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Month: June 2025

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A Duty to Pop?: On Our Obligation to Hear from Others

In my previous column, I surveyed recent criticisms of social media platforms, such as Bluesky, where the userbase skews toward one end of the political spectrum. Many argue that these platforms are echo chambers and that continuing to use them has various negative effects for the users, so users ought to leave for less polarized platforms.

Drawing on the work of C. Thi Nguyen, I argued that social media platforms, at worst, enable users to create epistemic bubbles, and thus one can resolve problems associated with them by seeking additional information from other sources. Further, I contended that polarization on social media platforms is just another facet of our general background polarization, so it is not obvious why we ought to pop this particular bubble first.

However, one might argue that there is something troubling about knowingly remaining in any epistemic bubble. Thus, even if we cannot show that the epistemic bubbles which social media lend themselves towards are especially troubling, then our mere knowledge of them implies that we ought to pop those bubbles. Further still, adding new voices and perspectives to one’s social media feed is much easier than moving, starting a new hobby, etc. So perhaps we should strive to pop epistemic bubbles in general, but we ought to specifically target bubbles on social media platforms because they are the least costly to pop.

But what precisely is troubling about knowingly remaining in an epistemic bubble? One argument is that it inhibits someone’s search for the truth. In the second chapter of On Liberty, John Stuart Mill offers a famous defense of the freedom of thought and discussion. Often echoed in arguments about free speech today, Mill contends that allowing open and broad discussion of any idea, however fringe, is vital for the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. Even repugnant and widely rejected ideas, Mill contends, must be carefully examined lest our rejection of it become a dead dogma.

Consider the following. Most people in liberal democracies endorse racial equality, the idea that an individual’s race is irrelevant to her moral worth, character, and merit. Yet, if someone is pressed to justify this belief, they may find themselves pausing; while reflexively endorsing this belief after living in institutions that also endorse it, many find themselves unable to articulate why this view is more defensible than the alternatives. A proponent of Mill would argue that racial equality has become a dead dogma. It is the cultural default view, so to speak, and any who question it even for the sake of argument may face social punishment. As a result, many may know that they accept it as true but cannot explain why it is true.

So, without open discourse and discussion, people may find themselves unable to defend their beliefs or explain why alternative views ought to be rejected. This may not make a difference for us personally, but it might leave some in a troubling situation. If people are not able to articulate why their beliefs are true, those beliefs may be on more precarious ground. Perhaps part of the reason for online radicalization is that people have not been inoculated, so to speak, against views on the radical fringes; when one cannot articulate why they believe a basic moral tenant of their society, encountering a cogent argument against its truth may be a profoundly troubling experience.

So how does this connect to epistemic bubbles? The less that we encounter positions we disagree with, the more error prone we may become in our beliefs. The less frequently that our beliefs are challenged, the less we are forced to seriously scrutinize them. Without scrutiny, we may come to accept falsehoods without realizing it. However, so long as we remain within an epistemic bubble, we will not encounter challenges to our beliefs. Thus, knowingly remaining in such a bubble appears troubling from an epistemic perspective.

(Of course, it is worth noting that Mill seems to view our challengers as well-meaning truth seekers. If our interlocutors are trolls, motivated by hate or simply hoping to win an argument via rhetorical tricks, rather than discovering the truth, it is not clear that defending our beliefs against theirs benefits us and may in fact be an epistemic detriment for any audience to the discussion.)

The epistemic importance of encountering different beliefs may dovetail with a second troubling aspect of knowingly remaining in an epistemic bubble. When we perform an action, typically we do so based on our beliefs. If I am hungry, I enter the kitchen because I believe that I can find something to eat there; if I believe the fridge is empty, then I would leave in search of food. What I believe shapes what I do.

Of particular relevance here, though, is the link between beliefs and public policy. The policies which people endorse and the candidates for whom they vote are shaped by their beliefs, both about what is true and what values we ought to uphold. Further, the policies we collectively enact will impact the lives of others. When it comes to matters like, say, health care policy, who lives and who dies depends in part upon which policies that we adopt. Thus, one may argue that we have a moral duty to seek the truth in matters where our beliefs and thus our decisions have the potential to significantly impact others, as they do in the policy domain. To the extent that we knowingly remain in epistemic bubbles, particularly bubbles on matters relevant to policy, one may argue that we are violating our duties to others, specifically, our duties to hear arguments from differing perspectives, provided that hearing such accounts plays a role in discovering the truth.

This argument offers an important insight but its conclusion may be hasty. Ethical theories often distinguish between two sorts of duties. Some duties are perfect duties. Perfect duties are ones that we can complete. This is because perfect duties are the duties to refrain from wrongdoing. For instance, simply by refusing to kill others, you complete your duty to not kill. Other duties are imperfect duties. In contrast, we cannot complete these duties because they require active undertakings, rather than just refraining. For instance, most believe that we have a general duty to provide aid to others in need. However, in the world’s current conditions, no matter how much you aid others, more need will always remain. Thus, most theorists contend that imperfect duties have latitude; because you cannot complete them, you have some choice in when and how to fulfill them.

The distinction between perfect and imperfect duties now helps us see clearly the issue with the earlier argument. It seems that our duties to hear arguments from others in the pursuit of truth must be imperfect duties; we cannot possibly hear all arguments, nor can we discover all truths. Thus, this duty has latitude. We are not required to always pursue it, even if we have a general epistemic reason and a moral duty to seek out the perspectives of others, especially those who disagree with us.

As a result, it seems the arguments that we ought to leave platforms on which we have created epistemic bubbles may overreach. If our sources of information and outreach towards those who think differently from us are indeed epistemic bubbles, then we act culpably both as seekers of truth and as members of society. But imperfect duties, like our duty to hear from those we disagree with, are not ones that we must follow at all times. So long as we are doing enough to discharge the duty in other places and at other times, we have permission to opt out at least sometimes.

