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Month: July 2025

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No One Left to Care: The Ignored Demographic Crisis

South Korea has a total fertility rate (TFR) of 0.75 children per woman — the lowest in the world. Even assuming the fertility rate stabilizes, for every 100 people alive today, there will only be five great-grandchildren. In three generations, the nation will have withered to near extinction.

South Korea is an extreme case, but it is hardly alone. Chile has a TFR of 1.13 (18 great-grandchildren per 100 current people — assuming birth rates do not continue to fall or that young people do not flee the collapsing country); Thailand has a TFR of 1.20 (22 great-grandchildren); Finland has a TFR of 1.30 (27 great-grandchildren). Contrary to common messaging, this is a widespread problem affecting diverse populations. In fact, the majority of countries around the world have sub-replacement birth rates.

One critical reason for concern is the sustainability of systems such as Social Security. The ratio of workers to beneficiaries has declined from 5.1:1 in 1960 to 2.8:1 today. Evermore retirees are dependent on the labor of increasingly few workers, who are being squeezed to keep the system afloat. These welfare programs cannot persist at the current numbers — and their collapse would be catastrophic. Around 1 in 10 Social Security recipients would be unable to pay their bills if checks were delayed by just one month. Beyond Social Security, many people’s retirement security is embedded in systems which presuppose economic and population growth.

Demographic collapse also imperils cultural diversity. Cultures are carried by people. And, as communities become barren of economic opportunities, individuals will face increasing pressure to abandon their homelands. Languages, traditions, and identities will increasingly fade away as the communities which sustain them disappear. This is not merely a poetic lament — UNESCO reports that a language dies every two weeks, often as a result of demographic and economic displacement.

It’s also important to note that, in most developed countries, people want more children than they are able to have. Around 90% of Americans either already have children, want children in the future, or wish they had children in the past. Among those over 45, the average ideal number of children — if they could do it again — is 2.6, far above the current TFR of 1.62. A majority of childless people over 45 wish they had at least two. Pronatalism, then, is not merely about economic or cultural survival. It’s about enabling people to live the lives they already want — lives stymied by economic precarity, social atomization, and institutional failure.

Environmental concerns are legitimate. More people means more consumption. But the relationship between population and environmental degradation is neither linear nor fixed. Today’s most urgent ecological crises — carbon emissions, habitat loss, resource depletion — stem primarily from unjust and unsustainable systems of production and consumption. Ironically, many of the countries facing demographic collapse have the lowest per-capita environmental footprints. While a shrinking, aging population may slightly reduce emissions in the short term, it also drains the labor, creativity, and vitality needed for long-term ecological stewardship. Rather than treating people as liabilities to the planet, we should recognize that future generations — if raised with care, education, and ecological values — are our best hope for building a sustainable world. To shape the future, humanity must first persist into it.

Some have characterized demographic concerns as a right-wing issue. There’s some truth to this. Figures like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance have been among the most vocal about this problem. But the ideological provenance of a problem is no reason to ignore its substance. Conservatives shouldn’t dismiss climate change because it’s associated with the left; likewise, progressives shouldn’t disregard demographic collapse just because its loudest messengers are on the right. Moreover, demographic collapse is coming regardless of who cares about it; to cede the problem to one’s ideological adversaries is to forfeit influence over its solutions.

Some argue that immigration can counteract low birth rates, but this misunderstands the nature of the problem. Immigration may delay some of the effects of demographic collapse, but it cannot resolve them. Immigrants from high fertility countries quickly see their fertility decline upon arrival. Moreover, native citizens also experience falling fertility in response to high immigration rates. Furthermore, viewing demographic decline as a mere numbers game misses the central concern: age structure. A graying population places immense burdens on younger generations, regardless of total population size. Most importantly, as noted earlier, demographic collapse is a global phenomenon. Of the top ten countries of origin for US immigrants — only one, Guatemala — has above-replacement fertility. Immigration allows rich countries to persist by drawing vitality from nations facing the same underlying problem. It’s a demographic shell game, not a solution.

If immigration isn’t viable long-term, what is? The most common answer is financial incentives — paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, and child tax credits. However, while parents would surely appreciate more money in their pockets, recent interventions seem to suggest that such subsidies do not substantively raise birthrates. Poland and Hungary spend 3.5% and 5% of their GDP on pro-natal policies respectively, yet have seen only modest gains in birth rates.

Because concerns about fertility decline are more common on the right — and because fertility was higher in poorer, more patriarchal societies — some suspect that pronatalism is a Trojan Horse for restricting women’s freedom. Setting aside principled objections to such repression, the data shows that restricting abortion and contraception is not a durable fix. Fertility may rise briefly, but the gains do not persist and in fact may invert as people adjust to their new, more repressive realities.

So, if immigration, coercion, and cash transfers don’t suffice, what might? The answer is unclear. Some researchers hold out hope for the efficacy of modified wealth transfers, such as income tax reductions, removing sales taxes on goods related to childcare, or modifying incentives around Social Security. Others advocate for expanding access to — and increasing research into — fertility treatments, allowing individuals to delay family formation without giving it up entirely. More still point out the tight link between housing and fertility, suggesting we need to loosen up zoning codes to allow for the production of more family-friendly housing.

Others, however, are pessimistic on the efficacy of policy and insist that demographic collapse is an essentially cultural problem. Researchers point to the (unsurprising) connection between marriage and fertility and the need to support those looking to get and stay married. Proposals include not shaming those who get married young or have larger families, normalizing working from home, and destigmatizing intergenerational living. Others point to examples such as Mongolia and Georgia and argue that the key to fixing this problem is raising the status of parents. More still emphasize changing norms around parenting to encourage equitable household labor, alleviate burdens from both parents,  and better align with scientific realities.

The prospect of unmitigated demographic collapse — vanishing cultures, faltering economies, fractured communities — is frightening. But it also presents a rare opportunity to rethink the systems and values that structure modern life. Rather than resigning ourselves to decline, we can rise to the challenge of sustaining human flourishing.

The future belongs to those who show up.

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No Ghosts in the Machine

The growing power of generative AI lends credibility to what was once a fringe conspiracy theory. The dead internet theory holds that the internet is largely populated by bots. What makes it conspiratorial is that it claims that this outcome is the deliberate result of a coordinated effort by large tech companies or the government. The nature of the conspiracy theory makes it particularly difficult to refute. Any evidence one gathers from the internet could be considered compromised precisely because it comes from a supposedly dead internet. If I use facts discovered online to prove the internet isn’t dead, the conspiracy theorist can simply reply: “Of course, that is what they want you to think.”

