the almighty market and the centralizing state, which claimed their own kind of authority over everyday life, making the divided churches into handmaidens or scapegoats, and using Christianity as an excuse for plunder rather than a restraining counterforce to worldly lust.

This simultaneous expansion of commercial power and state power made the Western world more orderly and rationalized and much, much wealthier. It also licensed cruelty and repression on an often extraordinary scale. It produced some remarkable experiments in religious tolerance, our own Constitution among them. It also encouraged secular inquisitions that made the original look tame. It opened new opportunities for the rational and industrious. It also weakened or destroyed the places where one might retreat from commerce or refuse the world. It led to huge leaps forward in health and life expectancy for all. It also brutalized religious resisters, stacked non-European bodies like cordwood… and eventually revived the worst tendencies of the old Christendom, anti-Semitism and millenarianism, in fascist and Communist experiments that added the genocide of millions to the modern state’s list of crimes… I’m being grim on purpose; more optimistic views than this are possible. But since the unity of Christendom isn’t coming back any time soon and our own society has a thousand incentives to lie to itself about how religious division was for the best, it’s worth considering the dark version of the long view.

The modern world offers many gifts, and the fact that Catholics and Protestants now dwell together without bloodshed is certainly one of them. But to assume that this division was a necessary means to a happy secular and liberal ending is to assume that we actually know the ending — even though the story so far has given us many novel forms of tyrannies as well as greater liberties, and the price of the modern experiment has been millions of unremembered dead.”

Ross’s powerful polemic, framed in the sweep of history, sets the landscape for the overarching response in your book. You push back in highlighting that liberalism’s culpability is not at all clear. You note that the critics are being reckless – that liberalism is not a person and Ross and other post-liberal critics frame a narrative without citing empirical evidence: “What, exactly, has caused what, specifically?” Moreover, you maintain that the religious cohort of critiques overlook that “many liberals honor and cherish the many traditions that define nonpolitical life, whether they involve family, community, or religion”. Lastly, you reasonably suggest that the real culprit could be many things, such as atheism or capitalism – and we will discuss restraining private capital later.

In understanding this line of criticism, perhaps the qualm flows from the political conception of liberalism where human flourishing simply follows the promotion of autonomy. The “culprit” in this narrative is an undue focus on autonomy, where neutrality becomes an end-in-itself. The argument is that any system – even democracy – is simply a means and its value depends on the manner of its deployment and ends. The counterpoint or reorientation might be that autonomy must be grounded in the social foundation of liberty, or the Common Good. To provide a potential example, I want to explore negative downstream consequences of a culture of freedom through the shifting application of the law.

In Technology and the Politics of the Common Good, I explored how the thresholds for both patent and antitrust law have drifted away from securing the Common Good. In the case of patents, the measure has shifted from beneficial utility to efficiency or expediency. In the case of antitrust considerations, the standard has moved from serving the community to pure “competitiveness”. The issue is that standards promoting the Common Good, suffused in our statutory framework, can be compromised with the lionization of freedom – where the law reflects the culture of the polity. Unwittingly, the kinds of liberal constraints you outline, such as laws regulating free markets, are potentially weakened.

My question, then, is how you would characterize a form of liberalism which would be pro-active in restraining liberty on the margin, in service of the public interest. As you note, a perfectionist conception is distinguished by promoting autonomy. Is a political understanding truly agnostic in simply guaranteeing a plurality of equal, genuine values – or might it include institutionally promoting shared principles, such as common values across faiths?

CS: There is a lot there! We can use abstractions to tell lots of big stories about history’s arc. Some of those stories are arresting and plausible. Some of them might seem thrilling. Some of them might even be true. But it’s worth considering the possibility that big stories are really just that. I am not sure how to evaluate them, other than to say: Maybe! (And then to whisper: Maybe not.) And note well: Some people are very good writers.

In terms of liberalism, the public interest, and the common good: Liberals have long focused on both the public interest and the common good. We need to solve collective action problems, for sure; that is massively important to liberalism, but not the whole picture of the liberal interest in the public interest and the common good. Public parks and museums fit securely within the liberal tradition.

Liberals value considerateness, including within the family. (See Edna Ullmann-Margalit on this.) Liberals need not oppose seatbelt laws and prohibitions on child pornography and polygamy. Liberals like a lot of traditions. Liberals hardly oppose the family. (My gosh.) On common values across faiths: Sure! For starters: No murder, no rape, no assault, no trespass. No breach of contract, either. We might avoid the phrase “restraining liberty on the margin,” because that formulation is insufficiently informative. Liberals insist on a broad conception of freedom of speech and also freedom of religion, and they highlight the rule of law, which includes the right to due process.

CT: Continuing with the perspective of using critiques as a basis for improvement and exploring concepts that could be co-opted for liberal ends, I would like to turn to capitalism as culprit for our modern predicament. We briefly touched on it in our prior Newsletter, where I lamented about the hegemony of private capital. I would like to highlight a means for constraining private capital that was summarily rejected by the liberal commentariat. In the last Newsletter, I suggested Common Good Constitutionalism, promoted by your esteemed colleague, Adrian Vermuelle, was a practical, institutional lever to regulate commerce. It’s not only a useful commercial tool to support the public interest, but, in my view, intuitive with the prospect of crystallizing public sentiment.

The use of State influence is fraught, but I would like to cite an excellent essay by Alexandre Lefebvre about Soulcraft, where he makes the case that using institutional power to foster human flourishing has been commonplace: “Across the sweep of human history, soulcraft, not individual self-determination, has been the norm”. He suggests that we can learn from illiberal regimes in how they try to craft souls toward spiritual and moral ends. I view the notion of Common Good Constitutionalism as a form of soulcraft – a part of our Western legal heritage reflected in the classical legal tradition. Professor Vermuelle often generates hysterical responses, and I believe knee-jerk reactions to his book overlooked its potential. Do you believe his framework, like the classical legal standards embedded in patent and antitrust law, could foster the liberal order? Could it be a viable concrete experiment in living?

CS: I confess that I like capitalism a lot, perhaps showing my University of Chicago background! Hayek, a great defender of capitalism, is a hero of my book, and here’s to a new appreciation of Ludwig von Mises, cranky and imperfect though he was.

If we care about freedom, security, and growth, we will see private property and free markets as very good things (and yes, we need patent law and antitrust law). It’s hard to show that “capitalism” is a “culprit” for our “predicament.” Maybe so, but I’d love to know what all of those words mean.

I am not sure how to think about “soulcraft.” Liberals want the state to leave the soul and spiritual ends to others (e.g., the Pope), though they also seek to inculcate a range of values, including mutual respect. I am no expert on patent and antitrust law, so alas I don’t have a lot to say about that.

Vermeule is a friend and colleague of mine, and I greatly admire him. (We have written a lot together on administrative and constitutional law.) It is certainly valuable to attend to the classical tradition, and to see what we can learn from it. It is right to say that the classical tradition informed the American founding, and also the development of liberalism as I understand it. Of course, my book is a defense of liberalism, not the classical tradition as such.

CT: To the extent that post-liberal critiques draw on religious values, I would like to introduce Eric Nelson’s fascinating book, The Theology of Liberalism, to further explore the intersection of religion and political philosophy. I know you explicitly state that your book is not a work of political philosophy, but, to the extent Nelson’s case grapples with the central question of agency, I cannot resist seeking your perspective. It is personal, so to speak, as I had the privilege of attending John Rawls’s course in the early 1980’s, which was a highlight of my life. I also had the pleasure of hearing Eric Nelson review his book at Yale and was honestly flabbergasted by his exegesis. Provocative would be an understatement, as he suggests the Rawlsian debate is really part of an ancient, theological dispute. Rather than a conventional, or even penultimate secular analysis, he unceremoniously flips the script to contend it’s unrecognized as theological, unselfconsciously joining the debate about theodicy.

Nelson’s case immediately came to mind because he was preoccupied with what he calls “dignitarian” liberalism. He is focused on modern liberals who make the case for the fundamental value of autonomy and ability to choose - reflected throughout your recent work. The tenets you laud - free speech, privacy, government by consent, etc. - all flow from the importance of voluntary action. He terms it transcendental freedom, where humans possess dignity by virtue of the capacity for moral choices.

Nelson makes the ironic case that Rawls’ morally arbitrary view of distributive justice fundamentally compromises agency - where everything is beyond our control, circumstances are dispositive, and merit has no claim on goods. Of course, he suggests Rawls is constrained by his Augustinian foundation in protecting Christian orthodoxy and God’s foreordained grace, rejecting the Pelagian defense of transcendental human freedom to vindicate God’s justice. For these purposes, Nelson’s challenge is the potential sacrifice of the bedrock principle of agency. He contends that Rawls’s case can be separated from the question of theodicy, situated within the ancient philosophical debate about free will.

As my next question, I am quite anxious to hear your perspective on Nelson’s book! First, the fairness of the exegesis broadly in leveraging Rawls’ Princeton dissertation. Second, outside of the religious context, is he fairly raising a fundamental question about human agency with Rawls’s account of distributive (vs. punitive) justice - in any way compromising the distinguishing feature of liberalism?

CS: I don’t know his book, so I should not speak to it. From your account, I confess that I fear that he might be getting trapped by abstractions. This sentence seems to me challenging to parse: “Rawls is constrained by his Augustinian foundation in protecting Christian orthodoxy and God’s foreordained grace, rejecting the Pelagian defense of transcendental human freedom to vindicate God’s justice.” I have a hard time mapping that onto Rawls’ work. But not having read the book, I should be cautious here.

CT: Lastly, I would like to leverage a common refrain in your book where you describe how a liberal would approach a problem or issue. There is a cohort of post-liberals who promote the concentration of power. The distilled argument might be that an “invisible hand” of competing systems of power, with no express intention of justice, will not naturally or automatically generate goods. Rather than support continuous improvement, this decentralized faith in check and balances can serve to preserve the status quo. To introduce your forthcoming book on the Separation of Powers, where the previews suggest that the concentration of power can amount to “tyranny”, please provide a liberal overview of the dangers of executive power and when it might be used for liberal ends in the administrative state.

CS: Oh well, I have spent a fair bit of time over the last few years in the company of Adolf Hitler. He’s not good company. He did not want to preserve the status quo.

Some people find it tiresome or tendentious to invoke Hitler as a warning sign about the concentration of power. I confess that I want to say to them: Shame on you. A friendlier and more responsible response would take a lot of pages. The basic point is that institutional design is always a matter of risk management, and the risks of concentrated executive power are repeatedly demonstrated by history.

If the executive branch is using its power to protect freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and to vindicate the rule of law, we should applaud. If it is implementing the Clean Air Act, we should also applaud. Liberals need not be hostile to the modern administrative state. Still, Madison was right on the concentration of power: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Amen.

CT: Cass, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to build on your fair-minded case. Your thoughtful and focused approach brings liberalism to life. I will try to keep track of your prolific work and hope we can continue the dialogue in the APA Blog Substack. Your public voice is vital and a tonic – thank you.

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From the APA Archive:

The Genealogy of Redemption

Cosmic Purpose, Creation and Individual Meaning

Cosmic Purpose with Philip Goff

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

The New Digest

AI and the Common Good

This article was originally authored by Jeremy Bendik Keymer with Judy Twedt and posted on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association. We bring it to you as part of our new “From the Archives” initiative, highlighting selected works from the APA’s outstanding philosophical community.

You can learn more about the APA and its work here.

How can Earth system science reach us personally? It involves time frames and complexity that challenge ordinary imagination and exceed the scales of our existence. The history of life is the history of mass extinctions. These range over hundreds of millions of years predating the order of life as we know it. The data used to assemble some concept of the deep past and of planetary systems involves imperceptible, cumulative changes over vast spatial and temporal scales that appear clearly only at tipping points, often transforming the possibilities of human society as during the receding of the last Ice Age.

With planetary imagination, we are in the realm of the inhuman and the more than human. Yet the fate of the planet and the fate of human society depends on our ability to internalize the meaning of living on Earth such that we can respond politically to the trends human social processes produce and can collectively respond to planetary environmental changes that arise and should be addressed as best as possible.

These matters interest Judy Twedt, a philosophically and scientifically trained scholar of science communication and a former labor organizer. Her assumptions seem to be that the meaning of living on Earth depends in part on experiencing the planet as such, and that this in turn involves sensing it. She has used these premises to produce a range of climate music based on climate data, some parts of which she directly contributed to gathering during her time as an atmospheric scientist. Her music has been performed internationally in many classical or modern music venues.