This suggests that the order to abandon social spaces free from ideological conflict is too hasty. Social media is ultimately, like any other technology, a tool. How we ought to use it depends on our purposes. Confronting alternative viewpoints needn’t be our sole driving motive. To make the point, we might consider a humorous post from Bluesky user Leon that describes a party with ideologically like-minded friends as an echo chamber. However, as long as you are putting in an effort elsewhere to engage with those who think differently than you, you should not be troubled that some spaces you occupy, digitally or physically, are not ideologically diverse.

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Hearing Voices: Social Media and Echo Chambers

Following Donald Trump’s re-election, many users of X questioned whether they should remain on the platform given Elon Musk’s extensive public and financial support of Trump. Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found that, following Musk’s endorsement of Trump, Republican-leaning accounts had significantly more views than posts by Democrat-leaning accounts. This was true even when both had a similar amount of likes and reposts, suggesting X’s algorithm amplified the reach of Republican-leaning accounts. Further still, many users felt the platform changed in other ways after Musk bought the site – prominent users regularly post pro-Nazi content, hate speech on the site increased by as much as 50% and, troubling for creators hoping to promote their work, X’s algorithm suppresses posts with external links.

Many users switched to a platform called Bluesky. Previously by Twitter, Bluesky was initially an experiment into “decentralizing” social media platforms. Developers aimed to create an open protocol which independent social media platforms could then adopt, allowing their users to access content from other platforms running the same protocol. After Musk bought Twitter, Bluesky became an independent entity, launched a closed beta in February 2023, then released publicly in February 2024. After the U.S. presidential election in November 2024, the website’s userbase expanded at a rapid rate, rising from about 10 million users in September, to over 30 million by the end of January 2025.

Given that many users left X for political reasons, some criticized the exodus. Discussing this in December, Kenneth Boyd helpfully chronicles some critiques that users who left Twitter for Bluesky were willfully entering an echo chamber. However, Boyd concludes that our duties to preserve our own well-being can outweigh our duty to engage in discourse, especially when the other party in the discourse is motivated by hatred or a desire to troll.

But in recent days, critiques have re-emerged. An op-ed in The Washington Post argues that liberals, by migrating to platforms like Bluesky, undermine their political causes. Billionaire Mark Cuban, in re-posting this editorial, commented that minimal diversity of thought is hurting the platform’s growth. Similarly, an opinion piece in Slate contends that having only like-minded voices on the platform inhibits both the Democratic party and growth of Bluesky itself.

Given the recent resurgence in discourse, it is worth revisiting the issue. Ultimately, there are two questions we must consider: 1) How do we spot an echo chamber? 2) Is it wrong to stay?

Let’s begin by considering what an echo chamber is. In doing so, I rely on the work of C. Thi Nguyen. Nguyen distinguishes between echo chambers and what he calls epistemic bubbles. Although we often use “bubble” and “echo chamber” interchangeably, Nguyen contends there are important theoretical and practical differences between them. According to Nguyen, one is in an epistemic bubble whenever one’s regular sources of information exclude certain perspectives. The term “bubble” is apt for two reasons. First, it accurately describes the situation. Bubbles clearly divide the interior and exterior. In this case, the perspectives covered by one’s community are inside the bubble, while those excluded are outside. Second, it makes the solution clear. Bubbles may be popped; once something pierces them, they are destroyed. To leave an epistemic bubble, one must merely be exposed to information and perspectives normally not covered within one’s community.

However, echo chambers pose a greater challenge, argues Nguyen. Among the features that differentiate echo chambers from epistemic bubbles are that echo chambers utilize what he calls disagreement reinforcement mechanisms. Unlike epistemic bubbles, echo chambers promote distrust of all information that comes from sources outside the chamber. To accomplish this, influential figures in the echo chamber may frame otherwise contrary information in a way that promotes both rejecting that information and further trusting the prominent voices within the current community.

For instance, imagine an isolated religious community. The leaders instruct followers that the outside world is corrupted, most people are possessed by wicked spirits and these spirits will try to tear adherents away from the community, so they too become corrupted. Suppose a member flees the compound and encounters an outsider. This outsider, upon learning about this religion and its teachings, cautions that this is a cult and the member should never return. This may, in fact, cause the member to gain further trust in the community from which she fled – the leaders accurately predicted what the outsiders would say and recommend. Hence, this warning serves as a disagreement reinforcement mechanism, as encountering a different perspective reinforces one’s trust of the prominent perspective in the echo chamber.

Although Nguyen argues there are other differences between echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, this is perhaps the most important and troubling feature: echo chambers encourage distrust of outsiders and provide members of its community with an explanation that enables them to dismiss all dissent.

With this taxonomy in hand, we can get a clearer handle on the situation for Bluesky and other social media platforms. Unless a platform is designed such that a) simply by virtue of being on the platform, users must consume content that b) encourages them to distrust and reject external sources of information and c) dissenting voices are either not present or their posts are suppressed, algorithmically or otherwise, then it does not seem that the platform itself is an echo chamber. At most, users can create or enter an echo chamber within the platform. But ultimately, without intervention by the designers of a social media platform, no platform is an echo chamber. These communities require intentional construction.