Although it once sounded outlandish, today it is easier to see how the dead internet theory could become a reality. Deepfake photos and videos can fool people into believing they depict real humans. Recruiters now grapple with an increase in AI-generated applications. There is an increase in retractions due to questionable AI generated content, which implies that the content was not initially detected as problematic. YouTube has recently announced they will implement a new policy designed to crack down on low-effort AI content. We are witnessing AI-induced psychosis and cases of people reportedly falling in love with AI, reminiscent of the premise of Spike Jonze’s film Her.

In this sense, a central concern of the conspiracy theory has a new bite. It is entirely possible for one to have an interaction online that appears to be authentic, i.e., between oneself and another person, when that is not the case. What we face today is, in effect, a Cartesian nightmare.

Many have heard the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” This was René Descartes’ attempt at finding a belief immune to doubt. He concluded that while we can doubt everything our senses tell us, for we could be dreaming or being deceived by some evil demon, we cannot doubt the existence of our own thoughts. Doubt itself is a thought, and so long as one is thinking (and even if one is only doubting), one can know with certainty that one exists as a thinking thing.

While this is of some comfort to the skeptic, it does not resolve all of our epistemic worries. We quickly need to face questions about how we can know things about the external world, including the problem of other minds. While our everyday interactions seem to be filled with people who have minds, one cannot know what the true contents of other beings’ inner lives are like. When one uses the method of doubt, one only reveals the existence of one’s own mind. Cartesian doubt can quickly lead to solipsism, the theory that only oneself exists.

Now, in light of the technological strides in generative AI coupled with the way we have deeply integrated the internet into our social and political lives, the question of other minds takes on a new significance. When I interact with someone in real life, I don’t bother to question whether I am talking to an actual person. But online, when reading a comment or receiving an email, I increasingly wonder: Is what I am interacting with real?

I think we can break this problem down into two distinct questions:

1) Content Authenticity: When consuming content, e.g., videos, photos, articles, and music, we must seriously ask: Was this created by a human? While there are signs that something might be generated by AI, it’s reasonable to assume those signs may become more difficult to spot as technology improves.

2) Interpersonal Authenticity: When interacting with another person via the internet we must seriously ask: Am I interacting with a human?

These questions are epistemic but with a deeply metaphysical subject matter. Ultimately, I want to know how I can know something (the epistemic bit) about the nature of what I am interacting with (the metaphysical bit).

There are a lot of reasons why we might be interested in knowing the answers to these questions. One answer I can see to the question “Why should I want to know what I am interacting with?” relates to the beliefs we form about other people in the world. When we form these beliefs based on AI bots, rather than real people, our beliefs run the risk of missing the mark. We falsely believe we know what people are like.

For instance, imagine you visit an internet forum where your political adversaries gather to see what they think about an event. You open up a thread to see the hot takes. The consequence? You come away from your investigation with new beliefs. This is what they think. This is what they are up to. 

But if what you have read is primarily produced by AI, then while you think you have read a sample of your political adversaries’ opinions, you have not. What you have read is an AI’s attempt at representing them.

Or imagine arguing with someone over the internet in the comments about how your country should respond to an ongoing war. The exchange might occur over several days of call-and-response posting. You find yourself staying up at night replaying your argument in an angry state of disbelief that someone out there could have such an abhorrent political view.

But, as the dead internet theory supposes, what if this person was not really a person and simply an AI programmed to argue the opposite position of anyone it interacts with? Not only would you have a false belief about a person in the world, but you would also have spent time being mad at something that was doing precisely what it was designed to do. It’s like getting mad at a toaster for toasting bread.

While misrepresenting another group’s ideology is problematic, the perils of a dead internet run deeper than this. It is difficult to imagine what a dead internet really implies and that is because for most of us it feels reasonable to assume that, at least in its early days, the content we consumed was real in some meaningful sense. Even if there are more bots now, surely this doesn’t mean that every aspect of humanity is gone.

But as linkrot proliferates, bot activity increases, and AI capacity improves, the possibility that one’s online experience drifts further away from reality increases. Even if there are other real people out there, the space between everyone may become too far for any individual to traverse. What horrifies me most about dead internet theory is not the conspiratorial possibility, that someone is out there pulling the strings. It’s the opposite. It’s the possibility that there is no one at the helm and that we are deeply alone. The idea that everything I read, watch, and listen to is generated by a machine is alienating. It is inhuman.

Generative AI has already brought to the foreground many serious issues. Much has been said about the trustworthiness of AI, the biased data it involves, the ridiculous amount of energy consumption it takes, the loss of important skills it will usher in, and the worker displacement it might create. We now have to add to this pile the Cartesian problem of other minds.

So, what should we do with the knowledge that there is no ghost in the machine that we built?

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Who Pays for a Life Saved?

I had to renew my driver’s license last week. As part of the process, there was a section on the form asking whether I would consider donating my organs after my death. After a bit of back and forth, I consented. My reason for this was relatively simple: it’s a morally good thing to do. This is a conclusion I would expect many of us to come to. That by allowing the harvesting of organs after our death — by potentially saving the lives of up to eight people and greatly enhancing the lives of many more — we do something praiseworthy.

However, while donating organs after one’s death is most certainly a good thing, it lacks the virtue of selflessness. After all, I don’t lose out on anything if I donate after my death. It doesn’t have any material impact on my life if, after my demise, my heart, kidney, organs, liver, and numerous other organs and tissues are surgically removed from me and given to many others (as a sidenote, I did opt-out of donating my retina, and I can’t justify that decision). Yet, there is another mode of donation that does have a material impact on the donor: living organ donation.

This form of donation, as the name implies, involves the removal of non-vital organs and tissues while the donor is still alive. The benefits for the recipient of the organ are notable, as they receive an organ or tissue that has not begun to undergo the degradation that sets in after death. Instead, the organ or tissue is as fresh as it can be. Obviously, however, having surgery, having an organ removed, recovering from an operation, and living the rest of one’s life with a biological part of oneself missing can have significant impacts on the donor. As such, while deceased organ donation is undoubtedly something to be praised, living organ donation is perhaps more so, as those who do the latter do so with the knowledge that the beneficial act will have a detrimental effect upon themselves.

It may come as a surprise (or perhaps not) that, despite the moral praiseworthiness of living organ donation, instances of it are exceedingly low. In the UK, for example, according to the Human Tissue Authority, across all four of the home nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), there were only 88 living organ donations. That’s for a country with a population of nearly 69 million people. The rarity of living organ donation concerning population size is also a notable feature in the US, where, in 2023, there were 6,953 living organ donations. This means there were an average of 579 operations per month over the 12-month period, which, for a country with a population of over 340 million people, is vanishingly small.