I first met Judy in September 2002 on my first day of work at Colorado College. It was 8:45 AM, minutes before the first class of History of Modern Philosophy. She walked barefoot down the hall and said "hello," friendly and open, excited about philosophy. Judy studied philosophy at that institution, working on human dignity. An excellent student, she took her time to graduate, taking gaps to spend time in Mexico learning about political activism and human rights as well as at the Denver ACLU protecting civil rights. She then traveled to the Middle East to work, learning about its society in Jordan during the time when the USA had become heavily embroiled in the occupation of Iraq. Returning to Washington, D.C., Judy worked with inner city youth on photography in an after-school non-profit organization, then returned to her home in Washington State to take classes in basic science so that she could study atmospheric science. Beginning her PhD program in that field, she eventually discovered the questions of planetary imagination she currently addresses through art and science.

This led her to create her own PhD program using an option at the University of Washington for self-created courses of study. She graduated not long ago with a doctorate best described as within science communication. Judy's path is a consummate philosophical path.

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The construction worker’s daughter

Several years ago, I was finishing my masters degree in atmospheric sciences and struggling to identify a compelling research direction for my doctoral work in that program. I started graduate school in 2013, after studying philosophy and environmental ethics as an undergraduate. I was drawn to climate models for the kinds of planetary questions you could explore with them.

In the summer of 2017, western Washington State experienced unprecedented wildfire smoke. Ash rained down from the sky. Visibility was worse than the thickest fog. No one was prepared. Preschool children went outside to play. Workers continued on their jobs. Under the relentless ozone-laced smoke, a farm laborer picking blueberries on a corporate farm died that summer. Even the atmospheric scientists in my department, where I worked and studied, were surprised and dazed by the severity of the hazard.

Trying to find my next steps and unwittingly searching for more grounded, human connection in my scientific work, I started developing a series of workshops about climate change for workers in unions. I was a graduate student member and leader in my union, UAW Local 4121. Our county labor council, which advocates politically for all of the member unions in the county, had coordinated a climate caucus after some internal disagreement between unions over a project that would have brought high- paying jobs in the oil and gas industry to Seattle. So it was that I toured a unionized construction servicing company just outside of Seattle.

Workers at this company loaded and unloaded building materials outside all day long. Did they see connections between climate change and this very direct and immediate impact on our lives? Despite work interruptions from the wildfire smoke the previous summer, none of the workers connected the fires to climate change. I asked one after another how they experienced the wildfire smoke. Were they worried about it getting worse?

Only one worker on that shift had even heard about climate change:

“I learned about climate change from my kid. She’s in fifth grade. I was helping her with her homework.”

He was worried about it; the concern for his daughter was palpable. That made me stop and think about the science, the relationships, and how we learn from each other.

The importance of homebound learning rituals

What is an adequate educational model for internalizing the meaning of planetary environmental change, such as global warming? According to Pierre Hadot, schools of ancient Greek philosophy were concerned with helping their students develop a universal point of view, a view from above, to “‘raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity.” For many schools, the “goal of a lived physics of the universe was to attain greatness of soul” (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 242). In this age of heat waves and droughts, sea level rise, permafrost thaw, extinctions, of the geologic transformation of the Earth by human activities, the goal of objectivity might also mean a kind of planetary consciousness, aware of our place in geologic time.

As I reflected on the construction worker and what he learned about planetary change by helping his daughter with her homework, I was struck by the power of homebound learning rituals. They evade the polarization of the news media. Multigenerational experience helps to inoculate against cynicism and the temptation to ignore or deny difficult information. Could these rituals fold planetary consciousness into the ancient philosophical quest for an objective perspective, so that we might live soulfully and aware of our shifting geologic era?

Now, as I write this, I am a parent and have experienced a similar form of learning through our ritual of bedtime reading. This daily rite, suffused with love, primes the conscious mind before it turns off for deeper processing and sense making in the dreams of sleep. Children often want to revisit their favorite stories over and over again. With my daughter, her favorite books often morph into imaginative play, as she recreates the characters and the most exciting moments from the storyline. This is a natural, innate progression from reading to embodied understanding with the text.

For instance, after reading What Goes on Inside a Beaver Pond more times than I can count, our family bed became a beaver lodge! My daughter will direct me, fellow beaver (!), to help patch the walls after a heavy rain, or to pretend to be a bear unsuccessfully scraping at the walls looking for a tasty meal inside. Sometimes the bear is allowed in if she promises not to eat the beaver kits (believe it or not, the name for baby beavers— ed.).

This kind of play did not begin until we had read the book many times. Repetition was key to her embodied, imaginative exploration of this knowledge. More recently, my daughter asked to visit a cave. I took her to the closest thing within a 15-minute drive, but when we arrived, she took one look and declared, “That’s not a cave. That’s a culvert!”

She knows this because culverts mattered to a young beaver in the story who was journeying downriver looking for a suitable place to build her first home. Again, ecological knowledge came from the daily rite.

In Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton argues that the wisdom and practices of religions have a lot to offer to our moral lives, even if we don’t believe the theology. Two practices gleaned from religions are pertinent to Earth-bound education: the need for repetition and the need for art. Both keep important ideas alive. “Aside from needing to be delivered eloquently,” he says, “ideas also have to be repeated to us constantly…Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration (132).” Reading rituals with stories of ecological or Earth system science are one way in which we might begin to develop planetary perspective. What would the construction worker have thought of them?

Tornado-force sneezes and Jurassic puddles

For her third birthday, my daughter was given the book You are Stardust by the science educator, elin kelsey. The book features three-dimensional visuals by artist Soyeon Kim that merge real-world materials, fine sketching, and painting techniques. It evokes homemade crafts and puppetry. In each image, I can almost feel the textures of the papers and cords, and the strings they are hanging from. These illustrations grab our senses and help us form more felt connections to the text, making the story stickier in our memory. That helps enlarge our perspective over time, gradually.

I love one example in particular: a page shows a dark night sky background, in the foreground of which children float on clouds. A cheetah emerges from behind the cloud-like rendering of a giant sneeze. The page reads:

“You sneeze with the force of a tornado. Wind rockets from your nose quicker than a cheetah sprints.”

That page offers an anchor point. That’s a technical term from science communication studies. Certain kinds of felt experiences with measurable things or processes ground people in imagination and have been identified as important ways of developing a sense of scale. That line from the book connects the internally felt body process of a sneeze with wind, weather, and other species. Think about it: simply stating the facts of how fast a cheetah can run or the velocity of air from our nose in a sneeze would do next to nothing to help build an intuition of what it is like to experience these things.

After reading this book, my daughter started exclaiming that she could “run faster than a cheetah!” I believe that the story and imagery made the connection to an experience for her, and then she inhabited it. She’d learned that her breath can move that fast. It’s so important to start to feel connections within our own bodies and the forces of nature. It helps to restore a sense of connection to terrestrial processes and to other animals.

Another page shows a child pouring a giant glass of water down a hill. But the ribbon of water becomes a river where dinosaurs drink, and another child swims. The page reads:

“The water swirling in your glass once filled the puddles where dinosaurs drank.”

If the cheetah-wind fantasy image connects us to the Earth now, this page builds a bridge between something as quotidian as drinking water and a world long extinct. That helps for understanding geologic time in continuity with our present, haunting now with deep time. The same elements that circulated through the bodies of dinosaurs circulate through our bodies! The cycle of water—from clouds to earth and back to clouds again—has persisted across the mass extinction events. Like the dinosaurs, it will endure after homo sapiens fade to extinction. When I read this, I think of my drinking water holding the memory of Earth’s history. These Earth science books my daughter and I read at bedtime help both of us keep the planet in mind. Just like homework assignments that the construction worker learned from with his daughter.

Data Sonification

But let me back up now and share another practice for holding Earth in mind. After working with labor unions on climate change, I needed to change the course of my research. In the late 2010s, I no longer wanted to produce specialized, scientific knowledge but to explore ways to connect soulfully to climate change data.

Environmental data is an artifact of a living ecosystem that comes from many sites of connection between scientists and the environment. I felt that we needed ways to memorialize and elevate the significance of some of the most important planetary data sets we have today.

I began making musical compositions from climate data using a technique called data sonification. Listening to climate data allows one to have a temporal experience with the data, unlike a quick glance at data on a chart. Music is inherently emotional and has a way of connecting right to the heart. Personal connection matters because it takes emotional intelligence to acknowledge that climate change isn’t simply a problem to be solved; it’s also a destabilizing experience of loss and rapid change on our finite planet. A deeply-felt connection to planetary data is necessary if we want data to inform our deliberations about how to live together on this changing Earth, given so many competing short-term demands on our attention.

One composition I created has been performed in many settings, both private and public, on radio broadcasts, podcasts, and live performances. It uses satellite data of Arctic sea ice extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s sea ice index. The satellite era lends a new meaning to the ancient philosopher’s quest for an objective view from above. With lenses looking down on the Earth, we can now see and measure changes on scales that aren’t possible with in situ, or Earth-bound, observations.

When the temperature over the salty ocean drops below about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, the ocean surface freezes over and becomes sea ice. This ice supports the whole Arctic ecosystem, and reflects sunlight away from the planet, keeping the earth cool. The sea ice extent is the area of ocean covered by ice and the area between ice and open water. The monthly sea ice extent dataset has a strong seasonal cycle. This is because the Arctic Ocean completely freezes over each winter, and melts back, but not completely, in the summer. This summer melt season has become longer and more severe over the satellite record, but the dominant signal in the record is still the seasonal cycle.

The intention of this piece is not to focus on the seasonal cycle, but rather to highlight the alarming rate of multidecadal decline in sea ice due to burning fossil fuels. To focus on that signal, I subtracted the 1978-2010 monthly average sea ice from each monthly data point. The resulting data is the deviation from the monthly average, also called the ice extent anomaly. To sonify the sea ice anomaly, I translated the y-axis of this graph to the piano keyboard so that lower and higher values become lower and higher pitches, respectively. One eighth-note represents one month of data, and there are twelve eighth notes per measure. Each measure represents one year in historical time. The “zero line,” which translates to the average ice extent, is also expressed musically: one hand, the left hand, plays a succession of four chords that hover around the pitch that represents zero sea ice anomaly. These four chords also represent the seasonal cycle, which rises and falls cyclically through the piece. The chords together, with the right hand playing monthly sea ice anomalies, creates a rhythmic structure: one seasonal chord for every three notes of monthly data. Because the left hand is playing chords around the zero line, at the beginning of the piece the right hand is above, or to the right, of the left hand. This is a natural position for the body. As time progresses, the right hand moves down the keyboard, and by the end of the piece, the right hand is continuously crossed over the left hand in an awkward reach. Thus the piece is both sonic and gestural—not only are the notes representing the data, the performer’s body also represents the extraordinary changes in the Arctic ecosystem.

It gets more complex, too, but always intuitively sensible. The data is mapped to a pentatonic scale spanning five octaves. This scale shifts twice in the piece, each time representing statistically significant shifts in the downward trends of ice extent. The first shift is in the year 2001. This is the year that at least one monthly ice extent trend became statistically significant. In the figure above, this is when the color starts to change. The scale shifts again in 2007, because in this year every monthly trend is statistically significant. The year 2012 is also notated on the score because that year’s melt season was the lowest on record as of 2018.

(Performance of Judy Twedt’s Arctic Sea by Jason Hardink, 2021)

The piece begins with the left hand playing two measures of the seasonal chords before the right hand joins in playing the monthly sea ice anomalies. This allows the listeners to hear the rhythmic sound and pace of the seasons alone, before adding in the additional layer—the sea ice values—from the right hand. The music starts with data from January 1979 and ends in August of 2016—the end of the summer melt season. This video captures a performance by Jason Hardink, principal pianist for the Utah Symphony, in a recording with the University of Utah’s artivism4earth festival.

Embodied thoughtfulness in times of planetary change

Returning again to the construction worker, I wonder about how art can reach laboring people. Expressive arts are well-known practices for working with grief and moving through loss so that we don’t get stuck in it. A collective experience of listening to a mournful sonification of sea ice can feel therapeutic—a reminder that one is not alone facing the evidence of our melting polar ice caps. Can these things be made part of daily life in our society?

There are an increasing number of places to hear climate music—projects such as Music for a Warming World, and The Climate Music Project. Meanwhile, bedtime reading rituals can be a site of planetary learning, where the tender relations between caregiver and child can protect against despair, or apathy, or hopelessness. Repetition allows the stories to sink in long enough to become embodied knowledge. Repetition and affection bond the caregiver and the child, like the construction worker and his daughter, creating a force that can bear some of the planetary.

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What I'm watching and listening to now

The end-middle of the summer caught me watching horror films, one of which I thought was excellent: We're All Going to the World's Fair. On reflection, this was not so much a horror film as a film about relationships in a socially alienated society where abusive family structures, liberal isolation, social media, wealth, and the internet contribute in various ways to mental illness and self-destructiveness, beginning with narcissistic fantasy. The film touched me and left an impression over the rest of the summer.