Further still, a platform is not automatically an epistemic bubble either. One may create an epistemic bubble on a platform through one’s choices about who to follow and content to consume. If a social media platform tends to disproportionately represent certain perspectives, then one may unintentionally create an epistemic bubble in their feed. But this happens naturally in many domains – where we live, shop, and worship (if we do) tends to correlate highly with our political beliefs. Given that we are likely to form friendships with people who live near us and share physical spaces with us, then social interaction in general has a propensity to create epistemic bubbles, at least when polarization is part of our background conditions. So, epistemic bubbles on social media platforms may simply be one symptom of a larger problem. And it is unclear why we ought to address this symptom first. Perhaps we should see a flood of columns exhorting liberals to take up hunting, or ads informing conservatives about the quality of Trader Joe’s proprietary brand products.

Of course, one might contend that this is simply a matter of semantics and that it does not matter whether a platform is an epistemic bubble or an echo chamber. But this misses the larger importance of the point. Whether a given community is an echo chamber of an epistemic bubble determines what we must do to resolve it. As noted earlier, we can simply pop epistemic bubbles by exposing those within one to the perspectives and views that it does not cover.

Echo chambers, however, pose a greater challenge. The presentation of previously unheard information may in fact lead one to double down. Nguyen argues that breaking out of an echo chamber requires first developing a prior trusting relationship with the individual who presents the contrary evidence. If one views the presenter of information as knowledgeable, trustworthy, and well-meaning, then they must weigh this contrary information against the echo chamber’s disagreement reinforcement mechanism. In time, this may cause them to lose confidence in the most prominent voices and beliefs within the echo chamber. Unfortunately, this process requires a lot of time and a great amount of patience on the part of the party outside the echo chamber.

Thankfully, though, if my above analysis is apt, (most) social media platforms are epistemic bubbles at worst, rather than echo chambers. Thus, one may not need to leave the platform. They must simply ensure that the platform is not their only source of information. Of course, one might argue that one has significant reason to leave a platform even if it merely lends itself to creating an epistemic bubble. We will consider ways of arguing this in my next column.

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Should Algorithmic Power Come With Responsibility?

Content mediation platforms are some of the most powerful tools in the world. They control the flow of global news and information, with the ability to silence world leaders like the President of the United States or the President of Brazil. Since these websites have worldwide reach, the owners of these sites do as well; this gives them reach that allows them to, for instance, move money markets overnight. There is evidence to believe that these websites hold the emotions of their users in the palm of their hands. And these websites generate profit on an unimaginable level based on user behavioral data.

Everyone knows that with great power comes great responsibility. Yet, on content mediation platforms, sites like X, Facebook, Bluesky, and Google, users are told they own their content (see their terms of service: X, Facebook, Bluesky, Google). In the same breath, these platforms give themselves the right to use, profit from, alter, and destroy that very content while also avoiding taking moral and legal responsibility for the content.

There is an obvious asymmetry between power and responsibility here, and, in the spirit of holding a critical eye towards powerful entities, we should take a closer look at this.

It is widely known that these “free” internet services generate profit from advertising and data collection. So while they are free to use, users pay through their participation in a massive data collection operation. One necessary component in this economic equation is user-generated content. Without user-generated content, no one would use sites like X, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok. The content that users create and post draws attention. The attention that a platform can command attracts the interest of advertisers who pay for that attention. Meanwhile, every interaction along the way is recorded and used to reinforce algorithmic prediction and monetization to keep the cycle going.

The question we should ask is simple: If user generated content is the key to a company’s economic success, why do we allow them to claim credit in the form of profit and social power, but refuse burden in the form of legal liability and moral responsibility?

There is legal precedent that provides part of the answer to this question. If companies were seen as the owners of the content posted by its millions (and in some cases billions) of users, there would be countless possible cases against them that would ultimately cripple their ability to function at the scale they currently operate at. It is hard to imagine the internet as we know it today if companies that mediated content and information were also held legally liable for everything that is posted on their website.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives interactive computer service companies (e.g., social media companies) broad immunity from content posted by a third party and gives them permission to censor information in good faith. The law establishes a distinction between a company like Facebook or X and that of The New York Times. The former companies are not seen as publishers and therefore are not held accountable for the content posted on their platform; whereas The New York Times is a publisher which gives them obligations that social media companies do not have.

But we should still ask: why shouldn’t social media companies be responsible for what is posted on their website? Why does it matter that this would radically reshape the internet? If companies could not scale up to the order of hosting content posted by hundreds of millions of people, would that be so bad?

One could argue that this would stifle the free flow of information and speech on the internet. Social media companies could no longer claim to be neutral platforms and would become publishers of ordinary people’s speech. However, this could open up the possibility for another kind of internet: a decentralized, diverse, and abundant online ecosystem with a larger number of communities. The status quo seems to assume that free speech requires centralized spaces on the internet where the majority congregate. But, why should free speech require this centralization?

Let us set aside predictions about what the internet would like if companies were held accountable and shift our focus to some conceptual asymmetries that deserve scrutiny.

Ownership, both legally and philosophically, typically entails a bundle of rights that often include the right to use, profit, destroy, and exclude. Platforms reserve the right to do all of these in some respect, other than exclude (since creators can always post elsewhere). However, in the unlikely scenario where a creator posts the only copy of a piece of content on a platform and the platform decides to remove this content, they could in theory exclude use of this content through its destruction. Thus, platforms can act as de facto owners.

These companies claim most of the economic benefit of ownership and, according to their ToS, can use, modify, and destroy content posted on their website in perpetuity, on known technology, as well as not yet invented future technology. This allowance is beginning to create new controversy as generative AI use cases are being scrutinized.

If companies receive most of the benefits of ownership, it would be conceptually symmetrical for them to receive most of the burdens. Figuring out the proportional relationship between benefit and burden is a difficult task, but we can start with an easier question: Are platforms taking on even a minimally acceptable amount of responsibility?

We need not look to first principles or objective standards to answer this question. We already know how these companies view themselves relative to the content they host: they explicitly claim that they are not owners and bear no responsibility for the legal or moral nature of the content they host. If a plausible minimum responsibility is some amount above zero, then it seems that most companies are doing their best to avoid even that.

