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Month: May 2025

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The Decline of Cinema Manners—and What It Means

I can’t speak for everyone, but here in the UK, it feels like things are starting to unravel. Not in some grand, apocalyptic sense but in the slow erosion of the basic norms and rituals that hold a society together. One reason I feel this might be the case is that I recently spent a week in Geneva.

The contrast to the UK was striking. In Switzerland, there’s a palpable sense of social cohesion. The streets are clean. Graffiti is rare. Public transport runs like clockwork — and is, for the most part, quiet and respectful. I struck up conversations with strangers in the park and was invited to play chess with them. A tour guide even noted this collaborative mentality during a day trip to Chamonix when he espoused Switzerland’s efforts to unify its people through mandatory military service, direct democracy, and a general sense of the country being something its population own, not just reside in.

Back home in the UK, that sense of shared ownership feels diminished. And nowhere was this more obvious to me than in a recent visit to the cinema — a place that, oddly enough, I think serves as a telling microcosm of our broader social fabric.

I went to see Thunderbolts* (don’t worry, no spoilers) and had to shout at someone mid-film.

Now, this isn’t a call to arms about movie etiquette per se, though etiquette is at the heart of the matter. Rather, it is a piece in the vein of the philosophy of cinema. Not cinema as in the medium of film but — and somewhat echoing Smith’s work on the medium of books in Portable Magic — cinema as the physical building and the experience of cinema-going.

I used to thoroughly enjoy the cinema. Growing up in the wilds of Devon, unless one was into fishing or drinking scrumpy in a barn, there wasn’t a lot to do before you could drive somewhere more interesting. However, I could take a bus, make a 20-minute journey, and go to the cinema. To a young me, that was always special. Hell, I even went to see 50 First Dates at the pictures (which, for an Adam Sandler romcom, is surprisingly acceptable). There was just something about the decorum of it. The ritual of paying for the ticket. The little thrill of sneaking in snacks bought from somewhere else. The finding of your seat in the dark. And, most importantly, the formality and rules once the film starts. It is this last part that, I think, really made it an experience. No talking. No annoying people around you. No making unnecessary mess. Turning your phone off or setting it to silent mode. All these rules exist to both avoid irritating other moviegoers and to help you focus on what you’re meant to be focusing on: the movie.

These aren’t just arbitrary codes of conduct. They are, in a sense, part of what philosophers from Rousseau might call a “social contract.” A shared agreement, albeit implicit, about how we ought to behave to allow others to enjoy the same freedoms we wish to enjoy ourselves.

These rules are still in place today, mind you. And just like back then, there are reminders before the movie gets going about how to behave. However, if you’ve been to a cinema recently, you might not know it. Cinemas are now noisy, with people constantly talking in hushed or not-so-hushed tones. People will snatch glances at their phones. Others will rustle around with bags of food or clothing or whatever in a way that defies logic and certainly the notion that you don’t disturb others when the film is on.

This degradation of cinema etiquette hit me squarely when I saw Thunderbolts*. At this screening, someone near the back started watching TikToks. Sound on. Bright screen up. Yes, I yelled at them to turn their phone off. And yes, I didn’t hear a peep from them for the rest of the film. However, the fact that they thought watching something on their phone during a screening was acceptable, and the fact that they had to be reminded by someone to stop doing it, boggles the mind.

Part of my dismay stems from a sense of purpose. Why would you pay to go to the cinema to watch a film on a big screen, to then decide to watch something else on a far smaller screen which you could watch at any other time? You’ve made the decision to go to the cinema and paid the entry price; why not commit to the experience?

The other element of my dismay relates to the social cohesion I experienced in Switzerland. There, it seems like people know the rules and, to a certain degree, conform to them. They work together as a society rather than against each other as individuals because they are all stakeholders, and they know it. Yes, I know my perception is coming via visitor-tainted glasses, but it still seems like a reasonable observation (and one which I’m sure my tour guide would support). In the UK, however, it appears that the individualistic attitude is so prevalent and all-consuming that it now corrodes spaces where the rules are clearly defined and exist for the betterment of all, such as the cinema.

Again, the rules are displayed on the screen before the film begins. This is probably not needed though, as who doesn’t know the basic rules of a cinema. Yet, there are an increasing number of people who want to flout those rules. Who don’t seem to know or care how their behavior affects others and how it ruins the movie experience for so many. Who can’t seem to keep their eyes away from their phones for more than 40 minutes before needing to catch a glimpse. If whatever is happening on your phone is so vitally important that you can’t tear yourself away from it, then why go to the cinema at all? What are you hoping to get out of the visit?

Ultimately, the cinema works as a useful microcosm of society as a whole. The darkness and feeling of isolation loosen one’s inhibitions. After all, if no one sees what we’re doing, we’re more likely to do what we want. The cinema is a sandbox in which the rules are clear, the goal is obvious, and if people behave themselves, communal enjoyment can be achieved. When selfish or ignorant actors enter this area, however, everyone suffers. Not only those whose moviegoing experience is ruined by those flouting those age-old rituals but also those disobeying the norms, as they surely cannot get everything from the movie if their attention is constantly being diverted to other places.

The joy of the cinema, as an adult, is not just the reenactment of something that brought me joy as a child. It’s also the groundedness and isolation that it provides. While the movie is on, nothing else should matter. The outside world is just that, outside. All of one’s focus should be on the big screen, and in a world in which our attention is constantly being pulled in one direction or another, this isolation is a blessing.

I like the rules of the cinema. I like the basic decency that they are meant to convey. I like the communal experience of witnessing a good story with others. And I like how easy it is to get these things right. All this makes it that much worse when others cannot.

So yes, I think the cinema is a litmus test. When people can no longer sit still, remain quiet, and respect others in a movie theater, it’s a sign that something deeper is fraying in the social fabric.