As to music, my summer playlist was called Summer in hell, parts I and II. On it were some good songs by Perfume Genius, Maryam Guebrou, Tropical F**k Storm, thanks to the metaphysician Mark Fiocco, and Laveda, whose latest album was mixed by the legendary Martin Bisi.

From the blog

I'm pretty excited about an upcoming blog post (from a different editor than me) by Samuel Bagg. His work is really interesting. Stay tuned!

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People with hidden disabilities always have stories to tell. They can usually decide whether they want their condition to inform their interactions with others. This leads to awkward, hilarious, and surprising moments. On my second date with my now wife, we were walking around a lake and chatting about nothing in particular. Without warning, she bolted for the lake then stopped at the shore. Caught off guard but not wanting to appear flustered, I asked what was going on. Her response, confusing at the time, was simply “Chaos brain. Wait.” She had seen a duck, which captured her attention. This was my introduction to her ADHD.

In addition to her ADHD, my wife Kortnee has bipolar disorder. My step-daughter Sarah (pseudonymized for her privacy) has autism. While I also have a disability—epilepsy—I will focus on their conditions for this piece. I discussed the generally unknown ways these disabilities affect our lives in a 2023 Blog article. For this piece, however, I explore on the lived experience of these conditions, and how, in phenomenological terms, the being-in-the world alongside people with disabilities develops a unique sense of community.

While it is common for disability theorists to encourage the disabled to tell their stories and ask society to both listen to their words and make accommodations, these steps are insufficient if they assume an objective reality that the disabled can’t experience as “normal” people do. No one knows for sure what it is like to be in the body of another, to experience what the world as they do. As Susan Bredleau and Talia Welsh say in the introduction to Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty, “So long as the lived experiences of those with illnesses and injuries are ignored or discounted, the illnesses and injuries will remain poorly understood.” Following Merleau-Ponty, they argue that treating the body as an object ignores how bodies are subjective since everyone experiences the world through them. One can learn about the causes of disability by treating the body as an object, but not how the disabled person’s body gives meaning to the world they experience. To understand the nature of disability, we must explore the being-in-the world of the disabled, or the way their bodies open them onto the world in unique ways.

Followers of this line of thinking often challenge the idea that people can be categorized as abled or disabled. Given the diversity of conditions recognized as disabilities and the social phenomena that produce them, researchers argue that the categories are not objective but objectivized. They appear objective because we’ve hidden their subjective origins. Objective accounts of disability should be problematized as they ignore the diversity of human experience and the subjective foundation of these accounts in one’s lived body. Though I agree with these critiques, I use the word ‘disability’ in this piece for the sake of clarity.

Many disabled people have written about their lived experience. In sharing the lived experience of my family, I focus not only on their specific conditions but the unique relationality that forms. While the Blog has discussed disability, it has never published an account of their lived experience. More significantly, I want to show how exploring the lived experiences of the disabled reveals a sense of community (understood by the Latin term communitas as a ‘sense of togetherness’) that is not well understood. While the Blog has many excellent pieces on love and community, none refer to their function in the context of disability. There is a similar paucity in academic literature, where the term “community,” when used in reference to the disabled, usually refers to the state or to the category of disability (i.e., things the community provides to the disabled or the disabled community).

Kortnee, Sarah, and I encounter the world in different ways. At home, our routines sometimes synchronize and sometimes clash. I tend to organize my schedule around things I need to do each day, waking with a plan of when and how to complete them. Without plans I feel aimless, as though my existence is not fixed anywhere in particular. Keeping to a schedule makes me feel my actions are purposeful and contribute to my larger goals. I prefer things to be organized, as it reinforces my feeling that events are proceeding properly. Kortnee’s ADHD makes it difficult to focus on tasks she finds uninteresting. Completing certain jobs (e.g., washing dishes or reading articles with familiar content) require high levels of focus that cannot be sustained for extended periods of time. For her, an environment with too much structure feels oppressive as her mind consistently deviates into other things that grab her attention. She uses the term “chaos brain” to describe how—without medication—many trains of thought occur at the same time, making focus on one thing difficult. She encounters our house in the same way, not as a structured and organized space filled with objects, but as a chaotic jumble. This is not a constraint; she finds it easier to encounter spaces like this. Sarah’s lived experience in our house is more difficult to discern given her limited linguistic ability, but she is drawn to familiar objects she associates with enjoyment, play, or love. She loves to jump on beds and play her tablet, and she is very affectionate with people she knows. Other objects puzzle her, as illustrated by her desire to manipulate objects which have an unclear purpose. She prefers routine, but she does not make advance plans. Her routines formed over time through her being-in-the world. Yet she is not only motivated by enjoyment. She has a sense of duty but must often be encouraged through verbal prompts.

When we venture outside, we face unique challenges. Sarah’s autism, while invisible at first glance, becomes apparent if one observes her for more than a few seconds. Kortnee and I have a set of looks, movements, and habits to keep Sarah calm. Sarah identifies certain noises much quicker than we do, and when those noises disturb her she has a hard time staying calm. She can have meltdowns because people are on those phones and temper tantrums when lines move slowly. Kortnee’s and my perceptions of objects that trigger Sarah gain more meaning when we’re with her. They transform from being innocuous parts of the perceptual background to important parts of our perceptual foreground. Similarly, Kortnee’s ADHD affects our decision-making in public. Kortnee can be an impulse buyer when it comes to her hobbies like gardening. On several occasions she’s asked me to tell her not to buy something. Even though she knows we shouldn’t spend money, hearing it from me helps her control her behavior (this is akin to the ADHD tactic of body-doubling, where the external presence of another improves executive brain function). In short, the outside world for Sarah is exciting yet dangerous. It contains places she enjoys, but her being-in-the-world can be disrupted by unexpected perceptions that trigger difficult emotions. Kortnee’s outside world is a place of many paths. When she is outdoors, the appearance of novelty can surprise her, making her lose focus. As someone who generally prefers predictability, I find myself trying to comprehend their perspectives to prepare as much as possible.

What is the sense of community that develops from this? Between Kortnee, myself, and Sarah, there’s a feeling of distinction since the means of communication we’ve developed are inimitable—sometimes invisible—outside of our familial context. Of course, all families have unique qualities and habits, but ours is in the minority since so much of it takes place using visual cues rather than language. At home, certain behaviors (hugs, cuddling, playtime) become more important than words to express our love for Sarah and Sarah’s love for us. How Sarah reacts to our parental authority gives us clues about her emotional state any given day, just as Sarah knows from our tone as much as our words whether she’s done something well or wrong. There is also a feeling of exclusivity among Kortnee and me because when we go out in public with Sarah, we’re the ones most qualified to interpret her needs for others. We encourage Sarah to speak to others but usually need to rephase or clarify her words. We become translators facilitating Sarah’s engagement with the world. Like many good parents, we make things easier for each other when we work as a team.

The lived experience we share with our community is polarized. When with Sarah, it is easy to feel the eyes of others on you. “Why is that child behaving that way? Haven’t the parents taught her proper manners?” you imagine others thinking. We always make sure Sarah is dressed nicely with her hair combed to minimize such worries. Encountering people who recognize Sarah is ‘special needs’ brings a wave of relief since we know we won’t be called to account for her behavior. We feel a connection with those who help Sarah navigate society. When Sarah recently saw a dentist, we knew in advance that she would need extra consideration (she dislikes the feeling of a toothbrush and can’t sit still for long). Our pediatric dentist specializes in helping children like Sarah, and at Sarah’s first appointment the assistant knew exactly how to set Sarah at ease. It is easy to build a sense of communitas with people who work together helping someone like Sarah. The opposite poll is the feeling of anger and defensiveness that arises when someone inconvenienced by Sarah is uninformed about conditions like hers. The last time Sarah flew on a plane, Kortnee arranged for someone from the TSA to guide her through security. When no one showed up Sarah had a meltdown. The person behind Kortnee in line declared that Sarah needed strict discipline, unaware that disciplining a child in a meltdown makes things worse. Thankfully, someone found a flight attendant to help Sarah calm down. Kortnee and I feel torn in such moments. We feel a need to speak for all autistics, imagining the injustices they’ve faced and what they would want to say. Yet caring for Sarah is our priority, since the sooner you intervene the more hope of soothing her. These encounters are toxic to communitas, as you leave with a distasteful residue of the encounter and the knowledge that your family cannot easily exist alongside such people.

There is no universal sense of camaraderie the disabled have with all society. The being-together of the disabled is distinct from that of all society and develops from their unique perspectives on the world. The emotional, physical, and/or cognitive labor that distinguishes their experiences from others binds them together with a shared sense of purpose. The experience of society can be heartwarming or frustrating. Collectively recognizing the subjectivity of disability develops strong bonds of community, while naivete about it makes a feeling of coexistence even more difficult.

What I’m reading: The most recent philosophy book I read is Decolonizing Freedom by Allison Weir. It explores how indigenous practices and ideologies provide a valuable alternative way of conceiving freedom. Rather than conceiving freedom as something which liberates one from constraints, freedom is the formation of a relational society whereby one can achieve more alongside others.

What I’m listening to: The podcasts I listen to most are Science vs and No Such Thing as a Fish. The first chooses questions that are trending (e.g., do weight-loss drugs really work?) and look at what scientific research says about it. They recently covered the issue of autism, combatting the narrative that autism is primarily caused by peoples’ diets or vaccines. No Such Thing as a Fish is a comedy podcast that shares little-known but interesting facts.

I want to extend his review of solutions, opening the aperture on the law and politics to explore options for controlling and leveraging digital forces. Drawing on prior Blog posts, I ask Cass whether we need new legal tools, or, alternatively, might look to the past, in form of the classical legal tradition, for answers. To the extent the solution is political, we conclude by discussing prospects for restraint in the modern, Liberal state.

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To start, I would like to share highlights of Cass’s account of the growing phenomenon of manipulation. As he notes in the preface to the book, it is a close cousin of coercion but with a unique and pernicious character all its own:

“We live in an era in which manipulation is pervasive, especially online. A central purpose of manipulation is to attract attention…But the ability to manipulate people goes well beyond grabbing attention. Manipulators, often aided by (or consisting of artificial intelligence), can play on your desires, your hopes, your fears, and your weaknesses…Manipulation is a serious threat to well-functioning markets, which depend on informed choices. Manipulation is also a serious threat to democracy. Perhaps above all, it compromises freedom. It is a threat to our capacity to exercise agency.”

Cass begins with a definition that is oriented around policy or law:

“Manipulation is a form of influence, intended to affect thought or action (or both), and not involving lies or deception, that does not respect its victim’s capacity for reflective and deliberate choice”.

The fundamental problem is a lack of transparency – at a time when information increasingly represents the currency of our age. Manipulation, he notes, is insult to both autonomy and dignity:

“An act of manipulation does not treat people with respect. From the standpoint of autonomy, the problem is that manipulation can deprive people of agency…The most serious problems arise when people are not given clarity that they are committing themselves to certain terms…”.

To anticipate our Q&A, in chapter 9 of the book, discussing the promise and threat of AI, he explores ways it can provide critical information for good decision making. He outlines how nothing is fundamentally neutral, and choices are unavoidable and require clarity. Nudges, subtle interventions that influence and encourage, are essential to avoiding biases that can lead us to bad decisions – highlighting AI’s fundamental promise:

“Choice Engines can be defined as mechanisms, typically (but not always) online, by which choosers are given an opportunity to provide some information about themselves and their preferences, and then receive a recommendation, or a set of recommendations, about what they ought to choose”.

Cass goes on to reinforce that Choice Engines, powered by AI and authorized or required by law, can beneficially address information gaps and behavioral biases:

“Choice Engines, powered by artificial intelligence, have considerable potential to improve consumer welfare and also to reduce externalities, but without regulation, we have reason to question whether they will always or generally do that. Those who design Choice Engines may or may not count as fiduciaries, but at a minimum, it makes sense to scrutinize all forms of choice architecture for deception and manipulation, broadly understood.”

“In markets, artificial intelligence provides unprecedented opportunities for manipulating people, and for targeting informational deficits and behavioral biases. Still, a properly regulated system of AI-powered Choice Engines could produce massive benefits. It could provide more personalized assistance, or nudging, than have ever been possible before. It could make life easier to navigate…It could make life less nasty, less brutish, less short – and less hard.”

Charlie Taben (CT): Cass, thanks so much for your continued engagement with the APA Blog. I would like to frame your solutions in a broader context to explore a range of ways the law can harness the power of AI. Before pulling on the thread of your prescriptions, to start, please outline the stakes for managing digital threats and why you wrote the book.

Cass Sunstein (CS): My first goal, extending far beyond digital threats, is to get clear on what manipulation is. This is a sharply disputed issue in philosophical circles, and I have my own preferred definition, developed after many struggles with the issue. My second goal, also extending far beyond digital threats, is to see what is wrong with manipulation. There is a Kantian answer, having to do with human dignity, and a Millian answer, having to do with welfare. I like both, but in the end, I stand with Mill. My third goal is to explore what ought to be done about manipulation. I suggest that we need a right not to be manipulated, and I try to give content to it.