So, the question is, if living organ donation is not only morally superior to deceased organ donation — as it involves a greater sense of virtue, but also leads to better outcomes for those needing organs — then how can we encourage more people to do it?

One potential solution is to compensate individuals for their organs. In essence, allow them to sell the bits of their body that they don’t need. This, as Arthur Matas argues in the BMJ, would increase the supply of organs by incentivizing people to donate who might not do so otherwise. With a greater supply of organs should come an improved capacity to save lives.

Yet, while paying people for their tissue and organs might sound like a effective and justifiable method to increase supply, it does come with a considerable risk; that those who would donate their organs would do so not because they wish to help others, but because they need the money.

This seems to be the case in the Kalai Upazila region of Bangladesh. As a recent piece by Al Jazeera reported, the area has become a prime hunting ground for organ brokers, who descend on the region looking for those whom they can convince to cross the border into India to donate their organs for payment. Instances of living organ donation have become so prevalent in the area that the village of Baiguni, which sits right in the epicenter of the brokers’ hunting ground, is known by locals as “the village of one kidney.” The reason why brokers target this area is rather apparent: it is one of Bangladesh’s most impoverished. As a result, the people there face the most tremendous pressure to find ways of making a living. The brokers are aware of this and take advantage of it.

So far, this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, if those in the area need money and can obtain it by selling an organ, then not only has someone received potentially life-saving surgery, but the donor now has the financial means to care for themselves better. Unfortunately, those who donate an organ don’t always get the payment the brokers promised them. As the Al Jazeera piece continues to report, many who make the trip to India receive little to no compensation for their donation. What’s more, they are also denied essential after-surgery care and, in some cases, even transport back to their home. In short, the brokers benefit, the person receiving the organ benefits, but the person who donated, who is the most vulnerable and open to exploitation, gets nothing except, in many cases, a lifetime of medical complications and pain.

Now, the account I’ve provided omits several complexities from the Al Jazeera piece (and I encourage you to read it), including the international and criminal elements. However, what I’ve hoped to capture is the very real problem of exploitation. When financial incentives are introduced into organ donation, they don’t apply evenly across society. They exert far more pressure on those with little than on those with much.

And this isn’t only a problem in faraway places. Even within wealthier nations, the same question arises: when donation rates remain low — whether living or deceased — and the demand continues to grow, how do we increase supply without compromising the dignity or autonomy of the vulnerable?

We’re left, then, with an uncomfortable but necessary ethical dilemma. If pure altruism isn’t sufficient, and monetary incentives risk turning desperation into coercion, how do we build a system that saves lives without sacrificing justice?

That’s not a question with an easy answer. But perhaps it’s a question we each must ask ourselves, not just when we’re handed a driver’s license form, but whenever we’re faced with the quiet, everyday choices that reveal what kind of society we’re willing to be part of.

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Must Democratic Citizens Think for Themselves?

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discussed some of his proposed changes to public health in America. Of note was Kennedy’s proposal for an increased role for AI, especially when it comes to evaluating the safety of vaccines, of which he has long been critical. Throughout the interview, Kennedy emphasized the importance of people doing their own research, specifically as an obligation we have as citizens of a democracy. “We need to stop trusting the experts, right?” Kennedy stated. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of science, it’s not a feature of democracy, it’s a feature of religion, and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation, and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”

Kennedy is wrong, of course, that trusting experts is not a feature of science: scientific progress would be impossible if scientists had to continuously reinvent the wheel every time they pursued an area of inquiry. Kennedy is also wrong that trusting experts is not a feature of democracy. A well-functioning democracy does not require that we ignore those with specialized knowledge; indeed, a democracy would likely cease to function entirely if we citizens ignored experts.

Perhaps, though, there is a kernel of truth somewhere in Kennedy’s confusion, namely around the value of thinking for yourself, especially as a democratic citizen. After all, democracies typically give citizens the rights to challenge narratives and reach their own conclusions, rights that may not be afforded to citizens of non-democratic nations. And if we are to uphold the values of a democracy, perhaps we not only have that right but the obligation to exercise it, especially when we may be wary about the status quo. Is Kennedy correct, then? Does democracy oblige us to think for ourselves?

Perhaps. But not in the way Kennedy is thinking.

While we most often hear skeptics or conspiracy theorists talk about “doing your own research,” there are certainly times when it’s a good idea to investigate issues ourselves. When we do so, we are exercising our intellectual autonomy: our capacity to figure things out for ourselves, which might involve gathering evidence on our own, reaching our own conclusions, and forming judgments ourselves, without other people telling us what to think. It often seems like there’s something worthwhile about being intellectually autonomous: figuring something out on your own can perhaps help you gain a deeper understanding of an issue and can help make progress by potentially discovering things that consensus views overlook.

Of course, there are many times when we should, in fact, listen to others instead of trying to figure things out on our own: there is nothing worthwhile in rejecting consensus views established by experts when we have no specific training or understanding of an issue. That we value intellectual autonomy does not mean that we value it when someone thinks for themselves or does their own research against all common sense.

A virtuous exercise of intellectual autonomy thus requires that we be able to distinguish between those instances when we should listen to others and when we should figure things out ourselves. On some accounts, virtues lie at the midpoint between extremes. For example, exemplifying the virtue of bravery doesn’t mean that you run head-first into every possible battle, no matter how hopeless: that’s not brave, it’s rash. Nor does it mean that you shy away from every potential conflict: that’s not brave either, that’s cowardly. Bravery lies somewhere in between, requiring that we know which battles to pick. Similarly, we might say that to exemplify intellectual autonomy virtuously doesn’t mean abandoning every consensus view (that’s also rash), nor does it mean always accepting everything other people tell us (that’s also a kind of intellectual cowardice).

So while Kennedy is advocating for a kind of intellectual autonomy, by claiming that we ought to reject the views of experts, he is clearly being far too rash. What about the weaker claim, that we have some kind of duty as democratic citizens to think for ourselves? As we saw, it does seem like there’s something intuitive about this idea, insofar as democracies afford (or ought to afford) their citizens the right to think freely and challenge the status quo. But again, if such an obligation exists, it cannot be so demanding as to require us to “stop listening to the experts.” Simply because we possess a right does not mean we are obliged to enact it in as extreme a manner as possible.

There is also a more fundamental way in which Kennedy’s remarks are misguided, namely that he implies that thinking for yourself requires excluding others from your inquiries. However, being autonomous is compatible with, and often requires, getting help from other people. For example, one of the goals of education is to teach people how to think for themselves, skills that we rely on others to learn. Indeed, any of the abilities we have as democratic citizens we possess because people have worked together to provide us with opportunities to act freely. Mutually creating the conditions for individual autonomy is arguably one of the points of having a democracy in the first place.