This concern is moral. Platforms monetize engagement. Engagement is often driven by controversial, inflammatory, and harmful content. Insofar as “bad” content (immoral, unlawful, or untruthful) drives traffic and profits, the moral question cannot be ignored: Why are platforms seen as the appropriate recipients of reward for the engagement driven by both good and bad content (e.g., in the form of profit, influence, and power), without being seeing as the appropriate recipients of blame for that same content (e.g., in the form of liability and moral responsibility)?

While it is easy to suggest these companies take on more liability and moral responsibility, it is much harder to understand what form that responsibility should take. Let me offer two ideas that, while imperfect, gesture towards some possible implementations. First, we could compel companies to acknowledge the fact that they are not neutral conduits of raw information, contrary to what they sometimes like to tell us. We could also demand that they, at the very least, remove categorical claims that establish the sole moral and legal responsibility lies with the users who post the content.

Second, we could borrow legal terminology from copyright law and devise a vicarious liability policy that better acknowledges the financial role that all content, both good and bad, has for content mediation companies. For instance, if a video that gains millions of views turns out to contain illegal content or content that violates the ToS of a website and gets removed, we could come up with a reasonable approximation for how much revenue this video helped create for the company. Asking a company to return the money generated from illegally posted content seems analogous to reclaiming profits made on stolen goods, and does not seem like a widely outrageous demand.

Of course, one might argue that not every case of deserving credit entails deserving blame. For instance, a lifeguard may deserve praise for saving a life but not deserve blame for failing to save a life. However, there is a distinction between the lifeguard and the social media website; the lifeguard did not contribute to the perils of the swimmer, whereas it is arguable that social media websites do contribute to harms in society.

To give just a few examples of this harm, Jonathan Haidt has argued that the rise of social media platforms is causally linked to a rise in anxiety and depression (especially amongst teens). In 2022, Amnesty International made the case that Facebook’s algorithms substantially contributed to violence and discrimination against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. And in her 2024 book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, Renée DiResta makes a convincing case for why sites like Facebook contribute to the proliferation of conspiracy theorists and sites like X contribute to the formation of online mobs, both of which can contribute to real, offline harm.

As the World Wide Web evolves, we are seeing an increase in wealth disparity and power grow as a result. Ultra-wealthy technocrats have influence over politics and have a deep canyon of resources to pull from to avoid accountability when they face pressure. While it is no small task to regulate the internet while simultaneously keeping it free from unjust censorship, it is imperative to continue looking critically at these asymmetries in power, profit, and responsibility, and ask ourselves: is this the internet we want?

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Buyer Beware: The Myth of the All-Powerful Consumer

On Thursday, June 12th, a Boeing Dreamliner 787 piloted by Air India crashed, killing more than 260 people. But, for certain internet searches, Google’s Artificial Intelligence overview asserted (incorrectly) that the June 12th crash was actually an Airbus airplane — Boeing’s main rival company. This was especially true for searches that looked for a recent Airbus crash.

Google, for their part, does provide a warning: At the bottom of their AI Overview, in small print, “AI responses may include mistakes” can be seen. The reason for this is the enduring challenge of so-called “hallucinations.” The Large Language Models that compose today’s prominent AIs, don’t know true from false. Instead, they present an expected answer based on the data that was used to train them. Oftentimes the expected answer is the correct one, but it does not have to be. When an AI extrapolates from a pattern in the data to construct false claims, this is called a hallucination. The AI “sees” something that is not there. In this case, the AI overview — at least for certain searches — hallucinated that the recent crash was an Airbus plane.

Whatever one thinks of the adequacy of Google’s disclaimer in this particular case, it is indicative of a broader “buyer beware” approach, which relies upon consumers doing their due diligence. Don’t want heavy metal in your protein powder? Get tested versions. Don’t want BPA leeching into your food? Buy glass containers instead. Want to use Disney+? Then agree to their extensive terms and conditions. 

This follows from an ethics of individual responsibility in which consumers knows themselves best and are therefore best positioned to make the right decision. From this perspective, more options are always preferable to limited choice. If you don’t like what’s on offer, then don’t buy it. Unsurprisingly, the current Republican administration anti-regulation takedown of paper straws, electric cars, and energy star appliances has often used the rhetoric of consumer choice.

But even on this thin framework, consumer protection cannot be wholly abandoned. The conditions under which someone can make a free and authentic choice must still hold. For this we can pull from medical ethics, which has thought extensively about choice in the context of consenting to medical treatment. Just like patients, consumers need to have capacity (are cognitively able to make an informed decision), be informed, and consent voluntarily without excessive pressure or inducement.

By this same token, a company should not be able to force or coerce someone to buy their products, nor should a company engage in deceptive practices. Buyers need to know what exactly they are choosing.

If we are true believers in the power of consumer choice and individual responsibility, then almost any product can be brought to market as long as it is labeled responsibly and buyers can freely choose. If someone wants to buy slimy, week-old lettuce rinsed in raw sewage, that sounds like a personal problem – as long as they know what they are getting into. Other harmful substances, like drugs, can also be reasonably put up for sale. We might draw the line at products which hurt other people, but as long as the only person at risk is the customer themselves, then we can tell a tidy story about prioritizing the preferences of the consumer.

However, this neat story quickly encounters complications.

First, regulations are often not just about protecting the individual consumer. A more tightly regulated AI market would not only prevent Googlers from being led astray, but would also protect Airbus’s reputation. Environmental regulations, too, are not just about individual safety but about protecting the environment more broadly. The protection of others has long been a justification for curtailing individual rights and freedoms.