CT: Tapping your legal expertise to explore bases to change or expand the law to counteract manipulation, I would like to draw on an example of a novel claim from a prior Blog piece by Trystan Goetze on responsibility and automated decision-making. It is an illustration of how we might augment legal tools to address digital harms – for instance to secure the right not to be manipulated. He is introducing a broader framework to make someone responsible, where expanding the bounds of accountability could secure such a right.

Trystan explores holding designers of systems responsible for future vs. past events, given an inability to pinpoint an agent. He describes how both human and computerized decision makers exhibit bias, but there is no accountability with a computerized system. It is difficult to attribute blame to a particular person because of the so-called “responsibility gap”:

“While both human and computerized decision-makers can exhibit bias, the victim of a biased decision has options when dealing with another human being…There are a few reasons why attributing responsibility for the decisions taken by a computer system to a particular person may be fraught. Some stem from a typical understanding of moral responsibility in analytic philosophy. On this received view, to be responsible for something, you must (1) have been in control of your actions causing the thing (the control condition), and (2) been in a position to know what you were doing (the epistemic condition)…. Because of the ways in which an automated decision system may be developed, deployed, and operated, it can be contentious, difficult, or even impossible to specify a human individual or group who should be held accountable for the decisions...”

Trystan then argues that perhaps there could be a forward-looking sense of responsibility. Like a parent, you might have to take ownership for the system’s future action:

“What gives rise to duties to take responsibility in these ways? I claim that there exists a special kind of relationship between the agent and the entity for whose behavior the agent should take responsibility, which I call moral entanglement. This describes cases where aspects of one’s identity are tightly bound with another: parents and children are one example, but similar relationships exist between citizens and states, employees and employers, and even our present selves and past selves. In each of these instances, some aspect of our identity is connected to the other entity such that distinctive duties arise….With this account in mind, the application to computer systems is clear enough. The creators of a computer system stand in a relationship of moral entanglement with it because it is the result of their professional roles as technologists…Similar claims can be made of the users of the system.”

Trystan acknowledges that more details are needed to develop his parental analogy, where humans and machines should be responsible that their arrival will not harm others – but he highlights the potential of reinterpreting accountability. My question, then, is whether new harms, or a right not be manipulated, require adapting the law to novel circumstances. Similar to the right to a human decision proposed by another friend of the APA Blog, John Tasioulas, perhaps we need to reenvision what it means to make someone accountable. You were declarative on the use of law in the final sentence of your book – “Manipulation can be a form of theft. Social norms should stand against it. In the most egregious cases, so should law” – but do not discuss how it might need to change given distinctly new challenges. Do we need to augment law or create new precedents because the threats are different – or is the existing framework sufficient?

CS: I would like to keep things simple, or as simple as possible. We should focus on two things: consent and harm. If you are bound by terms that you did not see, because they were hidden, you have been manipulated, and you have been harmed. If you are tricked into agreeing to an arrangement that you did not understand, you have been manipulated, and you have probably been harmed. “Shrouded attributes,” as economists call them, are something to target. This is a short but not-so-short way of saying that we need something new – a right not to be manipulated – and to specify the right, we start with consent and harm, and with clear cases. In terms of who the defendant is: that’s usually pretty easy. If we’re speaking of AI or an algorithm, well, there’s some human actor behind it.

CT: To continue to assess the adequacy of our tools, my next question approaches leveraging the law in a different way – in fact, to look backward and draw on the heritage of classic legal tradition. To be more transparent, to explore the role of religion and how it can be harnessed in the Liberal state for restraining technology and serving the public interest. I have written several APA pieces making the case that the lineage and weight of the Common Good can be a powerful force for crystallizing public sentiment.

In The Common Good and AI, I described attending a fascinating panel with John Tasioulas at the UN. John was a keynote speaker alongside the Pope’s advisor on AI, Rev. Dr. Paolo Benanti. The discussion addressed ethical questions to ensure that machine learning does not inhibit human decision-making or the moral frameworks that have supported the development of humanity since the beginning of civilization. The panel of experts focused on finding common ground between secular humanistic ethicists and their counterparts in the faith-based sphere.

I made the case that the Common Good could fairly be construed as a proxy for the humanist approach to ethical boundaries and potentially invaluable in framing commercial development to serve the public interest. Indeed, using the example of your esteemed colleague, Adrian Vermuele, I specifically cited his Common Good Constitutionalism as a concrete means, which conceives law as “a reasoned ordering to the common good” – promoting the goods of a flourishing political community.

The question, then, is whether there might be solutions drawn from our past? Could Common Good Constitutionalism be a nose under the tent for changing our culture and therefore behavior – regulating commerce in intuitive ways to promote norms? Again, your prescriptions were more conventional – such as more aggressive controls that “might take for the form of fines and an order to cease and desist, enforced by an independent commission.” However, could an even broader reinterpretation be helpful in leveraging existing tools – such as Common Good Constitutionalism driving enforcement of antitrust laws, grounded in the primacy of the public interest?

CS: If we focus on consent and harm, we can make progress in a way that is agreeable to many different traditions. Suppose that people are tricked into giving a certain amount of money, every month and automatically, to a service that benefits them not at all. Suppose people end up in a contractual arrangement that they were given no chance to understand. I hope that people who differ on fundamental matters can agree that that is a problem. Utilitarians can agree, Kantians can agree, and people with different religious commitments, or no religious commitments, can agree.

CT: To end with the broadest question on solutions, and highlight a more pessimistic case from another APA Blog essay on why the internet became an autocracy, Vili Lehdonvirta suggests we have a more systemic and fundamental problem. The digital empires are tantamount to a new form of state – and “regime change” might be our realistic recourse:

“The Internet was supposed to change the structure of society. It was supposed to empower individuals and communities, create a “level playing field”, and “give everyone access to the same information”, according to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. It was supposed to render obsolete centralized authorities that set up artificial boundaries and compile dossiers on us and be governed by “ethics” instead of “systems erected to impose order,” according to cyberspace visionary John Barlow. It was supposed to get rid of gatekeepers and middlemen. It was supposed to topple autocrats and promote individual liberty over top-down control. This is what technologists and visionaries promised us. But they delivered something very different. They created some of the most powerful gatekeepers in history. “

Vili goes on to make the case these visionaries created formal institutions – and assumed for themselves the role of the central authority that they had been trying to abolish:

“The task that Internet visionaries and technologists set for themselves—fostering large-scale market exchange—was the same task that modern state administration has, in many ways, evolved to do. Almost inevitably, then, the technologists converged on analogous solutions: centrally administered bundles of complementary formal institutions that function as infrastructures but also seek efficiencies from central planning. The same forces that once favored the rise of the state now led to the rise of platforms….A lot of what so-called technology companies now do is thus in a certain sense just traditional statecraft…Instead of revolutionizing our social order, they reimplemented it with computer code and customer service agents. Big data is statistics. Blockchain is sortition. Algorithmic decision making is just another word for bureaucracy. After a decade and a half of “moving fast and breaking things,” Mark Zuckerberg realized that Facebook had ended up “more like a government than a traditional company,” as he said in a 2018 Vox interview.

The reverse is also true: what states traditionally do is in a certain sense just technology. The world’s first databases were ancient Mesopotamian empires’ tax and administrative records. Ancient empires also developed packet switched postal networks, mathematical algorithms, mechanical calculators, and cryptography to govern their holdings….”

In this sense, Vili suggests the technology companies simply rediscovered what the state was doing all along and, in some cases, overtake it without the constraints of territorial boundaries. The technology companies are states without estates, empires in the cloud. Vili believes it is not unreasonable to intervene and make them accountable, whether by breaking them up or enforcing regulations. Provocatively, however, he thinks it will be unsuccessful:

“…what if users took matters into their own hands? What if the public that had a legitimate interest in controlling essential platform infrastructures was not the public of any particular nation state, but the public that used that infrastructure—the actual users of the platform? In Cloud Empires I tell stories of how merchants and artisans of the platform economy—much like burghers of old—have begun to organize and push back against the platform princes’ excesses. Via strikes, pressure campaigns, and outright hostilities, these citizens of cloud empires have begun to demand political rights for themselves—and in some cases even win them….”

If the idea of a joint-stock company eventually transforming into a public body with a democratic government seems outlandish to you, consider the following piece of history. The state of Virginia was literally a venture-funded start-up company at first, called the Virginia Company of London. It was founded in London in 1606 by a serial entrepreneur with seed funding from four high-net-worth individuals. The founder raised additional funding through a public share offering, in which hundreds of individual and institutional investors across England bought stakes in the venture. The business plan was similar to Amazon: construct a town in North America, attract artisans and tradesmen from Europe to do business there, and tax them. The town was governed from London by the company’s board of directors, and like any joint-stock company, it was expected to turn a profit for its owners. But these governance arrangements did not last; the artisans and tradesmen began to demand a say for themselves in how the place was being run…. Admittedly, this transformation from company to commonwealth took a couple of hundred years to unfold in Virginia. But the Internet so far has zoomed through history at an amazing speed. And already we can see rebellions brewing in the digital colonies.”

To finish with Vili’s dramatic plea, his case may be overwrought, but the modern state is under duress, and the stakes are high. The power of digital forces is also increasingly magnified by the tech sector’s capital accumulation and attendant economic power. The hegemony of private capital knows no bounds. To recall Adrian Vermeule again, the law is ultimately a reflection of the polity. All the tools are ultimately political in nature. You have been a vital public advocate for Liberalism. To what extent are you concerned about our capacity to face these digital challenges – what sustains your optimism?

CS: Suppose that you are trying to solve a problem – say, one of your teeth hurts. You might think: What can I do about that problem? Or you might think: Should I be optimistic? I much prefer the first thought. I guess it’s usually good to be optimistic about whether you can get your tooth to stop hurting, but please, focus first on how to address the problem.

Issues about digital forces and the tech sector are of course numerous, and each one has to be approached in its own right (even if many issues are related). In October, I have a book coming out with APS Press, called IMPERFECT ORACLE, which explores what AI can and cannot do. Its focus is on prediction problems, where machine-learning algorithms are terrific under identifiable conditions, and also not so terrific under identifiable conditions. The problem of manipulation is not small, but it is pretty specific.

On technologies as “states” – I am not sure how to think about that. In what respect? What is the definition of states here?

I also have a book coming out in September on liberalism, with the imaginative title, ON LIBERALISM. I almost called it “Big Tent Liberalism” – a bad title, I guess, but a descriptive one. Commitments to freedom and pluralism help define liberalism, big though its tent may be. One impetus for that book, which is closely linked to my book on manipulation, is a sense that some people (mostly on the left but also on the right) have produced a bizarre caricature of something (what? I am not sure!) and called it “liberalism,” even though no liberal would endorse or even recognize it. Another impetus for that book is a sense that commitments to freedom and pluralism are in serious jeopardy. We’ve seen that movie before. It’s a horror movie.

Back to optimism: If your tooth hurts, please try to find a way to get it to stop hurting; try not to think, am I optimistic about my tooth? But I will confess that I am an optimist by nature. Amos Tversky, the great psychologist who helped found behavioral economics, once said something like this: “I’m an optimist, and it’s rational to be an optimist. If you’re a pessimist, you suffer twice!” I aim to follow Tversky.

CT: Cass, your wise counsel is appreciated - distilling complex issues to offer practical solutions. I greatly appreciate your engagement with the APA Blog and, given your prolific output, I look forward to extending the dialogue in the future.

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From the APA Archive:

Breaking GPT

Smartphones and Meaningfulness

Undermining Autonomy One Swipe at a Time

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

Cass Sunstein on Liberalism (On Interintellect)

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This article was originally posted on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association. We bring it to you as part of our new “From the Archives” initiative, highlighting selected works from the APA’s outstanding philosophical community.

You can learn more about the APA and its work here.

The 2018 Central APA featured an author-meets critics session on Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Below, I interview the four panel members about their experiences and their thoughts on the book’s content.

I understand you were part of the panel on Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. How did it go?

Mark Lance: I thought it was wonderful. I’m particularly happy that issues around organizing, social transformation, etc. are being taken seriously in philosophy venues these days, rather than dismissed entirely or relegated to some “applied” backwater as they have been for most of my career. The audience was engaged and asking great questions, and I learned a great deal from the other papers.

Michael Doan: The conversation was extremely thoughtful and rewarding. It was the first time I’ve seen people in the audience at a philosophy conference chiming in just to thank panelists for focusing on certain questions—as though these were questions that weren’t meant to be asked or pondered at any length. It was moving! I think it speaks to the quality of Alexis’s latest book, to the ways philosophy continues to change, and to the palpable need for more work born of, and grappling with, the complexities of acting collectively from positions of complicity and compromise.