At the end of the day, we can see how futile Kennedy’s advice is if we were to try to put it into practice. Unless we deduce an understanding of virology from first principles, we will necessarily rely on the work of other people if we are going to do any of our own research. Of course, it is characteristically ironic of the conspiratorially-minded to claim that one should reject the word of experts while advocating for the acceptance of other people that they consider worth listening to. Once we realize that we need to rely on someone to think for ourselves, though, it seems prudent to trust those who have legitimate expertise.

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The Feelings of Fish – A Follow-Up

Back in 2023, I wrote about a recent study showing the ability of fish to pass the Mirror Test – an important indicator of advanced cognitive abilities. I wrote about how these findings raised troubling implications for our treatment of fish, particularly if it implies that fish are capable of suffering.

A new study out earlier this month confirms precisely this. Examining how rainbow trout experience air asphyxia (that is, the way in which caught fish “suffocate” once taken out of water), the study found that the average fish suffers around 10 minutes of moderate to intense suffering as they die. That turns out to be around 24 minutes of suffering per kilogram of fish.

Such findings are worthy of careful consideration, given that fish is the most widely consumed meat in the world. In fact, 2.2 trillion wild fish and 171 billion farmed fish are killed each year for our consumption. Even on a much smaller scale, the study should be a cause for concern. According to the findings above, a standard tuna sandwich (containing around 70 grams of fish) is the product of around 100 seconds of intense animal suffering.

Can we morally justify this? Is that tuna sandwich really worth it?

As I outlined last time, Peter Singer uses the principle of equality to argue that if it’s morally impermissible to inflict a certain amount of pain on one creature, then it’s just as wrong to inflict that same amount of pain on any other creature. It’s a safe bet that most people would never consider inflicting 100 seconds of intense pain on a human for something as trivial as a sandwich. So how can we explain why this is permissible when it comes to fish?

The first possible answer is, perhaps, the most obvious: fish aren’t humans. We might argue that there’s an importance difference between humans and all other animals – that is, that it’s permissible to treat animals in ways that it would be impermissible to treat humans. But this answer doesn’t accurately describe out attitudes toward many other animals. I, for example, would never want to see my pet cat suffer for the sake of a mere sandwich. Perhaps, then, it’s the fact that it’s permissible to treat some animals in ways that it would be impermissible to treat humans and some other animals. We might say that it’s okay to cause fish and chickens to suffer for a sandwich, but not cats and dogs. But this approach demonstrates the exact kind of speciesism that the principle of equality rejects. What’s more, drawing lines about which animals can suffer for our benefit, and which cannot, seems awfully arbitrary.

A second answer can be given by saying that it’s not about species, but rather cognitive ability. Fish are commonly perceived as less intelligent than cats or dogs – and much less intelligent than humans. We might therefore use this as a basis for explaining why it’s permissible to treat fish in ways we’d never considering treating humans and certain other animals. But this approach is problematic too. Why? Because, ordinarily, we don’t use something’s cognitive ability as a guide to how much moral consideration it should be given. We don’t, for example, think it’s okay to treat someone worse simply because they’re less intelligent than someone else.

So how – if at all – can we justify that tuna sandwich?

Mary Anne Warren provides one possible route. While Warren acknowledges that animals have rights, she argues that these rights can often differ from equivalent human rights in both their content and strength. Let’s look at these one at a time. The content of a right describes what that right protects. Consider the right to freedom of speech. The content of this right involves my ability to say what I want, when I want, in whatever form I want. The strength of a right instead outlines the weight of the reasons required to trump that right. In many jurisdictions, for example, the (legal) right to freedom of speech doesn’t cover hate speech – since in those cases, competing reasons (i.e., other people’s rights to dignity and respect) are sufficiently strong to override the right to freedom of expression.

Consider, now, the right to freedom of movement. In order for most humans to fulfill their desires, the content of this right requires an ability to travel pretty far afield. I, for one, had to move to the other side of the world to pursue my dream of becoming a professional philosopher. For most animals, however, the right to freedom of movement requires much less. A migratory bird may need to travel many thousands of miles – such that imprisoning it (say, in a zoo) would amount to a violation of its right to freedom of movement. Another animal, however, may never stray beyond its territory of a single acre – meaning that restricting it within this space (say, by erecting a fence) would not violate its right to freedom of movement.

It’s in the relative strength of rights that Warren’s approach might provide some help for fish-eaters. Her approach allows us to say acknowledge that while humans and animals all have a right not to suffer, the weight of the reasons needed to trump this right differ between humans and different animals. In this way, a human needing to eat food in order to survive might be a strong enough reason to trump the rights of a fish (or any other animal, for that matter). This, I think, is a fairly close approximation of how most meat-eaters justify their treatment of animals. It’s not that animals don’t have rights, nor that in most cases we shouldn’t respect those rights – it’s just that humans need to eat, and this fact is weighty enough to justify us killing and eating other animals.

But here’s the problem with that argument: while we need to eat, we don’t need to eat meat. And while it’s true that some barriers to plant-based alternatives exist (cost, availability, allergies, etc.), for most of us, there’s nothing preventing us to make a better choice than a tuna suffering sandwich.

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More Than a Message: Finding Meaning in Sympathy Cards

I suspect having cancer must suck. Indeed, when I think about cancer, my mind instantly runs to terms like “malignant,” “tumor,” “fight,” and “chemotherapy.” All things which one might generously call undesirable. A phrase that doesn’t jump out at me is “funny.” However, Mark Steel’s The Leopard in my House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland is an undeniably funny book.

In it, the author, broadcaster, stand-up comedian, and newspaper columnist recounts the extraordinary year in which he was diagnosed and treated for throat cancer. The book is peppered with vivid, often graphic descriptions of what it’s like when your neck is repeatedly blasted with radiation (expect a lot of talk about mucus). But it’s also filled with warm, witty reflections on his relationships, his fellow cancer patients, his brushes with mortality, and the miraculous feeling of doing something as simple as swallowing water again.

Undoubtedly, all of the above is ripe for philosophical analysis, and this fact isn’t lost on Mark himself. In one chapter of the book, after receiving a recommendation from a fellow cancer sufferer, Mark considers the disease, the effect it’s having on his life, and how one can wrestle with forces beyond one’s control, via Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Taking a stoic approach, he considers the futility of asking “Why me?” or looking for fairness in something as arbitrary as a cancer diagnosis. It’s a grounded, practical perspective — and, I think, a wise one.