Second, the condition of “being informed” can be surprisingly hard to fulfill. Often customers will know very little about the product. How much does a company have to do to inform them? How big does a warning have to be? How much information should it provide? And even if they provide the information, how much research is it reasonable to expect consumers to do? It seems impossible to really have informed consent about a purchasing decision, without an in-depth knowledge of what is being purchased. Yet, we clearly cannot be expected to each do this level of research before every marketplace decision we make. Consider harmful chemicals in food. Third-party entities like government agencies or consumer watchdog groups can do the work to ensure people are informed. This role seems especially important as sellers often have an incentive not to disclose information. From a strictly profit-oriented perspective, Boeing would probably be quite happy to have Airbus share the blame.

Third, consumer decisions may not always be truly voluntary. Poorer people especially can be wedged into making decisions they would prefer not to because it is the cheaper option. Maybe they want to buy safer, more carefully raised and processed food, but simply cannot afford to do so. Is their cheap, factory-farm raised chicken truly voluntarily chosen? Moreover, some products distort consumer decision making. For addictive products like alcohol or social media, the decision consumers would make after careful consideration may very well depart from the decision they make in a moment of weakness.

Appealing to personal choice and individual responsibility is a powerful tool in ethics. All else being equal, we should try to respect people and their decisions. And yet, fundamentally, the modern consumer does not have the power to stand as an equal to big corporations like Alphabet (the parent company of Google) or Boeing. We all have constraints on our time, our pocket books, and our research skills. The fully autonomous consumer making fully informed decisions is a good aspiration, but it is ultimately just a fantasy. And simply appealing to that standard represents a problematic ethical shortcut. Why worry about what level of accuracy AI overviews have? There’s a disclaimer. If a consumer doesn’t read, that’s on them.

By offloading questions of AI accuracy, food safety, and environmental impact onto the individual, we can unintentionally undermine the necessary ethical work of deciding how responsible businesses should operate in our modern society.

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Should We Engineer Nature to Save It?

An eerie silence is descending across large swathes of the planet’s coral reefs. These once bustling and vibrant oceanic hubs are being transformed into bleak monotone ghost-towns by a process known as “bleaching.” Coral bleaching occurs when unusually warm ocean temperatures cause corals to expel the colorful algae that live symbiotically in their tissues, providing the coral with essential nutrients. We are currently in the midst of the fourth, and worst, recorded coral bleaching event. According to scientists at Coral Reef Watch, over 80% of the planet’s reefs have been impacted by bleaching since this event began in 2023, pushing reefs into “uncharted territories” and potentially past tipping points beyond which they will not be able to recover.

Coral reefs are essential parts of ocean ecosystems, with an estimated 25% of all marine species dependent on them at some point in their life cycle, despite them only covering less than 1% of the ocean floor. They are also essential to human life, with over 500 million people relying on them for food, and coastal communities depending on them for flood defense. The deterioration of these marine metropolises would be a catastrophe for both people and nature. The protection of coral reefs in the face of global warming is therefore a priority for marine conservation organizations.

All conservation organizations and reputable scientists agree that the reduction of carbon emissions through a socially just transition to clean energy is vital if we are to lessen global heating and prevent further damage to reefs. However, the speed and scale of the threat to coral reefs is leading conservationists to reach for faster and more direct techniques to protect them from rapidly rising ocean temperatures. It is against this backdrop that “synthetic biology” – biotechnology techniques to genetically engineer organisms, like gene editing – is being increasingly looked to as a solution. Conservationists hope to use the tools of synthetic biology to insert heat-tolerant genes into coral DNA to prevent them from bleaching when ocean temperatures rise. Such technologies have a history of sparking fierce public debate when used for agricultural purposes – think of the backlash against genetically modified food crops – but their use as a tool for conservation is still very much in the early experimental stages. Such use has therefore only recently become a matter for ethical consideration.

Proponents argue that humanity has a moral obligation to do our utmost to fix the damage humans ourselves have caused to ecosystems. Although this technology may be more intrusive than traditional conservation techniques, it essentially has the same aim of conserving species and restoring ecosystems. Those in favor can point to the fact that conservationists have already undertaken similar, albeit less technologically advanced, projects. Techniques such as selective breeding and artificial gene flow, where coral species that already possess heat tolerant traits are interbred and then introduced into struggling reefs, are already being used with some success. The use of synthetic biology is not far removed from this more traditional style of intervention it might be argued, and so there is no great ethical difference between these two approaches. If one is permissible, then so is the other.

Yet there remains a lingering feeling for many that such a radical intervention into the very essence of a coral organism – its DNA – is somehow different, and could in some significant way undermine the value that conservation seeks to preserve. Some may worry that it is one thing to assist the evolution of a coral population by introducing a naturally occurring but non-native coral species into that population; it is another to engineer entirely new artificial coral species and introduce them into a natural system. This level of intervention, it may be thought, erodes what is valuable about these systems in the first place – their naturalness. Coral reefs have developed autonomously through the co-evolution of huge numbers of different species over thousands of years. They are not the product of design but of spontaneous natural processes. Yet the use of synthetic biology would make them a product of design, specifically human design. If coral reefs can only exist because of human engineering, the line between them and an underwater aquarium wears thin.