Kathryn Norlock: Yes, I agree with Mark and Michael that the panel discussion went so well partly because the audience was so superb. It was an intensely lovely session because discussants were seriously committed to working out, in light of Alexis Shotwell’s book and our responses, how to actually make change for the better happen in the world, how to avoid getting burned out and stay motivated when it feels like the opposite of progress is happening. Our listeners were not just there to hear a few words from us. They wanted to get to work on implementing some answers!

Alexis Shotwell: For me, having the chance to talk together about these questions was an amazing gift – even after writing a book about purity and what’s worrying about it, I could talk about it all day. Beyond the really dense and generative thinking Kate, Mark, and Mike brought to the room, it was also so amazing to hear from others in the room.

Why did you participate in this session?

ML: I admired this book before being asked. I taught Alexis’s previous book last year and am teaching this one this year. As someone who has lived in both the professional philosophy world and the activist-organizer world for a long time, I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to further grapple with some of the issues arising in the latter using the tools of the former.

MD: I’ve been an admirer of Alexis’s work since graduate school, where I first read her earlier book: Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender and Implicit Understanding. I still make use of her account of implicit understanding in my own research, while teaching it in my social epistemology and moral psychology courses. So, I was eager to dig into her latest manuscript. Then I discovered that she and I were both developing critiques of ethical individualism in the context of climate change, and also thinking about what might lie beyond. So, I realized getting together for this panel would be an important learning experience for me.

KN: I am always impressed by the thoughtful care of Alexis Shotwell’s scholarship, and I find it difficult to say no to any request of Ami Harbin (Oakland University), who organized this panel, so it was largely the motivation of deep admiration for excellent scholars. (I also love going to the Central APA, my favorite chapter and so often in my hometown of Chicago.) I greedily wanted to take the opportunity to read Against Purity as well, because I’m a newcomer to non-ideal theory, still working up my own scholarship in this area, and recently wrote an essay on maintaining politicall engaged attitudes even when pessimism is correct.

AS: The North American Society for Social Philosophy is a wonderful part of the philosophical ecosystem on this continent, and I love their conferences and panels at APA meetings – so I was really honoured when Ami Harbin proposed this panel, and really excited to have the chance to talk with these panellists. Book panels sometimes threaten to be kind of weird, because the author sometimes finds the material of the book rather over-masticated and stale by the time it’s actually out and ready to be discussed in person – I knew that these folks would open up fresh ways to think together about things I care about, and they did!

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What do you think is the most important, intriguing, or compelling aspect of the book?

ML: There are so many deeply inter-related points that it doesn’t really make sense to pull one out. For me personally, the way the book forces us to foreground our complicity in the systems of oppression we are working to overcome was key. Of course, put that generally, this is not a new point, but it really is deepened and made the focus in this book in a way that I’ve not seen before.

MD: Wow, this is a tough question—and a personal one. When you have a book that addresses everything from historical memory in colonial contexts; to the epistemic dimensions of AIDS activism, particularly the work of ACT UP; to the impossibility of exempting ourselves from relations of suffering and death by, say, going vegan and taking our houses off grid; to the relationship between speculative fiction and queer disability prefiguration… it’s not going to be easy—or worthwhile, even—to isolate the most compelling moment. That said, I do find it awfully compelling to find a philosopher whose work synthesizes so carefully, without forcing. It’s also intriguing to read a book that resists the urge to just “make a point,” or tie everything up neatly, and yet doesn’t disappoint. Just the opposite: thank goodness for loose ends.

KN: I loved the urgency of attention to collective and relational approaches to ethical questions. Alexis Shotwell surprised me with criticism of one sort of attitude of some vegans and vegetarians – not all, of course! But she describes the attitudes some take toward food choices as mistaken when those who pride themselves on their dietary habits fancy themselves as “opting out” of systems of agriculture, migrant labor, environmental degradation, illness and death – as if veganism were an action-guide in a world with right choices that lead to a pure self. Shotwell’s attention to the relational nature of oppressions and systems of production enables her to clarify that rightly intended actions are still enacted in thick contexts from which no opting out is possible. Shotwell keeps front and center a relational account of what it means to be a body (interdependently) and what it means to be a moral agent.

What do you think were the most contentious or challenging points?

ML: Maybe not directly answering what you are asking here, but the section I’m having the most trouble with – that is, am still figuring out what I think about – is the section on pollution and the ways that our alterations of the world change the status of our own bodies. There are lots of fairly straightforward points here concerning the impossibility of any dichotomy between environment and self, but I feel that there is more that I’m not quite getting, in particular that this has implications for the organizing strategy stuff I wrote about. The best books leave us thinking about their implications for a long time, and that’s what’s happening here.

MD: You know, purity is a pretty sensitive issue. One of the things I find most memorable and challenging about this book is the way it comes at the idea of purity from so many different angles, pressing on so many tender nerves. In one way or another, each of our lives are informed and deformed by the ideas and aspirations of material purity: purity of race, gender identity, and sexual desire; purity of the body from toxicity, disease, and disability. As Alexis points out, the material conditions characteristic of interlocking systems of oppression are partly a product of theoretical purity (in distinctions, categories, classification schemes, and so on), and can only be very awkwardly addressed by the sort of ideological purity often encountered in certain leftist scenes (“correct line” politics, sectarianism, etc.). Moral purity (cleanliness of hands, heart, and conscience) both conditions and emerges from out of this messy soup. What could it mean, then, to be against purity in any or all of its guises? Totally against? Uncompromisingly? Purely…?

KN: As the author and my fellow panelists know, I took the opportunity of the panel to work out what to think of Alexis’s idea of what she calls non-individualistic, non-voluntarist approaches to gender change. I am clearer on what she describes as a voluntarist approach, especially as voluntarism appears in some trans-exclusionary writing, when she says voluntarism refers to “a political position that places emphasis on individual choice and liberty, implicitly assuming that individuals are the locus of change” (145). Alexis calls “the supposition that we make change as individuals” a “danger of voluntarism for engaging with oppressive norms” (146). I appreciate that the whole excellent book tilts at overly individualized conceptions of practices that are better seen as relational, including gender practices, but I’m still trying to work out if she’s saying that we not only do gender relationally (I’m on board, I get that), we also ought to take up the attitudes and practices that contribute to collectively changing norms. I mean, all the time? Can I enact some gendered practices and presentations individualistically, and others collectively? Do I have to carry out gender with an eye to making the world a better place, or is it compatible with her view that some splendid forms of gender expression are not for the purposes of collective change and are just for me? I don’t know if collective change should be a disciplinary norm. I’m still working that out.

What sorts of discussions took place in the session?

ML: Hmmm. I’m not sure I want to try to summarize these. It was a very wide-ranging discussion.

MD: All sorts, really. The book, and our panel, sort of encouraged that. One discussion that stuck out to me concerned the anti-social nature of purism. A lot of us find it difficult to be around people who act as though they’re ethically or politically beyond reproach. First, there’s the hostility: from the faintest gestures of superiority, to the most strident of “interventions” and “call-outs.” We feel put on the spot. And then the hypocrisy inevitably shines through: beyond un-called-for, now their hostility seems un-earned. After all, purity is impossible—this is part of what Alexis is saying. Yet as someone else pointed out during our session, all of this anti-purist bashing can be pretty anti-social in its own way. Ironically, it can also be pretty purist. I mean, does everyone have to be perfectly civil with everyone else, come what may? How much injustice do we need to tolerate in defense of hurt feelings? And if incivility is sometimes called for, are only the perfect called to be uncivil?

KN: There was some especially intense and excellent discussion toward the end of the session on the motivation to keep pursuing collective action when it seems like there aren’t as many prospects for change and progress as one might need to believe in to keep going, sometimes. Burn-out on the part of moral agents is a real pre-occupation of mine, so this stood out to me. I did my usual bit where I suggested that moral progress isn’t really a thing, and one needs to keep contributing regardless, that moral life and social change is more like the laundry or the dishes; just because you have to do it all over again, doesn’t mean you should never do it! I loved Mark Norris Lance’s corrective response to my pessimism (which sometimes I do to excess). He reflected on his activism against South African apartheid in his youth, and then told us of a day, years after apartheid’s official end, when he flew to South Africa and a black woman was the officer in the Customs line; he said, “I know a country’s not perfect, and I know there’s more work to do — but I handed her my passport and thought, ‘This is better than apartheid!’” And I needed that reminder; that’s right, better is possible! It was such a great, anti-purity moment: Sure, we’re not going to make pure and lasting progress, but we can make situations better or worse.

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What are some areas for further research on this topic?

ML: There are so many. Every chapter was more a signpost – pointing us in the direction of fruitful research than a finished account. For me personally, much of this is going to influence my work in the next year on my book – which I’m writing with a historian-organizer comrade – on revolutionary nonviolence. The goal of that book is to articulate concrete strategies and tactics for challenging core systems of oppression, for making nonviolent movements truly revolutionary. And in many ways, the impurities described by Alexis are the starting point for thinking about that.

MD: I’m curious to see if any defenses of purity will emerge in response to Alexis’s book—whether defenses of the idea(s) of purity, or of ethical and political purism as practical orientations, or both. Of course, apologies for purity and purism are already a philosophical sub-genre in their own right. There are also plenty of philosophers already grappling with the “over-demandingness” objection, among other offspring of ethical individualism. But I can’t think of anyone who’s taken seriously the thought that, “an ethical approach aiming for personal purity is inadequate,” not to mention “impossible and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth” (Shotwell 2016, 107). Part of the reason for this, I think, is that issues surrounding anti-authoritarian organizing, collective action, and efforts to prefigure other worlds are not often appreciated for how they bear on mainstream debates in ethics and social and political philosophy. But as mentioned earlier, that is changing.

KN: I’ve been thinking lately that there’s this group of feminist philosophers who write about non-ideal ethical theory. Alexis Shotwell doesn’t say her theorizing is “non-ideal” more than once or twice, but I’m drawn to the possibility that those of us who tend to concerns with moral failure, moral dilemma, imperfection, and pessimism should perhaps make it clear that — among other motivations to be pragmatic or stoic or anti-purity — our feminist reasons matter as justifications for those sorts of perspectives. There is something promising and peculiar about the attention of feminists to the endlessness and urgency of social change that can be undone, and must be redone, and redone again. We should be more attentive to this trend in the near future.

What are your top tips for authors and critics when they meet in sessions such as these?

ML: Organize them with people who get along, and are cooperative. That’s not to say with people who agree, but with people who are in a common project of figuring things out. If the panelists amongst themselves, or the panelists vis a vis the author, are just critics, it feels much more like a game. I thought this group felt like we were all inquiring together.

MD: Organize sessions around books you care about, and that care enough about you and the world to make working together irresistible.

KN: Ami Harbin did something wise, when she solicited participation in the panel. I saved her email so that I can grow up and be just like her, because she said that, “rather than be mere critics, [we] readers of Against Purity should provide a focus on [our] ways of using and developing its themes in [our] own research.” That was exactly the right thing to say in order to encourage a panel of collaborative inquiry rather than just criticism, although I engaged in some of that, too!

AS: Over the last six years, as both someone having a book commented on and commenting on other people’s books at APA and SPEP sessions, I’ve been so happy to see a form of engagement with books that really aims to let audience members “in” to a book, where people bring their curiosity and intellectual generosity to the table, and in which there’s still space for asking really hard questions. It’s like the opposite of a caricatured version of agonistic philosophy where everyone just trying to beat each other’s arguments to the ground. It’s exciting to think that this is becoming more of an available mode of engagement in these kinds of panels.

What are you working on at the moment?

ML: As I mentioned, this Revolutionary Nonviolence book is the biggest project for the next year. (I have research leave all next year – YAY!) Maggie Little and I are also picking back up some work in moral contextualism that we wrote a bunch of papers on a decade ago. We have this idea for an argument explaining why morality has to be structured according to defeasible rules. That is, why our form of life would be impoverished if either the moral rules were absolute or if there were none and morality structured around either pure particularism or utilitarianism. I’m also very involved in a number of activist projects including Thetruthtellingproject.org.

MD: One of my research projects focuses on understanding and working to remedy collective inaction in response to climate change (“Climate Change and Complacency” was my first on this topic). Another focuses on the relationship between epistemic oppression, authoritarian state intervention laws (e.g., Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws), and community-based activism in response to ongoing ecological and social crises (“Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Redlining” is among my latest). I’m currently co-authoring a paper on the health activism of the Black Panther Party and its relevance to ongoing conversations concerning responsibility for the provision of public health. I’m also working on a number of activist projects with Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management (D-REM), the Detroit Independent Freedom Schools Movement (DIFS), and the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.