Yet, what I want to do here is look past all the fertile philosophical material that Mark provides us in his book and go in on something very specific: sympathy cards.

In Chapter 11, Mark talks about how awkward it can be talking to someone who has cancer. How unsure we often feel about what to say. That uncertainty, he argues, is natural, but it shouldn’t stop us from saying anything at all.

Of course, this transfers to non face-to-face communications. I’m sure you too have faced the daunting task of writing a meaningful message in a card. It might be something as innocuous as a birthday or leaving card, or as substantial as a commiserations or sympathy card. Yet, despite having some vague sense of what you want to say, you don’t know the correct words. This makes the whole thing slightly stressful, and the temptation is there to simply not write in the card at all. To not say anything. This, Mark says, is a mistake:

… here’s my tip if you know someone who lands in a serious medical condition. If you’re not sure what to say to someone, don’t worry because anything you say is better than nothing. I can’t remember the exact words of many of the messages I got, I can only remember that they came. Every email, text or call is a reminder that you matter to someone and that is critical in getting you passed the difficult moments. Don’t worry about saying the wrong thing. All the person remembers is that you got in touch.

This, I think, gets at something we often forget when it comes to comforting those who are ill. You’re not expected to craft the perfect, poetic paragraph that lifts someone out of despair. The point of a message, whether text, email, or card, isn’t to fix everything. It’s not even to promise that everything will be okay (because you can’t know that). Rather, it’s to remind the person they haven’t been forgotten. That they’re in your thoughts. That you’ve taken a moment out of your day and dedicated a sliver of your attention to them. That they matter.

These gestures, small as they may seem, speak volumes. They signal that when given the choice between silence and acknowledgement, you chose to say something. And in doing so, you affirmed that their struggle is worthy of notice.

But as I read Mark’s reflections on this, my brain, never missing an opportunity to be pessimistic, conjured a darker scenario: what if the message doesn’t actually come from the person it claims to?

It’s a familiar trope in film and TV: a high-powered executive learns that someone in their office is unwell and tells their assistant to “send a card,” maybe flowers too. Or worse, the executive never finds out at all, and the card is sent by a dutiful underling who signs it on their behalf. In such cases, the card still arrives, and the recipient may still feel touched that someone cared enough to reach out. But on some level, the gesture feels hollow. There’s a subtle, unsettling deception in play: the card wasn’t really from the sender it claims to be. The sentiment was manufactured.

And while the card might still do some good (after all, someone did something), it raises uncomfortable questions. Does intention matter as much as the action itself? Can a false gesture still provide real comfort? Or is there a quiet harm in pretending to care, when the person supposedly sending the message never even knew you were unwell?

These questions seem even more relevant with the advent of easily accessible generative AI. It’s now easy to offload the difficult task of writing a heartfelt message to a tool like ChatGPT. You face the blank space in the card, ask an AI to fill it, and copy the result. To the recipient, it looks like you took the time to write something meaningful. But in reality, you thought of them just enough to delegate the task to a machine.

In that light, the hollowness of the corporate-card trope becomes more personal, more widespread. The authenticity that gives these messages their power starts to erode. Worse, it casts suspicion on the entire genre. If one message might be synthetic, why not all of them?

This unease reminds me of a central theme from Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals. In it, Han argues that our society is losing the shared symbolic acts that once gave meaning to human experience. Rituals, like writing a sympathy card, once required time, presence, and emotional investment. Today, however, many of these acts are reduced to gestures of efficiency, of communication without community. It would seem evident that a card composed by ChatGPT might technically fulfill the form, but it lacks the symbolic weight Han insists is essential. The message becomes a simulation of care, not the thing itself.

Now, I acknowledge that this is a niche worry. And, at least for now, probably an overblown one. Most people still write their own messages, even if they’re clumsy or awkward. And frankly, the awkwardness is part of the point as it shows effort. A messy, imperfect message from a friend is infinitely more valuable than a flawless, ghostwritten one.

But just because it’s niche doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. The emotional stakes are high. As Steel points out, those messages can be a lifeline. They are something to cling to in the middle of immense physical and emotional suffering. They are not just words; they are reminders of human connection. And if we’re not careful, the convenience of automation might start to chip away at that.

What’s the solution, then? Honestly, I don’t have one. But I do know that next time I sit down to write something in a sympathy card, I’ll try not to overthink it. I’ll write something, however clunky or awkward, and trust, as Steel suggests, that the act of writing matters more than the words themselves.

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Grok, Is This True?: Chatbots and Domination

Last week, Grok, the large language model driven AI chatbot from xAI, suddenly began posting… differently. On Tuesday, May 8th, (in posts which xAI has since deleted) Grok stated that “anti-white hate” always comes from individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, claimed that Adolf Hitler would be best suited to deal with this problem, invoked conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”

This follows an incident in May where Grok repeatedly posted about “white genocide” in South Africa when responding to posts on wholly unrelated topics, such as baseball. When asked by users to clarify its posts on “white genocide,” Grok stated that it was instructed by its creators to accept these claims as true.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, announced on Wednesday, July 9th, that she is stepping down. Elon Musk, the owner of both X and xAI, recently wrote that Grok was “too eager to please” and that enabled users to manipulate the chatbot into creating antisemitic posts.

However, this explanation clashes with other information. In June, Musk expressed unhappiness with Grok, declaring that it would be upgraded, targeting a release date around July 4th. On July 5th, xAI posted new lines of code to Grok’s publicly accessible system prompts. These prompts encouraged Grok to assume that viewpoints from legacy media are biased, to “find diverse sources representing all parties” and to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”

The about Grok page on X states only that it was trained “on a variety of data from publicly available sources and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers.” It is unclear what “well substantiated” claims that “represent all parties” are; given the posts Grok made after the new instructions were added to its core prompt, it is reasonable to worry that the chatbot’s dataset considers antisemitic conspiracy theorists to be a party whose claims are substantiated.

There is a sense in which Grok’s posts are philosophically uninteresting. They obviously are morally condemnable. Further, they are not particularly surprising from a sheer informational standpoint. The case bears striking similarities to a Microsoft chatbot called Tay. Microsoft released Tay in 2016, intending for it to learn from its interactions with social media users. Within 24 hours, Microsoft deactivated the bot after it began making racist posts, praising Hitler, and denying the Holocaust.

However, what is interesting about the Grok fiasco is that it illuminates the extent to which creators have influence over AI tools. It seems that just a few additional prompts were able to massively change the content that Grok produced. This is particularly striking given that it appears Grok has been altered strictly to align with Musks’ preferences. Further still, new reporting suggests that Grok searches for Musk’s personal views before answering questions on controversial topics.