Such feelings of unease might be given greater depth by considering the arguments of philosopher Eric Katz. Katz thinks that when conservationists intervene in a natural ecosystem to achieve some pre-established goal (like restoring the system or preserving biodiversity), they turn that ecosystem into an artifact. It ceases to be a natural ecosystem at all since it is now designed to fulfill a purpose given to it by human beings. For Katz, this means that the resulting ecosystem can only be “instrumentally” rather than “intrinsically” valuable. Instrumental value is the type of value something has in so far as it is good for achieving some other end. For example, a bicycle is valuable in so far as it is good for the purpose of cycling from one place to another. However, the bicycle is not valuable “in itself,” the bicycle does not have value beyond its function. It, like all artifacts according to Katz, does not have “intrinsic value.” Natural systems, on the other hand, Katz argues, have “intrinsic value” because they were not designed to serve any purpose, their value stems from their “autonomy” – from not being controlled and constrained by humanity. By imposing our purposes onto natural systems, the argument goes, conservation interventions erode nature’s intrinsic value, resulting in artifacts that have been manipulated to serve human desires and preferences.

Katz’s argument was initially constructed as an objection to conservation interventions generally, however, his argument is perhaps most forceful in cases like genetically engineered coral. The notion that the resulting engineered coral organisms are artifacts is hard to doubt. On Katz’s view, then, engineered organisms and the systems into which they are introduced lose their intrinsic value. They may still have instrumental value in so far as they fulfill human needs and preferences – for their ability to provide food, flood defense, tourism revenue, aesthetic pleasure and so on – but they are no longer valuable in themselves as natural systems.

Katz’s argument gives philosophical expression to a sense that there is more to nature’s value than the various benefits that humans get from it; that there is something deeply valuable about the spontaneous processes that led to the formation of ecosystems like coral reefs.  However, many have pointed out that such arguments rely on an overly narrow understanding of nature in a world where humanity is increasingly and inseparably entangled with the natural world. In fact, many philosophers and conservationists have questioned whether any sense can be given to the distinction between humanity and nature in such a world. Bill McKibben argued that climate change has brought about “The End of Nature,” in the sense of a force that acts independently of humanity; while Steven Vogel has advocated for an “environmentalism after the end of nature,” arguing that “environmental questions are social and political ones, to be answered by us and not by nature.”

From this perspective, the idea that deploying synthetic biology converts reefs into artifacts is irrelevant, because the whole planet has already been transformed by human activity, and so is already, in some sense, an artifact. When the extent of humanity’s impact on the planet is properly understood, it becomes incredibly difficult to separate what is “natural” from what is “artifactual” and to make moral judgments based on this distinction. Is a coral reef that has been intentionally engineered by humans to become more heat-tolerant any less natural than one which has been bleached and decimated by human-caused global warming?

This is what Emma Marris has called “the paradox of pristine wilderness” – conserving ecosystems in their “pristine” historical condition increasingly requires intervention in and control of those ecosystems, so the more “pristine” an ecosystem looks the less truly “wild” it is likely to be. Some conservationists, like Marris, calling themselves “new conservationists,” have embraced this paradoxical situation, arguing that conservation must ditch old notions of nature and instead accept that we humans are now in the planetary driving seat. In the words of writer Stewart Brand: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” For these “new conservationists,” it is now up to us to decide the future of the planet and the tools of synthetic biology should be put to use as humanity sees fit.

While it is difficult to question the insight that humanity and nature have become so tightly interwoven as for it to be difficult to neatly separate the world into these two categories, that does not necessarily mean that there is no morally significant distinction to be made here. As technological progress continues to change the possibilities of human relations with ecosystems and the planet as a whole, we may question whether dispensing with the concept of nature is really appropriate. The use of synthetic biology for coral conservation represents the cutting edge of what will become a new horizon for the ability of human beings to control and manipulate natural processes. Although the use of these technologies may seem innocuous enough when it comes to preventing coral bleaching, humanity must consider how far we are willing to go down this path. To what extent should we go on engineering species and ecosystems so that they suit our own preferences? At what point would the planet’s once mysterious and unfathomable natural systems become merely a mirror of human values? With the prospect of even more intrusive interventions, such as the “white skies” of geo-engineering glimmering in the not so distant future, we must consider the extent to which it is morally permissible for human beings to manipulate planetary systems to suit our own interests.

Still, given the dire and rapidly worsening state of coral reefs, there may not be much more time for debate. Action must happen now, and those who argue against the radical solutions being offered by synthetic biology will have a heavy burden to bear if their arguments succeed in preventing such action, and, in doing so, contributing to the irreversible and devastating loss of the planet’s once magnificent coral reef ecosystems.

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National Parks and Intergenerational (In)Justice

In addition to other environmentally concerning developments, the first 100 days of the Trump administration has also been disastrous for National Parks. Most recently, the administration has rolled back logging safeguards for more than half of US national forests, while the Bureau of Land Management gave permission to an Australian mining company to continue operating an unauthorized mine in the Mojave National Preserve. These actions might seem to fall within the prerogative of government officials. After all, aren’t we, the people, permitted – through our elected representatives – to make use of whatever natural resources we have at our disposal?

But it’s a little more complicated than that.

While the first national park – Yellowstone – was established in 1872, it wasn’t until 1916 that the National Park Service was created. Its stated purpose was to:

“conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

It’s the last part of that purpose that creates unique challenges for the management of national parks. It means that when we’re deciding how to best deal with these parks, it’s insufficient to merely consider what is to be gained – or lost – by current residents of the US. We must additionally consider how our actions will affect future people. The management of national parks, then, is an issue of intergenerational justice.

Intergenerational justice is, essentially, the careful consideration of how we should act now so as not to wrong people later. Most of us share the intuition that it’s wrong to harm other people. Unfortunately, a failure of the imagination often makes us blind to the ways in which our actions might harm people in the future – including those who may not yet even exist. Intergenerational justice encourages us to carefully consider such possibilities.

There are many theoretical bases for claims of intergenerational justice. Utilitarians – for example – focus on maximizing the good. On such an approach, short-term gains will rarely be justified if they come at a long-term cost. A utilitarian would, most likely, disapprove of our government racking up massive debt just to improve the welfare of current residents. Why? Because this would shackle future generations with a crippling financial obligation. Alternatively, an application of the “Lockean Proviso” (which I here applied to the Lunar commons) requires that, when we’re dealing with common property we must limit our actions so that anyone who comes after us can deal with those commons in the very same way.