KN: With Mark and Michael, I’m writing about this panel for an upcoming issue of the APA Newsletter on Feminism! And as grading winds down and the summer begins, I’m completing a chapter on forgiveness (for which Manuel Vargas and John Doris wait patiently) for the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. Then I’ll turn my attention to developing the next iteration of the “Feminist Ethics” entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

AS: Over the time since the book’s come out, I’ve been working on a couple of areas that I feel I didn’t step up to enough in the book. The first is about how people who benefit from oppression can step up to fight it; I’ve been working on a paper called “Claiming Bad Kin,” which comes after or out of the chapter in Against Purity about the inheritances of colonialism in North America. This was sparked in part by racialized and Indigenous people on social media asking white people to “collect your people” when, for example, there’s a racist thread on someone’s facebook wall, and in part by the continued problem of white settlers claiming Indigenous identity for their own benefit. I’m trying to work through what it looks like for us white settlers to own up to our inheritances of enslavement, border militarism, and colonialism alongside the material and psychic enrichments we receive in the present at the expense of Black people, Indigenous people, migrant people, and people of color. In another piece, called “Unclean Eating,” I’m doing more to think about what’s wrong with imperatives to “eat clean,” why my fellow vegans really need to stop worrying about Indigenous sustenance hunting, and what anarchist conceptions of mutual aid might offer to ethical decisions about consumption. I’m also finishing up an oral history project about the history of AIDS activism that has been really generative for me.

Michael D. Doan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University. He is also a Council and Board Member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.

Mark Lance is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Professor of Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. He has also been an activist and organizer for 30 years on a wide range of issues. He is the author of Marx’s Ethical Vision.

Kathryn J. Norlock is Professor of Philosophy and the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. She is currently interim Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, and Only With Others (forthcoming).

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However, with this essay, in response to Everitt’s artful exploration of intelligence and nature, I want to reconsider this narrative and offer an interpretation for a potentially unconstrained AI. The focus on LLM’s and quality of imitation is incomplete because we must appreciate the unique character of quantum AI (QAI). To date, the practical applications are nascent, as nations and corporations seek to disrupt cryptology – but we miss QAI’s revolutionary potential without grappling with the introduction and impact of quantum materials. Given its radical dimensions, I want to pull on Everitt’s ontological thread to temper conclusions about AI’s fundamental limitations.

Everitt interpreted intelligence in relation to a spontaneous and disorganized nature – in the sense of intelligence organizing the unorganized. AI, on the other hand, is static and stuck in the given of its algorithms. I suggest that QAI is qualitatively different in that it, antithetically, harnesses spontaneity with quantum uncertainty to realize its powers.

These newfound powers are naturally derived from materiality which, as Everitt notes, is contingency. Although QAI is not intelligent, nor does it possess consciousness as “redoubled externalization” removed from nature, it could potentially be viewed as distinct in the way she describes the will actualizing thought as the “knife”. QAI may be in some form objective and systematizing and therefore construed as part of a force underlying the world – analogous to the metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche’s will-to-power. More importantly, leaving aside ontological characterizations, by virtue of leveraging superposition, QAI has the potential to be unconstrained.

Before speculating about QAI, it is valuable to heed Everitt’s case for AI’s constraints, adding a fresh perspective on the character of intelligence:

“But what of AI? Without a doubt, AI is not just its programming, but it also has a natural remainder, a remainder that is not so insignificant. There are warehouses of batteries, tons of water used to cool data centers, all dependent on the materiality of the internet’s hundreds of thousands of miles of cables.

But in terms of its artificiality and its intelligence, the Hegelian critique lies in pointing out that AI is in no way intelligent. In fact, it is precisely the opposite.

While intelligence is always artificial, AI is, in actuality, not artificial enough to be labelled “intelligent.”

Intelligence organizes the world through – and this is the critical point – an externalization of the self. Intelligence and the will go hand-in-hand for Hegel. Intelligence thinks and the will actualizes thought. Intelligence posits itself in its subjectivity, and the will in its objectivity. Intelligence is the cut, and the will is the knife.

When we exercise our intelligence, we are precisely able to step outside of existing assumptions and systems presented to us. We are able to think outside the box. We have the ability to step outside of ourselves and outside of what’s been given. And when we put thought into action that forces us outside of existing circumstances, that is will. Both intelligence and will, in this way, are rare.

Most people do the same ol’ thing every day, stick to routines, indeed, stick to their learned second nature. But to exercise intelligence, that is precisely when we think outside the information that has been presented to us and beyond what we are used to thinking. Intelligence appears when we really think something radically different. Intelligence introduces a gap that allows for the externalization of thought.

And this is the critical reason why “artificial intelligence” is a misleading slogan. AI – from LLM’s to graphic design generators – none of these algorithmic programs have the ability to step outside of themselves. They are constrained to the program. It is, strictly speaking, impossible to program an algorithm to violate its own programming. The algorithm simply cannot support contradiction, precisely because it cannot think. And for Hegel, it is contradiction that is at the heart of thought.

What we call “AI” would be better named “algorithmic autocomplete.” It fills in the blanks, so to speak, based on a probability model that shuffles through the choices it has available, be it the best possible word to complete a sentence or the best arrangement of pixels based on the context clues given to it in a prompt.

AI can never have intelligence nor will for the simple reason that it cannot violate its own programming. It cannot step outside of itself. It cannot think outside of its own algorithmic box.

Thus, AI is not intelligent precisely because AI is not artificial enough. Were AI able to externalize itself from its own nature, then it would be doing something akin to self-consciousness by forming self-awareness. But AI is trapped in its own programming. There is no gap between AI and itself. It is completely immediate in its relation to itself. And hence, without a subjectifying gap, AI is not artificial enough to be called “intelligent”.

As noted, Everitt’s view comports with my case construing AI as our aesthetic destiny. Building on a piece with Brian Leiter on Nietzsche's fatalism, I contended that creativity is our essence in the sense of Nietzsche’s Essentialism. In Brian’s naturalistic account, Nietzsche’s determinism is best understood as an Essentialism, where our nature is constricted to a trajectory governed by facts or psycho-physical realities that can only be sculpted, not changed entirely. He uses the powerful example of a tomato plant. We can cultivate and nurture it, but ultimately, it will bear its unique fruit.

In this vein, I maintained that our human essence is creation. Artistic expression distinguishes our unique nature and grounds meaning. To recall Nietzsche, without God, the only alternative is creation. As he says in a notebook, “he who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere… he must either deny it or create it.”

To the extent that AI can never be truly creative – our defining nature – it is not intelligent in the sense of Everitt’s exegesis. However, we must still grapple with the fact that “conventional” AI is not the whole story. QAI’s revolutionary computing powers are nascent but have no historical precedent. Most importantly, the way those advances are produced is the antithesis of constrained algorithms.

However, we might first pose the question of whether QAI’s unimaginable computing power reinforces the dismissive case. If computation is AI’s apotheosis, perhaps we should view it as pure instrumentality – the ultimate form of Heidegger’s standing reserve, where modern technology reduces resources to mere tools available for human use and manipulation. Rather than a world of inherent meaning and value, everything is a potential supply – to be stored and ordered, defined by their usefulness to humans.

Acknowledging this danger, I would like to flip the script and suggest that the way quantum materials change AI should make us reconsider its powers. QAI is revolutionizing computing because it is not limited to the binary nature of conventional computer bits (which must have a value of zero or one), as quantum bits can be zero, one, or both simultaneously. Quantum materials effectively introduce superposition, which radically enhances computations – producing results in minutes that would otherwise take conventional computers hundreds of years.

In my very first APA Blog piece, I grappled with the philosophical implications of tapping quantum uncertainty by contending that QAI invigorates Spinoza’s doctrine of Parallelism – which stipulates that there is no interaction or causal relationship between the mind and the body. Neither the mental nor the physical are reducible to the other, as they are two attributes of the same divine substance.

Viewing QAI as a fusion, where quantum materials are the proxy for body and AI is the proxy for mind, I drew the analogy that the radically enhanced computations were produced without any direct relationship between the superposition (body/extension) and the AI (mind). They work in tandem without any correlation – in the same manner as Spinoza maintained the mind and body moved in parallel with no interaction.

Even if this miraculous computing power is not Parallelism in practice, the upshot relative to Everitt’s piece is that QAI is not trapped in an algorithmic dead-end. To the contrary, tapping matter’s quantum uncertainty creates a distinction or separation from nature. Its computation power might then be construed as a variation of what Everitt called the “doing of art”, actualizing like the “knife” of the will, following the “cut” of intelligence. If QAI is objective and using extension as a means, it could be interpreted as part of an all-striving force or fundamental principle governing all of reality.

Nietzsche describes his theory of will-to power as “life as such”, where, in Beyond Good and Evil, he notes that “self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it…our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will – as will to power…is my theory…one could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment — they are one problem — one would have acquired the right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its ‘intelligible character’ — it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else. —”

To recall Heidegger again, in his interpretation of Nietzsche, will-to-power is not reflective of mere human desire, but an unconscious willing that defines the constant state of becoming. In this sense, it is a metaphysical force underlying the world and he linked it to Eternal Recurrence and viewed as the closest concept to Being.

In sum, if AI is not artificial enough to be conscious and intelligent, QAI’s instrumentalization could be viewed as actualizing or willing in this metaphysical sense. It is organizing outside of nature – systematizing with sui generis computational powers. Even if the will-to-power analogy is unwarranted, it is a new phenomenon that begs classification. At a minimum, to the extent it harnesses radical contingency, it should make us wary of concluding AI is fundamentally constrained.

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From the APA Archive:

Why Machines Will Never Rule the World

Technology as Part of Nature

What else I’m Reading/Listening To:

What is Happiness

War is the Father of All

This article was originally posted on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association. We bring it to you as part of our new “From the Archives” initiative, highlighting selected works from the APA’s outstanding philosophical community.

You can learn more about the APA and its work here.

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Imagine the following scenario: You are an engineer who has worked for years with a small group of colleagues. One day, your company informs you that while your own role remains unchanged, your co-workers will gradually be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The transition is smooth: some colleagues are retiring, others are redeployed elsewhere in the firm. But you are left working alone—your daily collaborators are now digital systems in the form of agents. Do you have a complaint about this new arrangement? You may still enjoy your tasks, be well paid, and have job security. And yet something seems to have been lost. My suggestion is that one thing that you will be deprived of in this scenario is a form of solidarity—something not easily captured by standard metrics of productivity or satisfaction, but nonetheless central to the value of work. In this post I want to explore the ways in which solidarity, as a distinctive social good, is put at risk by the digitalization of work, especially through the deployment of AI systems in the workplace.

Individual Goods of Work

Most people work to earn a living. But work also provides non-instrumental goods—reasons to non-instrumentally value it. Philosophers working on the value of work have long drawn attention to three such goods: pleasure, excellence, and self-respect.

First, pleasure: Many have thought that for work to be good for us it must, as a bare minimum, be something that we enjoy doing. (Perhaps not always, but to a sufficient degree). We are complex, learning animals, and so for any activity to give us enjoyment in the long run, it must engage our faculties to learn and develop. It is hard to see how work that is boring and/or extremely repetitive, or ‘bullshit jobs’ that seem pointless to the worker, could be enjoyable in the long run.

Second, excellence: For Aristotle, the good life—eudaemonia—involved the cultivation of virtue and excellence. Humans have the ability to develop their skills through practicing them, thus attaining higher levels of excellency in particular activities. Imagine the experience of learning a new musical instrument: through practicing, you gradually improve your musical skills until (hopefully, some day!) you manage to play that difficult piece you have dreamt of playing. Importantly, both the process of growing our skills and attaining a higher level of mastery seem non-instrumentally valuable. Good work also helps us to develop our skills and attain excellency: a coder debugging a complex system or a surgeon executing a precise operation both exemplify this kind of achievement. Through repeated engagement with difficulty and challenge, individuals cultivate excellence and competence. Such excellence forms a core part of the agent’s self-conception and fulfillment.

Third, philosophers have argued that valuable work plays a central role in fostering self-respect. Following John Rawls, self-respect is the conviction that our goals and plans are worth pursuing and that we can achieve them through our own efforts. This sense of self-respect arises from the recognition of one's capacity to realise one’s plan of life. A person's role in their workplace—at least when they have some degree of autonomous choice about what to do and are not subject to constant ‘micro-management’ by others— often gives them the opportunity to experience their own power to set ends and pursue them effectively.

These goods do not, I think, essentially depend on co-workers. A solitary researcher may still experience deep engagement and a sense of excellence. A freelancer working remotely with AI support tools may take pride in creative output. That is why, to fully appreciate what is lost in the move to “colleague-less” workplaces, we must turn to the social or communal goods of work.