What do we do about it? I don’t know. Maybe the first step is to notice. To mourn the erosion of shared rituals. And to insist, in our quiet ways, that the social contract, however modest its form, still matters.

Even if it means yelling at someone during Thunderbolts*.

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Should Canada Join the Golden Dome?

Canada, despite a rash of democratic, economic, and separation crises, must make a difficult choice with regards to its neighbor to the south. While the United States has, on the one hand, threatened Canada with annexation and is currently attempting to push its industrialized heartland into oblivion, it has also recently offered a new deal with regards to continental defense in the form of the “Golden Dome” proposal. As new technology brings new military threats, concerns about missile and drone defense loom larger than ever before. But what (and who) should Canada be defending itself against? Does it make sense to further integrate Canadian military capabilities with a country that prefers it didn’t exist?

On May 20th, Donald Trump announced planes for the space-based missile defense system known as the “Golden Dome” to protect America from long-range and hypersonic missile threats and from drones. The desire for a missile defense system comes after increasing concerns in recent years about the threat of hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones which have proved very effective on the battlefields of Ukraine. Similar in ways to Israel’s iron dome concept, the system would include a huge network of sensors, satellites, and ground-based (and possibly space-based) interceptors to eliminate aerial threats to the North American continent. Following the announcement, Trump said that Canada has been asked to join and that the Canadian government has expressed interest. Given Canada’s reluctance to sign on to similar projects in the past and a rocky relationship with the second Trump administration, one wonders whether Canada should once again reject the proposal or decide to break with tradition.

On the one hand, Canada has good reasons to refuse. As mentioned, Canada has been reluctant to join major missile defense projects in the past. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration attempted to get Canada to host nuclear missiles. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) which was turned down by Canada. In 2004, the Bush administration proposed another missile defense system which was rejected by Prime Minister Paul Martin. The reasons for these rejections can be complex, but each time the proposal ran counter to Canadian skepticism of military procurement in general and heightened Canadian fears about getting too close militarily to the United States.

Many may not realize that modern Canada is the result of the fact that the American Revolution was more of a civil war than a revolution within a single nation. Modern English Canada is culturally tied to the losing side of that civil war, the loyalists who fled the United States and wished to remain British. While Canadians like Americans, they have always been wary of getting too close or being too American. Meanwhile, the Trump administration threats of annexing Canada as the 51st state have pushed these sentiments into overdrive. If Canada must think of the United States as a potential threat rather than an ally, the prospect of military integration looks problematic.

There is also the fact that Canadians are skeptical of large military spending. While the administration has said that the Golden Dome will cost under $200 billion dollars, Space Force has said the costs could be closer to one trillion dollars. Meanwhile, Canada is facing budgetary issues owing to the Trudeau administration’s spending and lack of economic growth, as well as the United States’s recent trade war.

Given this, Canada is in no hurry to invest billions of dollars in American defense contractors. Tariffs have already made Canada consider a pause on its purchase of the F-35 jet after a decade of dragging their feet over the decision to purchase them. Not only are there concerns about giving money to American companies for this, but also the fact that Canada will not control any spare parts or maintenance on the jets. Any support of the Golden Dome project will no doubt haunt Canada should it only benefit the American economy and limit Canada’s ability to make independent defense decisions.

On the other hand, missile and drone threats are increasing, and we are living in an increasingly perilous time. Missile defense would be beneficial for Canada, who is also looking to limit defense spending to 2% of GDP in line with NATO targets. They are also looking to modernize NORAD, the continental air defense system that already includes Canada. Investing in the Golden Dome could not only mean better NORAD integration, but it would also presumably mean that Canada would have a larger voice at the table. Currently, for example, Canadian sensors and radar provide early warning for aerial attack, but Canada is more limited in terms of how to respond to threats without the United States.

There are also political reasons to suggest we might be interested. Given Trump’s unhappiness with Canada’s lack of military defense spending and continued threats to our economy, there’s reason to give the appearance that we are willing to play ball. Despite administration projections, it’s unlikely that the Golden Dome proposal will come to fruition by the time Trump’s time in office ends. Verbal commitments now may not lead to any more concrete investments in the near future.

Not only could joining the Golden Dome project yield some economic and industrial benefits, it may also offer leverage when it comes to other international issues such as Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic and the opening of the Northwest Passage. If the United States wants Canada to host and maintain a bunch of equipment, this may provide greater strategic influence for Canada than if we were to refuse to participate from the start.

No doubt many Canadians would be happy for a US missile to intercept an attack on a Canadian city, and it isn’t as if there are great options for Canada to develop its own missile defense system – particularly given our skepticism towards military spending. Still, it’s hard to jump into bed with someone who has expressed a desire to annex your country. Not only is it a difficult policy decision, but it is also a difficult political decision as the announcement comes just as Canadians’ views on America have soured. For a Prime Minister who just ran on a campaign of defending Canadian sovereignty (“elbows up” being the popular slogan), it sends a contradictory message to voters to join the Golden Dome initiative. It’s said that moral decisions are not about making easy choices between good and bad, right and wrong, but instead hard choices between competing values and uncertain outcomes. Canada has a difficult decision to make.

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Why Flourish?

Are you flourishing? According to the results of the Global Flourishing Study, if you’re a young person in a Western industrialized nation like the US then there’s a good chance you aren’t, at least in comparison to people of older generations or those in other countries. The study comes from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, and while 2025 marks the first year of the program it is already making headlines for its surprising conclusions about which populations are flourishing and which are not.

The Global Flourishing Study is not the only study that has recently painted a pessimistic picture of young Americans, with the most recent World Happiness Report showing happiness trending in the wrong direction, as well. It has also identified numerous responsible causes of declining happiness, including inequality and a lack of social services, people feeling disconnected from others, declining levels of trust, and, of course, excessive phone use. The Global Flourishing Study identifies some common factors that also stand in the way of flourishing, such as feelings of being disconnected from one’s community, but also identifies additional factors that are specific to flourishing, such as a lack of religious affiliation or sense of spirituality.