Whichever approach we take to intergenerational justice, they all seem to agree on one thing: it is morally impermissible to leave to the next generation a world of less value than the one we inherited.

But here’s the thing: the world is valuable in all kinds of different ways. Sure, there’s environmental value – the value found in things like national parks and a clear night sky. But value can also be financial, technological, institutional, and cultural. And we might argue that it’s permissible to convert one kind of value into another, providing there’s no loss to the total value of the world. A government could, for example, permissibly expend a portion of its national savings to develop a fairer justice system (trading financial value for institutional value). Alternatively, a government might mill a forest and use the proceeds to establish a foundation for the fine arts (trading environmental value for cultural value).

Maybe that’s precisely what’s going on with our National Parks. While Trump’s policies will  necessarily see a loss in environmental value, this might be offset by gains in value elsewhere. Indeed, one of Trump’s stated reasons for removing logging restrictions is to increase domestic lumber supplies.

But here’s the thing: the permissibility of such an offset necessarily requires that there’s something of equal value to the thing being lost. And that might not always be the case.

Consider an analogy: Suppose that I inherit an antique ring valued at $500. The ring has a storied past, being handed down from one family member to another for many generations. Suppose, however, that instead of bequeathing this ring to the next generation, I opt to sell the ring to a friend for the tidy sum of $1000. I then place the proceeds in a bank account for the enjoyment of those who come after me. Not only have I ensured that there’s been no decrease in financial value of the inheritance – I’ve actually managed to increase it. Nevertheless, it might seem that I’ve still wronged future generations. Why? Because there’s value in the ring that cannot be quantified – and therefore cannot be offset. By selling the ring, I deprive my ancestors of taking part in a rich family history. And no financial gain is capable of offsetting this.

Since 1500, almost one thousand species of plants and animals are known to have gone extinct. Among these was the Moa – a twelve foot tall flightless bird from my homeland of New Zealand. Is there any value – be it financial, technological, institutional, or cultural – that could be added to the world to offset the value lost when these animals disappear? Or is the Moa – like that family heirloom – priceless? We might argue that the same is true of our national parks. There is, quite simply, no equivalent value that could offset the loss suffered if they are decimated by logging or mining. We would be depriving future generations of something that is, quite simply, irreplaceable.

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Humanities, Defunded

On April 1st, a notice pinged my inbox: “Action alert: Save the NEH.” As the month wore on, fallout flooded headlines: the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has allegedly terminated over 1,000 grants and 65 to 85% of its staff. For sixty years, this 180-employee federal agency has fueled more than $6 billion in public-facing American humanities programming, including efforts to promote education, preservation, and research in the arts and letters. Though threats also happened back in 2018, today’s swift followthrough is exacting and unexampled.

Insiders are better-positioned to articulate the defunding’s resultant material gains and losses, whether present or potential, or postulate the ultimate intention of this Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-prompted directive. I’m curious, instead, to explore what defunding signals: How do the NEH cuts ask us to view and value the humanities — and who deserves access to them?

First, let’s consider what “the humanities” means.

Some define the humanities by subject matter: “areas of knowledge outside of, and beyond,” science. Arts, history, language, literature, and philosophy, to name a few, are disciplines routinely accepted into the “humanities” canon. Similarly, the sciences — natural, physical (and, for some, social) — are habitually excluded, though edge-cases within this demarcation suggest a less-than-settled definition.

Others identify the humanities by the skills or methods they inculcate: namely, an ability to investigate immaterial human values, concerns, or a telos — an ultimate purpose or meaning. Someone eager to learn from objections, considerate of others’ experiences, and immune to the sway of a trite talking point, for instance, is popularly thought of as the kind of person hoped and expected to arise from humanistic immersion in the twenty-first century.

As with most things of substance, neither the essence nor value of the humanities is pigeonhole-able. What is clear, though, is that we lose some sense of “what it means to be human” (whatever that connotes!) without these disciplines’ influences. A day free of style and reflection means a day without radio, a wall without art. Losing inquiry, empathy, and rationality looks like friendships devoid of storytelling, bookless libraries, and lunch tables zapped of queries and convictions.

Though the examples’ opposites are idyllic, perhaps they sound frivolous, estranged from the reality of much of the world. After all, a gut-reaction critique of humanistic immersion is that it just ‘doesn’t actually matter.’ Who has time for metaphors and logic, no matter how enticing, when the globe has yet to endure a day without someone fighting in or fleeing from conflict, fighting for physiological survival, or doomed to the repetition and restriction of exploitative servitude?

And yet, whether factory, hospital, or war zone, humans in the midst of magnanimous suffering continue, in numerous cases, to turn to song and stories, conversation and comedy, and existential and spiritual reflection. No, books and songs cannot replace medicine and food, and no one should save a first-edition classic instead of a person from a burning room. However, a lack of physical life-saving ability does not eliminate all opportunity for meaning and purpose.

If the immaterial, artistic, and theoretical are historically reached for as modes of internal survival, then the humanities are right to dispel any claim to a decorative, superfluous denotation. The ivory tower — to whatever extent you feel it real or conceptual — takes its place as a crowning flaw, not a feature, of the heart of humanistic engagement. The presence of elitism in the humanities — or anything else, for that matter — does not eliminate the existence of stunningly real, raw value.

This brings us to public access.