Solidarity as a Communal Good

Solidarity is a social relation through which individuals recognize shared commitments and act together in pursuit of a common good. It is more than identification or empathy. To stand in solidarity is to identify with others’ circumstances or goals and to be prepared to act on that identification in ways that reflect mutual commitment. Through solidarity, we build relationships with others that are, in interesting ways, both non-instrumentally valuable for us as persons with specific projects and help us to further more general moral ends. (I explore this ‘positive alignment’ function of solidarity in more depth here.) In the workplace, two forms of solidarity are especially central:

Productive Solidarity. This arises when individuals collaborate to produce something they collectively value. It is not just about teamwork; it involves a deeper moral orientation toward others as co-contributors. The solidarity of a newsroom putting together a publication or a surgical team coordinating complex care reflects this sense of joint enterprise. The process matters as much as the outcome: when people work together toward a common end, they experience interdependence and mutual recognition.

Philosophers influenced by Marx have seen such cooperation as a distinctive site of human flourishing. In these productive relationships, each person’s work is shaped in response to others, and the achievement is owned collectively. Recognition flows in both directions: I see your contribution as essential, and you affirm mine in turn. In this structure, individuals realize their own capacities by contributing to others’ needs. Productive solidarity reveals our social nature, not just as individuals pursuing aims, but as beings who become fully human through shared activity.

Labour Solidarity. This second form of solidarity is shaped less by cooperation and more by shared vulnerability within a system of wage labour. It is the solidarity of workers who, lacking capital, must sell their labour and thereby occupy structurally similar positions of potential disadvantage. Labour solidarity has an adversarial edge: it is not merely about shared enjoyment or team spirit, but about recognizing common interests in resisting exploitation or domination. Labour solidarity takes form in unions, strikes, collective bargaining, and protest. These are not merely tactics for economic gain; they are practices through which workers affirm their dignity and collective power. They transform isolated grievance into coordinated resistance. This kind of solidarity is deeply moral: it affirms the idea that one’s struggle is not merely one’s own, but part of a broader injustice that demands a shared response.

How AI Undermines Solidarity

What happens when AI systems replace human co-workers? Both forms of solidarity—productive and labour—come under pressure, albeit in different ways.

First, productive solidarity is eroded because the AI systems that fill the roles of former colleagues do not support the interpersonal dynamics required for mutual recognition. AI does not have needs, intentions, or feelings. It cannot affirm your efforts, respond to your initiative, or share in your success. Even if the work process remains efficient, the structure of recognition and reciprocity breaks down. I may solve problems and deliver results, but I do not see my contribution reflected in others. My intentions go unacknowledged, my successes unshared. Over time, the social meaning of work fades.

Second, labour solidarity becomes harder to sustain when workers are physically or socially isolated. When AI takes over tasks once done by people, opportunities for shared experience dwindle. Without co-presence, there is no corridor chat, no informal exchange, no chance to recognize shared grievances or identify common goals. Workers become atomized. Without fellow human colleagues with similar interests and concerns, the possibility of collective action—already difficult in many corporations—becomes even more remote.

Third, AI agents are not partners in solidarity. They cannot be co-organizers or co-protesters. They do not suffer injustice or hold commitments. This matters because solidarity is not just about shared goals; it is about shared standing with others. When we are surrounded only by tools owned by our employers, we are left without the partners necessary for labour solidarity to emerge.

Fourth, AI increasingly is more than a passive obstacle to labour solidarity but a means of actively preventing it: algorithmic scheduling, productivity monitoring, and performance evaluation systems mediate many work relationships. These systems individualize assessment and suppress informal feedback loops. Workers are continuously evaluated by systems they cannot contest and that evaluate them against each other. The result is a depersonalized workplace in which workers are more easily surveilled, controlled, and ranked—but less able to reflect, critique, or resist as a group.

Finally, these developments intensify the power asymmetry between capital and labour. The owners of AI infrastructure gain ever more leverage, not only in directing work but in shaping the conditions of labour itself and atomizing the workforce. With workers dispersed, digitally mediated, and lodged into competition with one another, the traditional infrastructure of organizing—unions, assemblies, petitions—becomes harder to maintain. AI, in this way, does not merely replace workers; what it also does, in the memorable phrase used by Waheed Hussain is to “pit people against each other.”

Preserving Solidarity in the Age of AI

I have suggested that AI’s most corrosive effect on the world of work is not merely economic displacement or deskilling, but the erosion of solidarity. Much public concern has focused on whether AI will take our jobs or make them more precarious. Less attention has been given to what it means to disrupt the social fabric of work. But it is precisely this fabric—woven from patterns of deep cooperation, mutual recognition, and collective agency—that makes work a site of human flourishing. When AI systems disrupt the possibility of productive solidarity, they deprive workers of a central form of moral relationship: one in which individuals come to see their contributions as meaningful because they publicy serve the needs of others. When they undermine labour solidarity, they disable the mechanisms through which workers resist domination and affirm their equal status. These are not marginal losses.

If AI is deployed in ways that sever those relationships, then it does not merely reorganize labour; it disfigures one of the key social institutions through which people realize themselves as equal participants in a shared social world. Rather than merely urging better governance or more inclusive design—though those are important—the primary implication of this argument is that any legitimate vision for the future of work must preserve and protect these solidaristic dimensions. That means treating human cooperation, collective action, and moral recognition not as costs to be minimized, but as values to be cultivated. The future of work should not be determined solely by what is technically possible, but by what is worth doing together.

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What else I’m watching

After missing the earlier hype, Juri recently started watching (and enjoying!) Severance, a show in which employees of a mysterious corporation undergo a surgical procedure that splits their consciousness between work and personal life, creating two separate selves with no shared memories. It made him think that a workplace full of AI agents may not be the most dystopian future we should fear.

What else I’m listening to

To keep on top of how technology is changing our world, he likes listening to the New York Times’s “Hard Fork” podcast. And to rid himself of techno-dystopian thoughts after listening, he turns to the magic of human cooperation and creativity that is music—most recently in the form of string quartets and piano quintets by Brahms and Dvořák recorded by Emerson String Quartet.

It is hard to bring up status anxiety in American academia, although the anxiety is continuous with the wider social order:

• A social media account near filled with the latest accomplishments, telling a projected auditor, a fantastical me-reflection, who they are with, their in-group to which “you could only wish to belong.” In between these pathetic signals, a shot or two of the dog, a child, a gorgeous day framed neatly—no, perfectly—like an online advert. Is this the broad and inclusive love of knowing shared with all, open to the searchers, the messy fools, and hard-working people sunk in limbo?

• The long-last, big-time fellowship won. Now this one is on the inside, and when they write their next book, they display the inside prominently. They invoke the in-group. They make a showcase out of the things that were afforded. Are they sharing these with all? Does the rhetoric deny that? Are they claiming authority indirectly by association? There is no criticism of the institution that enclosed them.

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There is a nouveau riche of academia, an academic bourgeoisie: they love their distinctions, and they display them first prominently, then subtly (for the initiated). But knowing the world and co-constructing society demands the abandonment of cool, perfect, in-grown, closed-talking forms and spaces. The rough, messy, incomplete, and unpolished should prevail as part of the useful and the available.

These claims are complicated and demand some unpacking, as well as the diffuse charge. First, about knowing. The world is everything that is and the openness of time, and to approach it is to be open to everything that is changing. Thus, knowing the world cannot admit of perfection, for that is some closed thing.

But knowing is a social process, too, admitting of perspectives. Indeed, our perspectives on the world are something. Closed-talking reproduces the mistake of a closed “world.” It traffics in insular things, not the circulation of discourse open to everything and to change.

This much bears on reasoning, the consideration of everything so as to arrive at considerations in favor of believing something. Reasoning must not be closed-talked, or it preempts the consideration of everything and its changing, the acceptance of perspectives in time. Basically, it sucks for knowing when people’s social relations and sense of what’s out there changing get closed in.

And did I mention warmth? Being cool is a way to shut down perspectives. Being warm opens them up. Has it ever struck you how emotionally cold, even terrifying, it feels in the most status-anxious spaces of American academia?

Co-constructing society, of course, is a practical activity that begins with the practice of exchanging ideas of what to do and why. So, the theoretical things just mentioned come into the collective undertaking. But once one sets to actually making society together, again the challenges of perspectives, emotional generosity, trust, sharing, and respect sink in. These cannot be cold, perfectionistic, or exclusive, or they alienate ordinary people. There can be no a priori extraordinarity in a well-functioning neighborhood for all who live there. As Frank O’Hara: wear workshirts to the opera.

In recent years, there are baseless insinuations, sometimes claims, that academia is more elite than other sectors of American society. I find this hard to believe. American society is structured by status inequality, mainly through wealth. But American academia is not immune to this, that Rousseau called “inflamed” amour propre (in the words of scholar N.J.H. Dent), the vain love of “moi” in deep insecurity over one’s rank and comparative standing. Vanity, too, builds up comparative advantage through stacking status markers higher and higher. The insecurity downcasts the “nobodies” into the shadows outside the halls of high tables.

The thing is, if American academia wants to properly go democratic again as it has notably aspired at times in U.S. history, then one thing its champions should jettison is the closed murmuring of status. They must live a resolutely open life where knowledge is for all, especially those farthest from the academic game by dint of poverty, oppression, alienation, stigmatization, and shame. They must face the psychological and practical difficulties of those finding it untenable, although desirable, to pursue the mind’s original joy in seeking to make sense of the world. This is a catholic aspiration, lower case “c.” The “original joy” is Lucretius’s way, says Nussbaum, of understanding wonder and the child.

One way to open up knowledge transmission is to unlock institutions and to make them anew. This is the hard work, the main work. But it also requires people who, from inside the institutions, are sick and tired of their being-on-high or being-above-it-all, who find exclusiveness as toxic as patriarchy and racism. I am one of those people. I hate the owning of knowledge-institutions through status markers. The only good academic is as good as the trash collector. But you wouldn’t know it if you served as a janitor or dining hall worker in the hegemonic universities of the U.S.A. I did. In no sense was the knowing continuous across these roles and stations.

The continuity of knowing occurs not at the level of content but of subjectivity. It is that that brings the objectivity, not as quality, but as process, a way of being together through knowing. Everybody’s mind counts in bringing the object into society, making that thing of the world socially stable. It must be totally open and not at all shameful to ask any sincere question about this thing that joins us in our knowing.

Here’s one place that the toxins pool, though, and hurt. The who-is-better!, who-is-in?, who-is-cool??, who-is-brilliant!!! brings shame with them, the risk and threat of being “stupid,” of a perspective that doesn’t count, though your relation to the world through your mind is necessary for agency, dignity, and your world’s meaning, though it is precious as life itself. So, the insistent worry of status poisons learning from within. Academics must resolutely block it. How?

• Stop boasting about yourself on social media. Start a conversation instead of angling toward anyone.

• Take the fellowship and demand that it bring in, or open to, outsiders.

• Leave any conversation that is toxic and ignorant because it generates judgments about who-is-stupid.

• Avoid venues that are perfectionistic, cool, or slick. Go usefully messy, trust-generating (because good-willed), emotionally warm.

• If they act like they’re better than others, forget, challenge, or pity (be chagrined for) them.

• If they constantly occupy the spotlight, forget them; remember ordinary others.

• If you are too much in light, move into the shadows and be with others who are not spotlit by observing them.

But these are ad hoc, depending on particular contexts. There’s an ethical and a moral problem underneath that is quite general. The ethical problem is that (secretly, unavowedly) snobbish academics have lost a sense of the good of knowledge that contributes to the co-construction of society through socially stable things that everyone knows. This takes rigor, not only in accuracy, but in moral respect for the perspectives of others, not to bring them shame or oblivion.

And so the moral problem is that (secretly, unavowedly) snobbishness has lost the thou of learning as well as its mutualism. Every potential learner views the world and seeks to make sense of it to some degree—and this striving is part of the world changing. The sense-making seeks at the least inchoate reasons that ground judgments of what to commit to, and the commitments are forms of accountability to oneself, reflexive binding of mind into action for daily life. To face some such one is to face one seeking their own ends. You as a learner cannot be a mere means to an end, not consistently with who you as a learner are. This is a moral point couched within an epistemic one. It only gets stronger when I realize that you contribute to who I am directly by communicating with me or indirectly by way of your world changing. To respect your center of meaning is to respect myself.

Turn these things around—and the positive idea is this. To be an academic should involve seeking socially stable knowledge with each potential learner out of respect for each one and for the good of a society co-constructed by everyone’s ordinary intellectual labor. There’s an ethos in such a view, and it chafes against American academia today, even the rad profs. who populate it with cool vibes of in-groupness, but also the new authoritarian profs. who want to defend top-down judgment in the classroom based on a socially impoverished and elitist view of knowing. Both cannot handle the modest mess of socially stable knowing that includes all from where they are at, sincerely seeking—no shame involved at all, no pretense.