While the study itself does not explicitly provide any guidance about how one could increase one’s flourishing, this has not stopped commentators from offering their advice. Writing in The Atlantic, for example, Arthur Brooks argues that there are three things you can do to promote your own flourishing: prioritize close relationships with friends and family in face-to-face settings; work on your spirituality; and avoid the pursuit of material gains.

While different people will likely draw different conclusions from the study and commentary, we should take a minute to consider: can we really draw conclusions about our own flourishing from a global flourishing study? And should we be motivated by a pursuit of greater personal flourishing at all?

You might be wondering: what do we mean by “flourishing,” anyway? The Global Flourishing Study defines the concept in terms of six variables: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. To measure how much people are flourishing participants are asked to rate their satisfaction with and the quality of different aspects of their lives, which are then tallied and amalgamated into an overall flourishing score. While the researchers acknowledge that “flourishing” is somewhat nebulous and that no scale is perfect, they take the six dimensions to encompass some of the most important qualities that determine whether someone is doing well.

Participants were also asked a series of questions about their habits and experiences, including questions about their childhood, education, and attendance at religious services, among many others. It is the answers to these questions that potentially point to ways to increase our flourishing by identifying the actions or qualities that positively correlate with high levels of flourishing. Indeed, this is how Brooks identified religiosity as a factor that correlates particularly highly with high levels of flourishing, arguing that we ought to move away from being a “none” – Brooks’ (rather condescending) term for those who profess no religious affiliation.

Can we apply any general lessons from how other people flourish to our own lives? Consider Brooks’ advice again: if you’re religious you might find his recommendations comforting. If you aren’t religious – or have had negative experiences with organized religion – then it’s difficult to see how attempting to foster your relationship with religion would improve your flourishing. Of course, we might instead choose to draw some more general conclusions: instead of focusing specifically on attending more religious ceremonies or affiliating with a specific religion, we might say that people should spend more time working on the aspect of their lives that has to do with meaning and purpose. Indeed, this is Brooks’ recommendation for the non-religious among us, arguing that we should focus on finding meaning in our lives in some other way.

But now that the advice has become more abstract it’s either banal – “you should find more meaning in your life” is not exactly groundbreaking stuff – or vacuous – “to have a more meaningful life try finding more meaning in your life.” We also risk reasoning in a circle. After all, if we define your flourishing in part by how you feel about your meaning and purpose, then it’s just true by definition that improving your feelings about your meaning and purpose will increase your flourishing. We thus don’t have an independent reason to follow Brooks’ advice beyond his telling us that we should.

To illustrate why this is a problem, consider a new definition of flourishing partly defined by how much mini golf one plays: the more mini golf you play and the more you like it, the more you’re flourishing. Telling you that you ought to play more mini golf to increase your flourishing is thus good advice in a sense, but it’s only good advice because of the definition of flourishing we’re working with. If someone asked us why we’re so insistent that they play more mini golf and we respond, “That’s how you flourish,” they likely will not be motivated to pick up a putter.

We might also wonder whether the variables the researchers in the Global Flourishing Study have chosen are the right ones. Of course, the frequency and quality of mini golf playing probably shouldn’t be in our definition, and there is indeed something intuitive about the idea that a sense of meaning is important for one to flourish. But it’s not clear that the six variables listed above fully account for someone’s flourishing.

For example, something that we might think is missing is one’s epistemic state: in other words, how much one knows and whether one’s beliefs are true. For example, consider a person who is doing well financially, physically, spiritually, etc., but is massively deceived: maybe they’re in an isolated cult, or just wrong about basically everything. It is hard to see how such a person could be considered to be flourishing.

We can, of course, argue about and refine the definition of “flourishing.” However, given that we have chosen to think about flourishing in terms of a set of specific variables, we can also ask a more conceptual question: why should we try to flourish at all?

While it would sound strange to say that we don’t want to flourish, it’s also odd to say that I am doing something because I want to flourish. We can certainly be motivated by a desire to improve aspects that are part of flourishing: for example, I might enroll in a fitness class with the dual motivations of wanting to improve my health and relieving my guilt about never working out. The result may be that my flourishing increases. It would seem odd to say, though, that I am enrolling in a fitness class because I want to flourish. If flourishing really is just a measurement of a collection of different variables and nothing over and above the sum of its parts, then it’s not clear whether our level of overall flourishing should motivate us at all.

So where does this leave us? We might think of flourishing as an interesting overall measure of how well things are going for different people in different parts of the world. But whether we should take any advice about how to live our own lives by comparing ourselves to those who are flourishing is less clear, or at least less straightforward. While it is tempting to look for correlations between the actions of those who score high on a flourishing scale and draw recommendations from it, perhaps the most useful advice we can take from the Global Flourishing Study is that every so often we should introspect on what we think is going well in our lives and what could use some improvement.

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Corruption, Bribery, and Public Confidence

In my graduate program, most of the PhD students shared a single communal office. At the end of the semester, when we had papers to write and exams to grade, it was common for us to do our work in the office – a show of silent solidarity and an offering of mutual moral support. On one such occasion a colleague of mine, call her M, was working in the office when one of her students came by. This student wanted to thank her for the semester and offered her a gift card.

M, however, refused the gift. The graduate students at Binghamton University are employees in the State University of New York system, thus, state employees. As part of ethics regulations in New York, state employees and elected officials are prohibited from accepting gifts of greater value than 15 dollars. I suspect that, the law aside, M may have refused the gift anyway. As educators, we were tasked with grading student materials as fair and unbiased as possible. As informed people, we were aware that factors such as the desire to reciprocate a good deed or to treat people you like well may shape judgments in unconscious ways. As philosophers who study morality, we were predisposed to have a concern for, and the ability to find, ethical violations.