Though hardly helping the cause, disendowing the NEH — or any public-facing academic body, for that matter — will not single-handedly eliminate the existence of the humanities. What cuts do immediately delineate, however, is who gets exposed to these modes of thinking about and engaging with the world. That is, children’s literature will not combust at the loss of funding, but a North Carolinian middle schooler who would have attended a grant-funded summer reading camp may miss a would-be opportunity to finally explore fiction for fun.

Consider the outcomes of recent decades of NEH support: Preservation Virginia’s 1994 Jamestown Rediscovery Project, led by archaeologist William Kelso, is responsible for uncovering Jamestown, an English settlement supposed to be long lost. Thanks to NEH funding and leadership from Emory and Victoria University Professors David Eltis and Stephen Behrendt, as well as Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute, approximately 66 to 80% of all Atlantic slaving expeditions have been documented in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Even the coveted Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), a free, online encyclopedia of the philosophical discipline, boasts over 1,450 entries as a result of over twenty years of NEH grants.

With an estimated 8% acceptance rate last year, NEH awards have allowed reflection on the human experience to travel across the country, inspiring opportunities for understanding and contemplation for every American. Further performances, discoveries, and artifacts include Shakespeare Lives On, The Mississippi Blues Commission, the traveling Treasures of Tutankhamun, and Library of America, a 269-volume classics collection.

Without public endowment of humanistic reflection, these opportunities to access fine art and close reading become less likely, less possible. If American classics and historic discoveries, fine and performing arts, and musical archives cannot reach the average citizen, then the humanities become nothing more than hobbies for the privileged. These disciplines are entrenched with elitism, and disendowment of public-facing academia will only calcify the ivory tower. If a defining defect of academia is an air of highbrow seclusion, then defunding its public-facing endeavors will only make this worse. Less public engagement means more private sequestering.

Without NEH funding, a Louisianian nine-year-old no longer goes to Prime Time Family Reading Time, her likeliest chance at outperforming her peers in 25 out of 26 categories of intellectual development. If the past decade’s 1,800 NEH-supported libraries can no longer offer programs like The Great Stories Club — a reading and discussion program for at-risk youth — then the participating students may no longer have access to this cultural engagement at all. The only ones who will are the ones already equipped with the means to do so.

For an ordinary person, it’s hard to know what to do with this information.

Large swaths of the population, in fact, applaud the cuts. For DOGE-defenders, defunding may seem the necessary consequence, an acknowledgement, of an inaccessibility felt irretrievably embedded within academic programming. Many maintain that academia, if not merely inefficient and/or propagandizing, is dangerously hostile or censorial to self-expression. Removing financial backing might feel like a win, a disempowerment of an oppressive elite in an implied exchange of support for the everyman.

Consider The Bipartisan Policy Center’s selection of college censorship studies reporting, with varying statistical backing, that while liberal students do self-censor, conservatives are more likely to refrain from sharing their opinions out of worry of potential consequences — including, for some, violence. Relatedly, a Pew Research study found that, from 2015 to 2019, surveyed Republicans who view colleges negatively affecting the U.S. moved from 37 to 59%, whereas Democrats adjusted only 19 to 18%.

But even if in favor of cuts, self-censoring undergraduates and academia-averse adults alike are not necessarily opposed to storytelling and the arts, to philosophical inquiry and rigorous deliberation. There is grief in the story of a college student who feels he can’t speak up in English class—he wants to engage with the text, with fellow thinkers. The clear-cut, for-and-against division—that all right- or left-wingers say this and that—perpetuated by politicized, sensational headlines is not ultimate truth. Instead, what is undeniable is our collective participation in the endeavor of being human: a shared, innate calling to explore what it is we are all doing here. Everyone ought to be part of that.

A call to unity is not meant to decry the very real consequences resulting from differences in conviction about academic funding. These consequences can (and do) exist alongside an acknowledgement that, at the root of these non-uniform experiences and interpretations, something is shared: all sorts of Americans value — and bemoan loss of access to — the humanities.

The real reason why humanities are worth saving is because they give their scholars the language of purpose, the feeling of participating in the bigger project of examining what it is to be alive. While there are important arguments to be made for prioritizing vocational training or even humanities’ cultivation of “practical” skills, the humanistic disciplines nourish the uncovering of meaning and equip us to stave off existential crises.

The message the NEH cuts sends to students in funded programs, therefore, is that it is acceptable to cut off, even in part, their access to this entire world — one of literary, philosophical, and artistic immersion in the experiences, ideas, and stories from all of the lives each of us will never ourselves live. Yes, there are gaps, we seem to acknowledge. But it is not our job to fill them in. It is not our duty as a nation to ensure you have this exposure. Defunding implies not that its endorsers believe the humanities to be without value — just that there are better uses of collective resources. That they’re not worth the investment.

And if I may be so bold: this is wrong.

In knowingly allowing any child’s inner life to become a little less robust, we default on cultivating her birthright to wonder and explore. As fellow humans and learners, we owe each one of the next generation the opportunity to engage in a fuller understanding of the human experience.

If this is (or isn’t) where you land, remember that finger-pointing at those who disagree is fruitless. It’s likely that your audience and acquaintances will not embrace the humanities, the sciences, or anything else if you expertly prove their failing to care enough about what you revere. No one has time to realize and marvel at all the good that exists — none of us have a front-row seat to every beautiful thing.

So if you are lucky enough to be someone who gets to earnestly cherish something, and unlucky enough to watch it being taken away, then it’s your job to tell others why. If you adore literature and the arts, then share how your most life-giving experience with a story injected color to your life. Invite newcomers in. There’s (literally) more to be gained with bringing people in than pushing them out.

Despair is an unhelpful and evasive conclusion, always. Actionless, morose critique earns us nothing. Hope, frankly, may not either. But hope, if nothing else, at least yearns to do something. The noble rage of earnestness is an active ingredient in defending anything you love.