There’s a politics in such a view as sketched here, and it opposes the assault on academic freedom and support for research that is the norm this year from the new American regime. The view here implies academic freedom even beyond the profs., to the students, staff, and entire communities of a school, as universities have since the twentieth century actually aspired to protect. It implies governmental support to involve willing citizens and non-citizens in research and science, a continuity of education from core to periphery. Moreover, here the periphery of continuing education and early childhood education, of remote or impoverished schools, becomes central to the co-construction of society through shared, stable knowing. That the periphery becomes central breeds trust just as shared objects stabilize the sense of the world. Mutualism again.

The politics, too, like the ethos, demands that all have an equal piece of the American pie at least when it comes to learning. The politics here is of inclusion, moral respect, and of community constructed from differences in perspective. The implications of the politics come against excessive wealth inequality, unfair school funding and taxation regimes, and much more that extends beyond the scope of this reflection. A society that is co-constructed with everyone having a perspective on the world that must be involved in the ideal pursuit of learning cannot be the plutocracy or authoritarian-fascist arc of contemporary American tragedy.

Thanks to Jean Godefroy Bidima and Laura Hengehold for a conversation around mutualism, Misty Morrison for discussion, and to Rickie Allen for perspective.

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What Else I’m Listening to:

Show and tell this time is about a place my family stayed at recently near Ithaca, NY. The “Music Lover’s Barn,” owned, managed, and often used for family stays by Maddy Walsh and family. My family combined funds and saved up for this once-a-year vacation within driving distance of Cleveland, Ohio where we live. Though expensive to rent for folks like us, it was affordable when you think of there being five of us who stayed there and then all the culture and country of the place. Hotels would have cost more, and there was no air fare.

The barn has an insanely good vinyl collection, heavily used, and a stereo to match it with sound filling the space and bringing out dimensions of albums I had never noticed. We brought some mainstays of our own from when we used to live in Ithaca in the 1970s: Keith Jarret’s Köln Concert, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (original ECM recording), and even Born to Run, KC and the Sunshine Band, and heading out of the 70s, The English Beat. But the barn had a collection to dream over. We also spun CCR, Cream, Procol Harum (all thanks to my 89 yr. old dad who was with us), and lots of Neil Young.

That last one reminds me of my favorite song of 2000, too, proof that the post-punk 90s did not totally lose rock and roll’s warm and holistic (lovely) mess.

This article was originally posted on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association. We bring it to you as part of our new “From the Archives” initiative, highlighting selected works from the APA’s outstanding philosophical community.

You can learn more about the APA and its work here.

Academics and Wikipedia

Among many academics, Wikipedia has a poor reputation. It’s not uncommon for college professors to discourage students from using the site or penalize them for quoting, citing, or referencing it in their written work. Usually left unstated, the assumption behind this attitude is that, since it does not go through the channels of peer review characteristic of academic research, Wikipedia content doesn’t meet the right standards of accuracy and verifiability, and is, therefore, inherently unreliable. In this way, academia’s model of legitimation via peer review (in which quality control is ensured by vetted scholars in positions of institutional power) is pitted against Wikipedia’s more malleable and decentralized model (in which quality control is distributed across a wide network of agents known as “Wikipedians” who build content and fact-check one another collectively).

This resistance is hardly surprising given that we academics are trained from the earliest stages of our professional formation to equate scholarship with the system of peer-review that has ruled higher education, by some accounts, since the 1600s. For many of us, scholarship is synonymous with peer-reviewed works, which is to say, publications anonymously evaluated and approved by experts in the field. Measured against this standard, of course, Wikipedia’s model of knowledge production looks more than vulgar and unrefined. It looks positively dubious. By shunning legitimation by the few in favor of legitimation by the many, this model seems to do away with the very notion of expertise, and to confuse what the Greeks called doxa (opinion) for episteme (knowledge). Since anyone and everyone can be a Wikipedian, or so the argument goes, anything and everything can end up on Wikipedia, regardless of whether it’s true or false.

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While we cannot deny that Wikipedia’s model of knowledge production has its limits (which model doesn’t?), it is revealing that those who oppose it most feverishly tend to be those who are least familiar with it, with what it is and how it works. For instance, even critics who know that behind every Wikipedia page, there is a large community of contributors who fact-check, update, and cross-reference its claims may not realize that behind this community there is a complex constellation of rules, guidelines, and principles regulating the behavior of its members. Yes, practically anyone can become a Wikipedian. But this does not mean that Wikipedia is a digital Wild West where “anything goes.”

Thanks to its internal quality control mechanisms, Wikipedia often yields content that matches, in terms of epistemic merit, the best of what the academic system of peer review has to offer. As early as 2005, a mere four years after Wikipedia’s launch, the prestigious journal Nature published an article showing that entries on the new site surpassed those in the Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of accuracy and credibility, putting the newcomer above its more prestigious cousin as far as epistemic reliability is concerned. Since then, the line between academia’s centralized and Wikipedia’s decentralized models of legtimation has only continued to blur. Nowadays, more and more academics are incorporating Wikipedia into their courses in one way or another, with a few even suggesting that academic scholarship should emulate Wikipedia’s malleable approach to knowledge creation in order to meet the informational and pedagogical challenges of the new century.

Wikipedia In the Classroom

In early 2024, I partnered with Wiki Education (a nonprofit that seeks to improve Wikipedia) to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment into a course I planned to teach that summer entitled “Humanities 315: The History of Science From the Scientific Revolution.” Beginning from the Copernican revolution in astronomical physics, this course traced the evolution of modern science through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, paying attention to the progression of scientific concepts “from above,” as well as to the social, cultural, and political forces that shape scientific rationality “from below.”

At the time, Wiki Education was promoting an initiative designed to close a gap in Wikipedia’s archive. By Wikipedia’s own admission, scientists from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (Latinx, Black, Asian, Pacific-Islander, Indigenous, etc.) are significantly underrepresented on “the free encyclopedia,” resulting in a problematic imbalance. So, Wiki Education was on the hunt for professors who might be interested in incorporating an assignment into their classes that would put students to work on closing this gap. The basic idea was that students would become temporary Wikipedians and write biographical entries for influential scientists from minoritarian backgrounds who did not yet have a presence on the site. A two-in-one package, the assignment sought to educate students about the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia while giving them an opportunity to help address a concrete racial injustice tied to digital representation.

Given that my course dealt explicitly with how classism, patriarchy, and white supremacy have influenced the history of Western science (and given my own interest in the relationship between racial oppression and the politics of knowledge), I decided to apply. Upon hearing I was accepted, I quickly edited my course syllabus to make room for the five-week long assignment, which asked students to:

1. Create a Wikipedia profile

2. Familiarize themselves with Wikipedia’s “backend” software program (where the content that will eventually appear on the site is created, edited, and fact-checked)
   

3. Select a scientist from an underrepresented community from a list provided by Wiki Education

4. Conduct research on that scientist’s personal history, educational background, and contributions to the fields of science and technology

5. Write, in groups of four or five, an entry on that scientist adhering to Wikipedia’s policies concerning citations and references, and

6. Publish their entry (pending approval by the site)

Students didn’t have to reach the final stage (publication) to receive full credit for the assignment, but they did have to complete all the steps leading up to it. And they were graded based on how far into the assignment they got and on the quality of their individual contributions to the collective writing effort. (I should mention that, as part of the initiative, Wiki Education provided support in the form of a $700 stipend and two staff members who helped answer student questions about how to create entries on the site).

Summer came and went, and the assignment was by and large a success. Though there were hiccups along the way (some students produced entries that didn’t meet Wikipedia’s standard for publication, while others didn’t bother creating a profile in the first place), the majority of students reported enjoying every stage of the process.

For starters, many were thrilled to learn about how Wikipedia pages are made. Although none of my students were Wikipedians prior to the class, all of them reported visiting the site on a regular basis, even when professors explicitly warned against it. Wikipedia was already a key part of their online experience, a recurring digital landing spot. Thus, seeing the backend program, familiarizing themselves with the platform’s rules and regulations, and seeing a collectivist model of knowledge production in action helped demystify the site, which in turn gave them a more nuanced understanding of its various strengths and limitations. For example, the assignment enabled them to see that even if Wikipedia content isn’t put through the grind of traditional methods of peer review, it is subject to norms of accuracy and verification that make it more reliable than the average blog, website, or social media profile. At the same time, this behind-the-scenes access clarified for them that while Wikipedia may be good for general information about a large variety of topics, it’s not the place to go for original research and innovative discoveries.

“Real” Writing

The most common refrain I heard from students as we debriefed about the experience at the end of the summer semester was that they were proud to have finally worked on “something real.” “I felt like this was my first real assignment in a college class,” one said. Another followed with: “It was more real than writing the usual essay.”

I confess: that I didn’t respond well to these claims. I balked at the suggestion that traditional classroom assignments (the weekly response, the midterm essay, the final project, etc.) were somehow less substantive or less real than assignments that simply happened to have the name of a recognizable organization attached to them. Was writing for Wikipedia readers really more “real” than writing for me, or were my students just awe-struck by the fact that they were contributing to one of the most famous online platforms?

It was a fair question. Or so I thought.

After mulling over their comments for a couple of days, however, I realized that my reaction was…well, reactionary. Rather than listening to what my students were telling me about their experience of the assignment, I chose to worry about what I thought their comments meant about my teaching style, which regularly features the kinds of assignments they characterized as not-so-real. By projecting this insecurity onto my students, I failed to listen to them and to do what every professor should aspire to do, which is to meet students halfway in conversation. To course-correct, I had to ask myself a question that demanded more careful consideration: In invoking the so-called reality of this assignment, what were my students flagging for me about assignments, homework, and education more generally? What did this concept mean to them such that it seemed to illuminate their experience? No sooner than I framed the problem in this manner, I came to see their comments in a new light–no longer as veiled criticisms of my pedagogy, but as sincere critiques of our education system and what traditional approaches to pedagogy do to students’ relationship to writing.

From an early age, students are taught to write for their professors. Every student knows that what they produce in the classroom will rarely, if ever, be seen by anyone other than the person who has the power to give them an “A” or an “F.” Thus, for most students, writing is tangled up from the get-go with complex dynamics of power, discipline, and submission. Given the asymmetrical nature of the student-teacher relationship, it’s only a matter of time before students learn to give their teachers what they (the students) think they (their teachers) want. So, students master a skill that isn’t easy to unlearn. They learn to write exclusively for “the Professor,” that amorphous character whose power in the classroom is virtually unchecked. From elementary school to college, the task is the same: Here is a topic, now write about it for an audience of exactly one (where the “one” in question is the person with power over you)!

One consequence of writing under these conditions is that students are never asked to imagine what they might have to (or want to) say to a broader audience, by which I mean an audience composed of different kinds of people, each of which with their own reasons for wanting to listen in. This, I now believe, is what the Wikipedia assignment offered my students for the first time in their lives. It offered them an audience that wasn’t “the Professor,” an audience of not-me. And my students experienced this as a breath of fresh air. This new audience freed them from me, but it also freed them to imagine a host of other subjects in the position of “reader,” which altered their psychological landscape. I still remember one student in particular, a humanities major, who said: “It’s kinda cool that my mom might read this. I know she’ll want to show it to her friends and to my aunts. Maybe it will help her understand what I’ve been doing in college!” For that student, this assignment was more real. It was more real because it had the power to touch her social world and maybe even make it tilt. Had any other assignment ever done that?

Furthermore, the mere prospect of having one’s writing “out there” (read: in the World Wide Web) was also transformative for some students. For them, the overarching question was no longer “What should I write in order to get the grade I want?” but, instead, “Knowing that strangers may read what I write, what do I actually want to say and how?” Even when my students didn’t reach the final stage of publishing their work on Wikipedia, the possibility that their work might have a life beyond the classroom was enough to shake things up and give them a glimpse of what another relationship to writing might look like.

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Conclusion

Of course, I do not want to romanticize the Wikipedia assignment. Some of my students were annoyed by the assignment from the start. Others found the backend program counterintuitive and hard to use (and on this point, I concur). But even the students who complained about the nuts and bolts of the task later reported feeling happy about having participated in a pedagogical exercise with a political mission: helping scientists from underrepresented backgrounds receive the recognition they deserve.

In effect, I could say that the Wikipedia assignment turned my classroom into an interesting house of mirrors where diversity was reflected off of multiple surfaces at once. Firstly, I, a professor of color, was teaching a class about the historical exclusion of minorities from the modern scientific project. Secondly, I was teaching this material to a highly diverse group of undergraduates attending a Hispanic-Serving (HSI) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI). Finally, I was asking these students at this institution to help correct one of the ways in which this historical exclusion continues to be felt in the here and now—namely, the “gap” in Wikipedia’s coverage of the history of science and technology. My hope is that by learning to move between these layers of reflection, students came out of my summer class with a better appreciation of the gaps that have shaped our past and continue to inform our present.