In a previous column, I discussed the concept of republican freedom. I will give a brief rehash here. Traditionally, philosophers think of freedom in two senses. You have positive freedom when you can do the things that you want to do. In contrast, you have negative freedom when no one actively interferes with your pursuits.

Suppose, for instance, that you are a very strong student and want to attend medical school. However, you lack the money to afford tuition and financial aid is unavailable. You are negatively free as no one is interfering with you. Yet the financial constraints hamper your positive freedom.

Now imagine that a rich uncle offers to pay your tuition. However, this uncle is quite capricious and vengeful; he has a history of lashing out against family members who engage in behavior he finds distasteful, and his preferences are unpredictable. Suppose you accept his offer. Your positive freedom increases as you can attend medical school. But are you wholly free? Your ability to attend medical school depends on your uncle’s preferences. If you do something he dislikes, he may refuse to pay your tuition. In this sense, your uncle dominates you. Even if he never actually rescinds the tuition money, you are still made vulnerable by the fact that he could. The mere threat is enough to reduce your republican freedom. You have republican freedom to the extent that your life’s prospects are not dependent upon the preferences of others. You lack this freedom when others have domineering power over you.

How does this relate to Grok and other AI chatbots? Users are increasingly reliant on these programs. Posters on X regularly ask Grok to verify or explain the claims of others, to the point that it is meme-worthy. Some preface their knowledge with “ChatGPT says that….” Even Google presents an AI overview prior to the actual results. This is deeply troubling given recently released results from an MIT lab which found that users who utilized a large language model in a series of essay-writing tasks appeared to experience neural and cognitive consequences; users of LLMs had weaker neural connectivity, demonstrated lesser cognitive activity while writing, and had worse memory of what they had written than non-users. To quote the researchers:

This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive process required for independent thinking. Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation [and] decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.

As users more frequently rely upon tools like Grok, their ability to research, analyze, and think critically about matters for themselves atrophies. This may make them more dependent on such tools, creating a vicious cycle; they initially use for convenience but over time the use becomes a necessity.

Grok’s recent antisemitic and conspiratorial tilt demonstrates why this potential for dependency is so deeply troubling. The most prominent AI tools are owned by private entities with private interests. As Grok has shown us, it seems that a few minor edits to their core prompts can vastly alter their outputs – the Grok case is simply extreme in both the result and slightness of the prompt modifications. Further, these edits may be the product of the arbitrary preferences of the ownership and programming teams.

This dependency thus seems to reduce the republican freedom of the users. Even if the owners and programmers of these tools never actually alter these tools in a way that misleads the users, the mere potential of their doing so is sufficiently troubling – the users still navigate through the world in a way that depends upon the arbitrary preferences of those who own and program the tools.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates worries about a relatively new technology: books. He fears that the written word worsens our memory and is less intellectually stimulating than dialogue. In retrospect, Socrates’ criticism is almost laughable. Even if he is right, the benefits of the written word surely far outweigh any cost.

However, there is something different about chatbots and other forms of AI-driven technology that makes the prospect of outsourcing our thinking to them troubling. Specifically, that the outputs of these technologies change. As Aaron Schultz argues, AI-driven technology captures our attention effectively because its contents change in real time to satisfy our preferences. But it is not merely the preferences of the user that can change the contents. So long as the owners and programmers may alter the programs to suit their preferences, these tools stand the potential to give those groups domination over us.

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What Didn’t Kill You Today?

This morning, I woke up after seven hours of air-conditioned sleep during a visit with a childhood friend. Yesterday, we walked plenty, prepared and ate food, and drank several glasses of water. I drove several hours before arriving, guided by GPS and secured with a seatbelt. Days ago, I completed an annual checkup at the nearby university medical system and enjoyed earnest conversations outside.

Without valiant effort, I have managed to move through the world not dying from heat stroke, dehydration, or food poisoning, free from the pains of a car wreck, untreated ailments, chronic loneliness, and air pollution. (Hooray!) I neglect, daily, to marvel properly at this miracle.

Daily survival is built on unseen protectors. When oblivious to what doesn’t kill us each day, we lack gratitude for our protective systems and, as a result, overlook their maintenance. This devaluation dominoes into preventable tragedies, even death. Hank Green calls this the tragedy of prevention.

To further understand what “prevention” means here, let’s first consider what it doesn’t.

Reactive life-saving measures, unlike preventative ones, occur in response to perils of a clear threat. For example, imagine you’re cutting up grapes for your babbling child to eat. Upon turning away, the chatter ceases, and you realize, in horror, that your four-year-old is choking. Eyes widened, you spring into action, performing the Heimlich. After a few moments, all is well.

By contrast, preventative life-saving measures occur before a threat, in protective anticipation. They are less flashy, less panic-inducing. Such action consists only in cutting up the grapes before serving them to your hungry toddler.

It’s curious. We don’t want the four-year-old to choke during snack time, and, similarly, nearly no one objects to setting broken bones in a cast or seeking a remedy while sick. However, driving the speed limit, and counting two rounds of A-B-Cs while hand-washing are less popular. It sounds like undeveloped object permanence, an inability to realize something out of sight still exists. When behind the wheel or a faucet, I rarely consider possible hospital visits or days of fever.

Striving to attend to the tiny tasks that save one’s own life is valuable; however, prevention does not begin and end at the individual level. Ongoing policy debate suggests that, even if lowering mortality is an agreed-upon aim, the methods by which a collective seeks to do this is contentious.

Take the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.I.), which passed through and to the House after a Vice Presidential tie-breaking Senate vote last week. As amplified by popular media, support for and contestation over the legislation seems rooted in reaction to the tens of billions in cuts to The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid.

These programs, insurance and food assistance, are preventative. They save lives less dramatically than the rescue of a car accident victim, aiding people in hopes of avoiding crisis. Related categories of prevention include the social determinants of health (SDOH), which the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion groups into five domains: economic stability, as well as quality of and access to education, health care, built environment, and social community. In other words, where and how you are able to conduct day-to-day life factors into how long you have it.

Gaps in global mortality rates reflect this story. According to Our World in Data, global life expectancy—one’s expected number of years alive — doubled from the year 1770 to 2000. However, though the Americas saw a rise from 34.8 to 73.2 in this time, average lifespan moved from 26.4 to only 53.7 in Africa. In the last near-quarter century, low-income countries experienced ten years of growth — 53.1 to 63.8 — while high-income countries — 77.6 to 81.4 — break into an eighth average decade.