On Sunday, May 11th, ABC News reported that the Trump Administration is preparing to accept a gift of a Boeing 747-8, worth about $400 million, from the Qatari royal family. The report further elaborated that the administration’s intention is to use the jet as the new Air Force One through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term – which would require a retrofit process that could take multiple years and cost nearly one billion dollars. Ownership would be transferred to Trump’s presidential library before the end of his term, with the Air Force covering any costs associated with the transfer. When questioned on the ethical implications of accepting the plane, Trump noted that only a “stupid person” would refuse a “free, very expensive airplane.”

Critics contend that accepting the plane, particularly with the intention to transfer ownership to the Trump presidential library, would violate the Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution states that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.” Congress has not approved receipt of the plane from the Qatari royal family and it is hard to see the plane as anything but a gift.

However, the moral critiques have been more varied than legal critiques. In its initial reporting, The New York Times said receipt of the plane “rais[es] substantial ethical issues.” Similarly, the outlet described a plan for the top holders of $TRUMP, a meme coin marketed by the President and his family, to privately dine with the President and tour the White House as a “foreign influence opportunity.” However, some other news outlets, politicians, and even Trump supporters have described these acts as bribery and corruption. Eric Lipton, reporter for The New York Times, defended his outlet’s framing, contending that “corruption requires explicit quid pro quo” thus stating that corruption is effectively only limited to bribery.

Lipton is correct, to some extent. We should be careful about how we refer to the receipt of a jet, perks for owners of the president’s cryptocurrency, and the president’s sons striking business deals across the Middle East in the days leading up to the president touring the region. Without evidence of an explicit quid pro quo – I’ll give you that if you support this policy – we cannot know for certain that these are bribes. For instance, we cannot be absolutely sure that the Trump administration reaching a deal to allow the UAE access to advanced AI chips from companies such as Nvidia was an exchange for the approval of a new Trump tower in Dubai, announced a week prior. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence.

But to limit corruption to bribery is to give an impoverished account. Bribes are a species of, not a synonym for, corruption. For instance, suppose a mayor had the final decision about which company would receive a contract to renovate a public building. Imagine that the mayor decided to award the contract to a construction company recently founded by his brother. This occurs despite contractors with a long history of successful work offering more competitive bids. This is plainly corruption, even if his brother did not offer the mayor something in exchange for this contract.

As this example shows, corruption is not just arranging quid pro quos. Corruption occurs whenever a public official/employee makes decisions based on private interests, preferences, or feelings, rather than the demands of the office/position. The mayor awards the contract to his brother, not for the good of the town, but because it aligns with his private goals. M demonstrated a lack of corruption not because her student offered the card in exchange for a good grade, but rather because accepting the gift card could affect her ability to function impartially in her role.

Of course, one might contend that accepting a gift does not necessitate that one’s private interests, preferences, or feelings will shape one’s decisions. Perhaps some individuals are especially integrous and will not let gifts sway their opinions. Indeed, one might even contend that publicly accepting gifts is a good thing – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson defended acceptance of the plane arguing, in part, that because it is happening “out in the open” there is not a cause for concern. The idea here might be that openly accepting a gift invites the public to carefully scrutinize decisions that an official makes regarding the party that gave the gift. This would not occur if the gift were a product of a backroom deal.

However, this argument misunderstands the true danger of corruption. Corruption is not a cause for concern merely if it results in decision makers endorsing policies for private reasons. This is certainly part of the issue. But the larger cause for concern surrounding corruption is that it erodes public confidence in institutions and those that occupy positions of power.

Elected officials and public employees are often referred to as public servants – they are supposed to act in the interests of the public. When they openly receive gifts or profit from decisions that they make, the public must now question all subsequent decisions that officials make. As a result, the public loses confidence that decision makers truly have their best interests at heart. This is why the appearance of impropriety or a conflict of interest is as damaging as its actual occurrence; both leave those subject to a decision uncertain that those who made that choice did so for the right reasons.

In 2024, only about 20% of Americans self-reported that they trust the government to do what is right most of the time. In this environment, civic life deteriorates; citizens no longer view the government, even a democratic one, as a cooperative project in which we all engage. They instead view it as something alien, and maybe even hostile, to the citizenry. As a result, it cannot be trusted. The true danger of corruption lies here.

Because of this, there is a sense in which an openly corrupt act is in fact worse than a secretive one. The politician who, say, takes a bribe during a backroom deal seems to acknowledge the severity of the situation. He recognizes that his act is wrong or at least will hurt his public image. Hence its secrecy. But the public figure who openly engages in corrupt acts believes that his acts are not inappropriate or that they will not damage his reputation. This suggests that the damage to public confidence has already been done. Faith and trust in officials has already collapsed. The openly corrupt acts are just the mask falling off.

Perhaps, then, what openly corrupt acts demand is not merely a response to those offenses. What they may demand is a response to all instances, large or small, where citizens are justified in perceiving that a public official could be placing private interests over those of the public. When a candidate for chair of the DNC declares that his party only takes money from the good billionaires, when $15 billion dollars of private funding were spent on political campaigns in 2024, when a bi-partisan group of senators sold literal millions of dollars of stock prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and numerous bills banning congressional stock trading fail to even reach the floor despite overwhelming public support, restoring public confidence in the integrity of elected officials may require addressing all potential sources of corruption. The most severe and flagrant acts may just be the symptom of a larger underlying disease that must be remedied.

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Should You Thank Your AI?

In late April, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, made waves with a response to a question about the financial and environmental cost of saying “please” and “thank you” when interacting with Artificial Intelligence — “Tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know.” The practice is common, with over two-thirds of users observing such social niceties when asking AI questions, according to a February survey. Altman may simply be preaching the power of politeness, but it could be for reasons that are anything but common.

Is Altman right? Should we thank ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek and the other AI chatbots out there? Can ethics give us any guidance?