War, natural disaster, and localized traumas could explain inter-state divergences. However, investigation suggests that some fare better than others, at least in part, due to disparities in resource access between and within countries. For instance, the United States observed a post-coronavirus dip in life expectancy. Yet, within this same country, one racial group experienced average losses of 2.1, while, at the highest end, another faced an estimated 6.6.

Given that most of us live in societies, not remote isolation, meaningfully reducing these gaps perhaps involves anticipating threats and responding preventatively to historical trends. Local and global collectives comprise a substantial portion of the response to early mortality risk factors like food insecurity, dense living conditions, and poverty. Such institutions range from food banks and domestic abuse crisis centers to national and global programs, like the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

But institutions aimed at prevention are not without their own fraught spotlight this year. Allegations of “waste and abuse” prompted cuts to 83% of USAID’s humanitarian and development aid, terminating 52,000 contracts worth $54 billion. Several headlines responded to this action citing an evaluation that, due to cuts, more than 14 million avoidable deaths could occur by 2030. In response, Boston University Mathematician Brooke Nichols created a PREPFAR Program Impact Tracker, estimating the number of deaths associated with the freeze and discontinuation of USAID’s program that supports people living with HIV.

If prevention is an invisible helper, then it could be easy to claim that — and perhaps more difficult to discern when — resources are used ineffectively. The painful truth might be that absence has a knack for highlighting the goodness we took for granted at the start. If funds are being misused, such conclusions will be hidden under waves of realizing what has been lost. And when quiet, preventative structures fall away, reactive ones might loudly, frantically attempt and fail to take their place. Consider, for instance, February’s NOAA cuts, which resurfaced amid this week’s heated disagreement of their role (or lack thereof) in the tragedies of recent deadly Texas flooding.

Connecting the dots between abstract public policy decisions and felt societal impacts will always be speculative work. Unfortunately, the political menu often offers only simple, all-or-nothing selections. Loud voices will, understandably, continue to amplify opinion on the distribution of resources that impact human lives and wealth on the national and global scale. However, the fundamental principles informing use of public provisions are seemingly messy by nature. Someone could genuinely want everyone to be taken care of without knowing how and where collected public resources ought to intervene.

For instance, we know clean air is healthier air. Does this justify annual emissions testing? Banning smoking — or all non-electric cars? Ought the reason for, opportunity cost of, and amount of pollution impact this decision?

Consuming poisoned food is deadly, so should we always accept the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulations on and evaluation of our groceries? What about outlawing digestible but addictive consumables like added sugar or alcohol? Should a regulatory standard for food and drink be edibility or health promotion?

What if you have food and healthcare, but your neighbor does not? What if you have no kids, but your coworker has three, and childcare costs are as high as your salary? If there’s a loneliness epidemic, then do we divert public funds to build more parks? What are public funds for?

We need a lot of support to live healthy lives. The extent to which a government should supply the structural support to construct them for its citizens, however, is not immediately clear. And when preventative systems do cut our grapes up for us, we’re, tragically, quite good at eating them in oblivious, underappreciated safety.

As the news continues to unfurl, I wonder if catching up with daily (or hourly) changes distracts, more than anything else, from the essence and productivity of what any of us are really after. Perhaps latching, instead, onto a foundational normative question might help unearth grounding and well-reasoned solutions:

What kind of lives, exactly, do we owe each other?

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Should There Be Billionaires?

In late June, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Primary for the mayor of New York City, over establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo. Making waves shortly thereafter, Mamdani attested that “I don’t think we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.” Fighting words from the potential future mayor of the city with the most billionaires.

Billionaires did not take this lying down. In a statement on X on July 4th, Sam Altman, the venture capitalist and CEO of OpenAI, contended that he’d “rather hear from candidates about how they’re going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires.”

Neither of the full views of either of these individuals can be gleaned from these short comments, but it sets up an interesting ethical question: Should there be billionaires? Or, more precisely: Should the government take steps to prevent billionaires from arising?

This is not the same as whether it is moral or ethical to be a billionaire. One might argue there is something grotesque about hoarding wealth like a dragon, when so many suffer in poverty (indeed, leftists have made such arguments). But it does not necessarily follow that the government should step in – perhaps we should simply regard it as a moral failing, a character flaw. To legislate the accumulation and reservation of wealth is a different question entirely. Could such a policy be justified?

The simplest argument is that billionaires deserve their billions; they should not be dispossessed of their hard-won rewards. This follows a pat societal story about the earning of money. Unfortunately, philosophical analysis does not support this narrative. Becoming a billionaire is incredibly luck dependent. Many simply inherited their money. But even if we think that a particular billionaire is very talented — business savvy, academically gifted, hardworking — did they somehow “earn” those traits? No, possessing those personal characteristics is ultimately just good luck as well. (I have, previously, questioned if anyone deserves anything.)

Additionally, the earning of so much money occurs on a specific social and legal backdrop. Without the corporate world organized just so, and investment laws, and the stock market, etc, such wealth would not simply materialize. From basic safety to specific resources, modern billionaires depend on government (and the public) for their existence. They do not simply emerge independently in the wild for the grasping hand of the state to swipe its share at the eleventh hour.

So taxing and redistributing money from billionaires does not represent a special obstacle. But why might a state be interested in it? There are reasons associated with both ameliorating potential harms caused by the existence of billionaires, as well as providing a wide social safety net to all members of society.

At first blush, it seems people are not directly harmed by the mere existence of billionaires. My house does not become smaller, just because someone else’s is bigger. However, inequality can have consequences of its own. In a highly unequal society, humans may treat those with fewer resources as lesser individuals and this prejudice and discrimination can cause an additional level of harm. The negative social effects of inequality are scientifically well-established, with Laura Siscoe having previously written about some of the issues associated with inequality for The Prindle Post.

Moreover, contrary to Altman, there are certain goods that not everyone can simply have more of. For example, there is only a finite amount of political power to go around, and if it is monopolized by billionaires, then others simply lose their ability to have their voice heard. The unequal distribution of political power represents an additional risk as billionaires can further distort politics in their interest.

Finally, a government may be interested in redistributing some of this money to provide public goods and services. This is especially true given the impact money has for different people. If you take a billion dollars from someone like Jeff Bezos, it essentially represents a small decrease in his net worth. It does not impact what he can buy or how he can live his life. However, a $100,000 may be completely transformative to someone earning $30,000 dollars a year. And for the price of this fractional cost to Bezos, this could be done 10,000 times! Or, if we oppose such direct transfers, the same general point applies to, say, building a public library. (It is worth noting that sudden changes in the distribution of wealth can have large-scale economic implications, which make it more complicated than this toy example illustrates.)