Entities that we do not believe need to behave ethically themselves, but should be subject to moral considerations, are generally called “moral patients.” We tend to think they have lesser (but still some) moral status. For example, we do not expect newborns and animals to behave ethically, but we often adopt certain moral standards in regard to their treatment.

But current Large Language Models, the umbrella under which tools like ChatGPT fall, are not good contenders to be moral patients. There is considerable complexity in debates about AI consciousness, when it might happen, and how we would know. Nonetheless, we are not there yet.  While current AI chatbots has been trained on vast amounts of date to emulate human speech and behavior, as yet, experts assert that they have no consciousness, no inner life, they are not in control of their actions, and they cannot suffer or feel pain. (Some of these matters have been previously discussed in The Prindle Post.)

Absent characteristics like consciousness or even the ability to be offended, there seems to be no special reason to treat AI chatbots politely based on the kind of thing that they are.

Altman’s response, however, suggests another kind of concern. We may have consequentialist worries — an ethical analysis based on the consequences of our actions — about saying please and thank you to AI chatbots. Each additional “token,” a chunk of characters, that the AI has to analyze in a question costs energy. Accordingly, adding polite words to questions both costs AI companies money and, of more direct ethical relevance, causes environmental damage. Prominent AI tools like ChatGPT need incredible amounts of electricity and water for cooling.

If we are interested in limiting the harms our actions cause, then reducing energy waste and environmental damage through being less polite with AI chatbots may make sense. Although stripping off a word or two has nowhere near the energy saving impact as, say, not asking the question at all, or simply using a standard internet search instead which costs ten times less energy.

Altman’s “you never know” however hints at another worry. We may be polite to an AI out of fear that it is actually conscious, or even, that the AI overlords are coming soon and it is in our own interest to be nice. This motivation echoes the famous Pascal’s wager in philosophy.

The 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that we should behave as if god exists. For if god exists, but we do not believe, then we suffer an eternity of misery and miss out on an eternity of bliss. The wagers provide no evidence for the existence of god one way or the other, but rather holds that believing in god and behaving accordingly is the safest bet. (There are a number of commonly seen objections.)

By similar reasoning, we might assert that even though the chances of ChatGPT being secretly conscious, or turning into an all-powerful overlord, are extremely small, the potential harms are so serious that we should nonetheless act if it could be the case — especially for relatively low-cost actions like saying “please” and “thank you.” It does somewhat notably depart from Pascal’s wager in that the consequences are merely very bad, and not infinitely bad, and therefore can be outweighed by other more likely concerns. In fact, given the tiny likelihoods involved, and the probably minimal impact that saying “please” and “thank you” will have, there is likely not a compelling probabilistic argument about avoiding serious (if rare) consequences at all.

However,  how we treat AI is not just about AI, it is about ourselves. The philosopher Immanuel Kant made a famously strict moral framework in which only actors possessing a certain kind of rationality, like humans, deserved moral consideration. Unsettlingly, even for those in the 1700s, this implied that we have no moral considerations towards animals. Kant’s response to this concern was that we owe it to ourselves to treat animals well. We injure our moral selves, when we ignore compassion, or an animal in pain. It becomes easier to slide into callousness with humans.

Whether Kant gives animals enough due is a matter of debate, but regardless, the same concern applies with AI. If we want to embrace a general ethos that treats people with dignity and respect when we make requests of them, then we should stay in practice when dealing with superficially human-like AI.

There is potentially a dark side to this argument about AI chatbots. Their very human-likeness can be a problem. Already, there are cases of people losing themselves to delusional relationships with  ChatGPT, or trusting chatbots uncritically. The scope of this problem is not yet clear, but perhaps we do not want to aspire to a very human-like relationship with the technology at all, but instead have a well-delineated set of norms and practices for engaging with these chatbots. We may want to adopt norms that avoid anthropomorphizing them.

Large Language Models are still new. Ethical analysis, especially ethical analysis based on the potential consequences of treating AI a certain way, is correspondingly young. This is even true for seemingly minor issues like saying “please” and “thank you.” It also speaks to a broader challenge with AI. The technology is already changing the world. It is good to consider how AI will change society — what jobs will it replace, what problems will it solve, what kind of surveillance will it enable, how much energy will it use? But we also need to consider its moral impact. What will AI do to our ethical selves?

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The Merits (and Misgivings) of Gen-AI Art

Whenever discussing tech ethics, the most common thing I get asked about is the use of generative AI for artistic purposes. Previously, I’ve discussed the case of Jason M. Allen and his first place AI-generated entry at the Colorado State Fair. However, a great deal has happened since then in terms of technological innovation, wider public adoption, and legal wrangling. Marvel Studios, for example, was recently accused of using AI to generate posters for their Fantastic Four film given some strange “choices” – you be the judge. But Marvel is not alone; numerous other creators have been caught in the crosshairs. Is all the outrage justified? What is actually at stake? Why are people so up in arms?

Let’s consider some related concerns. Many arguments against Gen-AI art start by asserting that AI is inherently incapable of producing art, as it lacks human creativity or some other human-ness about it. But we should be clear about what we mean. As I have previously discussed, there are over 20 different theories of consciousness out there in the academic world, but there are very good reasons for accepting the fact that these algorithms are just automated statistical models and not something that is conscious. Ultimately, generative-AI is a tool for humans to use, just like a camera, a paintbrush, or a chisel. Just like those tools, they will not work without human input and whatever product they produce that will be accepted as “finished” or “complete” or even “satisfactory” will depend on what the human wanted to get out of it. If critics of AI art are going to charge that a person cannot make art with it, “because they typed a few buttons” then why can a photographer make art by clicking a shutter? This isn’t to suggest that anyone who uses Gen-AI instantly becomes an artist, but neither does anyone with a camera become a photographer. In other words, critics need to explain why some types of art can utilize technology while others cannot.

But, in a similar vein, some critics charge that AI cannot produce art because it is incapable of understanding human emotional qualities that are a necessary component of artistic expression. AI cannot understand or replicate the emotional intention behind art. First, it is important to note that in addition to the field of generative AI, there is a whole field of affective computing devoted to getting computers and AI to understand human emotions. There’s no obvious reason why insights from affective computing cannot build emotional understandings into an algorithmic model and have that influence the output. It is also known that AI-generated art can produce emotional responses in humans that we might expect any artform to do. Anyone who has seen the “priceless pancake” video on the internet can probably appreciate the level of emotional intuitiveness involved. If artworks are supposed to induce certain emotional responses in the audience, a clear argument needs to be made why AI is incapable of communicating the desired emotional effect, particularly if it is further modified by humans to achieve this end.

Critics may also charge that because generative AI is trained on the images of other artists, it cannot truly be creative. But creativity is an ambiguous concept. While gen-AI models do take their cues from the inputs they are given, it is worth noting that they are also not completely deterministic, nor do they simply reproduce works that they have been trained on. There is always room within the statistical mesh of relationships a model forms to produce something new; generative AI is capable of creating novelty out of what has come before. Ultimately, whether something is creative or not depends on what we “see” in the work.

There is also a sense that gen-AI art cannot produce art because of the intellectual theft or plagiarism of pre-existing works. But we should be careful to separate economic and aesthetic concerns. I wonder how critics would feel about a model trained entirely on artworks that exist in the public domain, or an artist who trains a model to produce new works using only their artworks as training data. Would a lack of copyright concerns in these cases still preclude the idea that such models could produce (or at least contribute to) real works of art?

Copyright exists to protect artists when it comes to commercializing their work. Another person should not be able to reproduce that work and sell it such that it would compete with the artist. However, it must be a very similar reproduction to qualify as infringement. Something done “in the style of” a work does not violate the original’s copyright. Cuphead, for example, does not infringe on Disney’s intellectual property despite obviously borrowing from features of early Disney cartoons. Likewise, a work’s particular structural components are not protected. For example, Ed Sheeran successfully defended himself against a copyright infringement lawsuit on the basis that chord progressions cannot be exclusively controlled.

These considerations complicate the claim that generative AI is effectively “stealing.” Images used as training data are not completely reproduced. Rather it is the statistical patterns of lines, cues, and pixel patterns that a network will learn. Also, a single image will have an infinitesimal impact on the overall output on a model trained on entire libraries of content. This is why it is difficult to argue that incorporating an image in a data set represents a clear case of copyright infringement. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the practice is ethical, but we do need to clarify which kind of problem it is: in some cases it might be a trademark issue, but, perhaps more often, it is a free rider complaint – developers use artists’ images without compensation in such a way that it threatens the artist’s livelihood and endangers art as an institution.

Still, we should be careful to distinguish the economic and industrial issues involving working artists from the issue of the place of AI in art in general. It’s no good to let our feelings about how AI might affect working artists affect how we evaluate AI-generated art as an art form and its potential to contribute to the world of art. We might fear a future where no one can make a living working as an artist, but we must also recognize that average people can now explore their own aesthetic interests thanks to AI’s democratization of art. Fewer people make a living as artists, but more people make art for themselves. Must we assume that this would leave the world of art worse off? Surely we can be sympathetic to working artists and think that they should be compensated or protected, without concluding that AI is necessarily bad for art in general.

This isn’t to insist that there are no ethical concerns regarding our current use of generative AI to create art. Rather, my point is that we must be especially precise in identifying what the nature of our objections is. We need an answer that doesn’t create more problems than it solves – by either overexpanding copyright or suppressing artistic expression.

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Should AI Democratize Art?

While AI-generated art has been controversial since AI tools became widely available, OpenAI’s introduction of an updated version of its image generator in ChatGPT has brought a fresh round of scrutiny. Many have been particularly critical of a trend where users generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli movies, arguing that the images created by AI in the signature style are soulless, derivative, and even insulting, given that Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki has explicitly stated his dislike of AI and AI-generated art. As users experiment with the tools, new trends have cropped up – such as the one where users create doll versions of themselves – alongside new criticism. Of course, there are evergreen worries around AI use in general, and AI art trends have only exacerbated concerns around the devaluation of artists and massive increases in energy consumption.

Not everyone has been so critical. Some commentators and communities online have defended AI as a creative tool, and feel resentful when others accuse them of creating “slop.” One such defender of AI-generated art is none other than Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In a recent interview Altman acknowledged that although the onset of AI image generation must be “a little bit of a bummer” for artists, it nevertheless has been beneficial for those who might not otherwise have the time or resources to create or commission art:

“I think the democratization of creating content has been a big net win for society… And this is something that I very deeply believe about the power of technology, which is giving everyone more tools, making things easier, lowering the barriers to entry, does significantly increase the number of people that can contribute to society and we all benefit from that overall.”

Altman claims that AI can democratize the creation of art. But is democratization always a good thing, and is it enough to justify AI-generated art in light of its criticisms?

What does it mean to “democratize” something, anyway? We can say that something has become democratized when it has been made available to most or all people in a society who wouldn’t have had access to it otherwise. For example, one of the touted benefits of widespread internet access was an increase in the democratization of knowledge, whereby many more people could not only consume but also contribute to knowledge production. Although there have certainly been downsides to letting everyone share their views with everyone else, the internet has removed many barriers to knowledge dissemination, and allowed for a much wider range of voices to be heard.

Altman seems to be arguing that AI will bring similar benefits in terms of the creation of art. Not all people are artists, after all, and so having access to AI image-generating tools could provide many more people with the opportunity to express themselves creatively. As a result, society could benefit from many more creative voices in ways that it would not have been able to otherwise.

However, we can ask two questions about Altman’s argument. First, does art need to be democratized? And second, does AI democratize art in a way that’s worth pursuing?

Many critics of AI-generated art answer the first question in the negative. For example, it’s common to find online commentators who note that instead of using an AI tool to generate art one could simply pick up a pencil, paintbrush, or any other artistic tool and medium instead. Art is thus already democratized: nothing is preventing the vast majority of people from creating art and sharing it with the world, the argument goes, they are simply unwilling to learn how to do so.

Of course, there is still a barrier to entry for most people when it comes to creating art that accurately expresses their creative visions. A lot of people have simply not had training or experience creating art, and so cannot bring their artistic visions to life. In this sense, there is a way in which artistic creations are still out of reach for most people.

This is perhaps more in line with what Altman and many AI art supporters have in mind when they say that AI democratizes art: it democratizes the creation of artistic creations that look impressive or more accurately capture one’s ideas by significantly lowering the barriers for the majority of people. But now we face our second question: is this kind of democratization desirable?

Consider an analogy to another very undemocratized endeavor: playing basketball at a high level. For most people, there are few barriers to playing some form of basketball, but there are only a select few who can play it well. What it takes to play at the highest levels of basketball is partly decided by one’s genetics, but arguably many people could be much better at basketball if they put in more time and practice.

Given this inequality among the people who do play basketball well and those who don’t but want to, we can ask: when is it desirable to democratize opportunities to play basketball? Here’s a possible answer: when it creates opportunities for those who lack them due to factors outside of their control. For example, someone might want to play basketball but be unable to because there are no basketball courts in their neighborhood or opportunities to play with others. In these situations, we should want to help reduce barriers to entry, say by investing in social programs and infrastructure.

One way that democratization is desirable, then, is when it helps to rectify injustice. This is one of the reasons why the democratization of knowledge via the creation of the internet was such an important ideal: it would help provide a voice to those who would not have been able to have been heard otherwise, given that they lacked the means to disseminate their knowledge in other ways.

However, the kind of basketball democratization that looks to create social programs and infrastructure does not necessarily address the barriers that prevent some people from playing basketball well. We then might want to democratize basketball playing in another way: we could, for example, give every NBA hopeful special prosthetics to allow them to jump higher or shoot the ball more accurately, which would lower the bar for entry into competitive basketball for a huge number of people. This kind of democratization attempts to even the playing field by providing opportunities to participate that people wouldn’t have had otherwise by compensating for a lack of skill.

While the first kind of democratization – the one that attempts to rectify an injustice – seems desirable, the second kind – the one that merely compensates for lack of skill – does not typically seem to be worth pursuing. The type of democratization promised by AI seems to fall into the second category: for the vast majority of those who use AI to create art, the barriers to their meaningful artistic expression are a lack of talent or practice, not because they have been unjustly denied opportunities.

There is another component of Altman’s claim, though: that society will benefit from people being able to create art much more easily. Here is a potential argument: say I generally lack artistic ability, but I believe I have good ideas for a work of art. AI can then help bring that idea to life, and other people may then be able to benefit from experiencing it, in a way that they would not have been able to otherwise. Is it not valuable, then, to remove the barriers that prevent potentially great art from being put out into the world?

Here, though, the question of how much a person is involved in the creation of AI-generated art becomes important. AI image generators do not so facilitate a person’s creation of artistic media but instead create those media on a person’s behalf. The results might be something interesting or entertaining or inspiring, and it might be beneficial to society to be more interested, entertained, or inspired. These benefits, however, are not attributable to democratization: AI does not lower barriers for people, it replaces them.

This is not to say that all AI-generated art is necessarily devoid of value. However, the argument that attempts to justify AI-generated art by appealing to democratization ultimately falters: AI can certainly create more art, but if it democratizes the creation of art, it doesn’t do so in a way that’s worth pursuing.

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Why the Baby Bonus Is Xenophobic

Last week, The New York Times reported that White House officials were considering ways to persuade American women to have more children. Ostensibly, this is in response to the US’s near record low annual fertility rate of 1.63 children per woman – far below the 2.1 children required to maintain a stable population. Among the suggestions was a “baby bonus” that would see $5,000 given to every American mother after she gives birth. The proposal was met with approval by self-described “Fertilization President” Trump who stated that it “sounds like a good idea to me.”

Praise, however, was not universal. The proposal was widely derided as tone deaf to the real reasons for the declining birthrate. It turns out that, for many, the prospect of raising a child in a country that does not guarantee universal healthcare, paid parental leave, or procreative rights is not all that appealing. What’s more, the meager incentive offered by this “bonus” is nowhere near sufficient to offset such concerns. On average, it costs around $19,000 to have a baby in the US. And parents will spend a further $300,000 raising that child before the age of 18. The cost of daycare alone is currently $315 per week for a toddler. That’s $16,380 a year – or 38% of a single parent’s median income.

But those aren’t the only reasons for hesitancy in bringing a child into the world. The existential threat posed by climate change is, for example, a growing factor in our procreative decision-making. Ninety-one percent of parents report that they are concerned about the crisis, with 53% of those saying that it has impacted their perspective on having more children. Put simply, potential parents are reluctant to bring their children into a world that is simultaneously on fire and under water.

Ultimately, the relevance of climate change runs in two directions. Parents aren’t just concerned about how the climate crisis might affect their potential children, but how their potential children might affect the climate crisis. Previously, I’ve argued that the climate crisis creates a moral obligation on us to drastically reduce the number of children we’re having. Why? Because it’s one of the most effective things we can do to mitigate the harm.

In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to ensure that our future global carbon expenditure does not exceed 456 billion tons. If we were to divide that budget equally between every human currently in existence, we’d each have a lifetime allowance of about 55.5 tons CO2. Unfortunately, those of us in the US currently emit around 14 tons CO2 annually. At that rate, we’ll burn through our share of emissions in less than four years. These figures make stark the obligation that each of us has, as individuals, to minimize our contribution. And, while certain actions like recycling, going vegan, or giving up your car can make a difference (reducing our emissions by 0.21, 0.8, and 2.4 tons CO2 per year respectively), these don’t even come close to the whopping 59.8 tons that can be saved by choosing to have one less child.

Of course, the environment isn’t the only thing that matters. There might be countervailing reasons to have children regardless of the environmental harms wrought by procreation. Chief among these reasons is the continuation of our species. To paraphrase an argument that often crops up in these discussions: what’s the point of saving the planet if there’s no one to save it for?

But here’s the thing: we’re good. While we might have concerns about our low domestic fertility rate, the global rate is currently sitting at 2.3. In fact, at more than 2 billion people, Generation Alpha is set to be the largest generation in human history. And, while this global fertility rate is declining, our world population is still projected to balloon to more than 10 billion by the end of the century. What’s more, there’s reason to believe that a steady reduction in the global population might be a good thing. Estimates put the ideal sustainable global population at somewhere between 2-3 billion, with an upper limit of no more than 7.

But perhaps this is all academic. Something like the baby bonus isn’t intended to address questions of global population policy, but rather specific concerns within our own country. As mentioned above, the current fertility rate in the US is well below replacement level – and this might be cause for concern. A shrinking – and aging – population can lead to a strain on social security and health care infrastructure, labor shortages, and a reduction in economic growth. These are legitimate concerns.

But having more children isn’t the only solution. If the global population is doing fine, but our domestic population isn’t, then the solution seems simple: encourage immigration. Yet, ironically, these concerns about our dwindling domestic population are currently being coupled with some of the strongest anti-immigration policies in recent memory. Maybe this isn’t all that surprising. As Guardian columnist Zoe Williams notes:

“…all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.”

In this way, a focus on domestic procreation – and not on increased immigration – smacks of xenophobia, and, perhaps, betrays the real values motivating policies like the “baby bonus.”

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The Missing Information Age

While Trump has been back in the White House for only a short time, he has already begun spreading misinformation and other harmful falsehoods. We have, of course, been through this before. Trump’s first presidency was supersaturated with lies, and, from all appearances, his second term will follow suit.

However, Trump has decided to continue waging his war on the truth from a new flank. In addition to promoting falsehoods ranging from subtle to ridiculous, he is also beginning to expunge data from government websites. The justification for these actions appears to stem from Trump’s fixation with DEI programs across the government, which he has ordered to be discontinued. Since the beginning of 2025, reporters have identified numerous government websites with data that have been deleted, including information about climate change and public health, the economy, and missing trans children, among others.

Trump’s actions in his first term supercharged projects dedicated to identifying and combating misinformation – false and misleading information that is spread unintentionally – and disinformation – false and misleading information that is spread with the intent to deceive. These projects are still very much worthwhile. However, if Trump’s first term sparked the misinformation age, his second threatens to start the missing information age: a time when information that conflicts with the agenda of those in power is simply erased.

As many journalists have noted, expunging information from government websites can result in serious harm. Missing data about climate change could make it more difficult to prepare for environmental disasters, and missing information about food safety is clearly dangerous. As noted in The Verge, deleting the names of queer and transgender children from The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children seems like nothing less than an attempt to “eradicate the recognition of trans people in the US.” The deletion of research and information around DEI initiatives not only threatens to obscure the benefits that those programs produce but also creates an ersatz version of history, written from the point of view of the intolerant. If misinformation muddies the proverbial water, missing information evaporates it. The result is a two-pronged attack on the health of the information environment.

Missing information also contributes to the creation of data voids: situations in which there is little or no high-quality information available about a subject. Data voids are potential breeding grounds for misinformation, since if the only information available about a topic is from low-quality sources, then anyone who looks for information on that topic has a much higher risk of being misled.

Of course, just as we should expect to come across some degree of misinformation in our lives – people are fallible, after all – we should not expect all information about every topic to be around forever. Records are lost, websites are discontinued or shut down, media fails to be archived, etc. Information sometimes goes missing, and that’s just a part of life.

The actions of Trump’s administration, however, are not merely the consequences of an information ecosystem where information is sometimes pruned. Intentionally deleting information from government websites is a deliberate act intended to obfuscate, silence, and censor.

The focus on misinformation that began in earnest in 2016 not only warned us of the potential consequences of false and misleading information about important issues but also suggested that consumers of information had some obligation to respond to the threats. Insofar as we are aware of factors that can easily produce harm, we ought to take steps toward mitigating or avoiding those harms, even if that just means exercising vigilance when it’s warranted. In practical terms, that might mean that we ought not to share or otherwise engage with information we’re uncertain about, or simply that we ought to be putting our trust in those who are best informed.

It’s more difficult to know how to respond to the problem of missing information. Misinformation is something that can be identified (or, at the very least, we can discuss how best to try to identify it) and mitigated by being fact-checked and corrected. While people will debate how best to do this, at its core misinformation is still something, a presence that can be detected.

Missing information, on the other hand, is an absence that is much more difficult to detect. It’s hard to know how to combat the lack of something, especially if we don’t always know what’s lacking. So what should we do when presented with a threat that doesn’t add falsehoods, but instead subtracts truths?

It might not seem like a task that should be assigned to individual consumers of information. The current problem of missing information is attributable to bad actors who are arguably abusing political power, and so part of the solution needs to come in the form of political or legal actions by those who have the power to enact them. At the same time, there are still some things that those affected by missing information can do to fight back.

For instance, some people and organizations have already begun taking action, and have worked towards making sure that archives of now-deleted documents are not themselves erased. Preserving, rehosting, and sharing information that is at risk of being deleted are thus some ways to help combat missing information.

Fortunately, when it comes to the internet, it is difficult to remove anything in its entirety. Unfortunately, those who consider the government a trusted source may not be able to find important information as easily, and with Trump’s obsession with rolling back DEI initiatives, it’s unclear what the consequences of sharing that information might be.