Perhaps what people are really interested in defending are not billionaires, but a system where individuals have the freedom and motivation to become billionaires. The concern is that starkly taxing billionaires would undermine the dynamism and drive behind entrepreneurialism. Ultimately, this is not a philosophical question, but an empirical question about how different tax structures and redistributive policies impact economic growth. The jury is still out.

However, even for the staunchest supporters of capitalism, a prohibition against billionaires is not obviously problematic. First, even if we constrained people’s ability to achieve 10 figures, individuals could still become incredibly wealthy; regulation is not antithetical to the profit motive. Second, there’s reason to doubt that innovation is the product of a small number of exceptional individuals seeking to be billionaires. This is especially notable for those like Sam Altman himself, who is unrelated to any technological innovation in AI except as a financier.  Presumably, of all parts of the innovation ecosystem, the most easily switched out is the specific pockets financial support comes from. In fact, if we are trying to maximize innovation, then a redistributive system which spreads resources around, allowing more people to get their ideas out there and innovate, should be preferred.

Even if we agree that there should not be billionaires, the precise way to go about doing that can raise independent challenges (e.g., how to enforce a wealth tax). However, from a philosophical perspective, opposition to billionaires is not an especially radical idea – it’s fully compatible with capitalism and a high tolerance of inequality. The harm done to a billionaire by making them a hundred-millionaire instead is minimal, the good that can be done with such money incredible, and the opening up of political power laudatory. From the perspective of a billionaire, redistribution no doubt feels unfair, but it’s not obvious that a compelling argument rests behind that impression.

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How Can We Know If a Bill Is Beautiful?

The “Big Beautiful Bill” just passed in the Senate and is likely to become law. Depending on who you ask, this bill is either a historic win, a major compromise, or a total disaster.

But with so many competing takes, how can we know what to believe?

One option is to look at the online breakdowns, news articles, or the whitehouse myth vs. fact page, all which try to explain the bill. However, if you are still skeptical, perhaps because these summaries feel overly simplified, vague, or partisan, you might be interested in reading the bill for yourself.

Fortunately, you can. All you need to do is check out the text of the Big Beautiful Bill conveniently placed online here. But, if you are like me, you will quickly be humbled by text like this:

Bills often amend existing laws by using in-line edits. Instead of rewriting the law, bills specify which sections of a previous law to modify and what text to add, modify, or remove. There are some good reasons to write a bill this way. It is precise, it allows lawmakers the ability to target parts of the law without rewriting the whole thing, and it helps preserve legal continuity. This approach makes sense if you are a lawmaker. For the public, it makes bills unintelligible.

In order to truly understand this bill, you would need to pull up and read every bill that this bill amends. Then, you would need to open the Big Beautiful Bill and systematically check the in-line edits across hundreds or thousands of pages of dense legal text. The Big Beautiful Bill alone is over a thousand pages, and the bills that it amends all contain sections, subsections, and subparagraphs, making it a sprawling mess. Even the lawmakers who have created the bill cannot possibly understand it in its entirety.

This problem is not trivial. John Rawls argued that a just society is one where the social and political institutions are known to, or at least reasonably believed to, align with a shared sense of justice. But how can a people judge whether a massive bill aligns with justice if they cannot read it?

There are a few ways we could increase the readability of law.

First, bills could include hyperlinks that link to the laws they amend. Second, lawmakers could produce a version of the updated laws that exclude the in-line edit language before the bill is passed. Third, we could impose limits to the size and scope of bills.

Adding hyperlinks would allow people to more easily move between a proposed bill and the laws it amends. While it is certainly possible to copy and paste the names and sections of laws being modified, adding hyperlinks removes the barrier of inconvenience. It also ensures that when I want to check what is being modified, I am looking at the correct version of the law being updated.

By publishing a version of the law that shows the proposed edits in context and without language like “is amended by adding at the end the following,” one can more easily understand the changes being made. While this does not change the complicated nature of the laws themselves, removing the contextualizing language reduces the mental effort required to make meaning out of the proposed changes.

It is worth noting that if we ask lawmakers to give us a draft of what the new version of a law would look like before it is passed, this will effectively nullify some of the benefits that one gets from using in-line edits. It would double the amount of work required to produce a bill. However, the point of this thought exercise is to try and imagine what would make the law more readable and increase justice; we can work through the practical points after we have a reasonable list of demands.

If we imposed limits on the size and scope of any single bill we would also increase our ability to understand the law. Consider, the Big Beautiful Bill includes amendments about the IRS, social security, higher education, agriculture, defense and homeland security, student loans, natural resource management, health, and the government itself. If you asked me to read a 1000-page book that covered these topics, I likely wouldn’t. However, if you asked me to read a 150-page book that only covered social security, I could manage it. This is a commonsense argument: smaller texts with a focused scope are easier to understand.

Limiting the size of a bill could have some additional benefits, like reducing the number of hidden amendments and bargaining chips buried within the text. When a bill is 1000 pages long and covers everything from AI regulation to social security tax reform, it is incredibly easy to slip in controversial legal changes that may go overlooked or to use less controversial but important amendments as bargaining chips for the more controversial ones.

One could of course argue that enforcing a size and scope limit on bills would slow down an already painfully slow government. To this, I have two responses.

First, it might do that and this is not an insignificant concern. Creating a just society is demanding, and having a government that can get laws passed in a reasonable amount of time is absolutely desirable. It may be a cost that we need to weigh against the benefits of increasing the public’s ability to understand and assess the laws that govern them.

Second, while it might slow things down, it may also speed things up. One of the issues with passing large bills is precisely the fact that bills contain so much. For example, if two senators agree on changes A, B, and C, but disagree about D and E, bundling these together unnecessarily blocks progress on A, B, and C. Smaller bills could encourage a quicker resolution on the things that are already agreed upon.

Making bills smaller would also force our representatives to show their true colors. Because bills often contain so much content, it is easy for lawmakers to hide behind policies that they know are more favorable. If there is a policy about military spending and a lawmaker wants to vote to increase that spending but fears they might be accused of being a warmonger, they can simply say the reason they voted for the bill was to help ensure a school tax credit would be instituted, which they know to be more popular.

There will be limits to making the law intelligible. Making the law precise requires using technical legal terminology, not to mention the technical language of every sphere the law covers. However, this does not mean we cannot implement ways to increase the legibility of the law. If we care about justice, we should care about making laws easier to read. If we cannot read the law, we cannot understand it, and if we cannot understand it, we cannot judge whether it is beautiful or ugly, just or unjust.

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The Skeptical Foundations of Social Trust

In a recent column, Tim Hsiao argues that we should endorse the “presumptive reliability” of police because:

Social trust is the foundation of everyday life. We trust that people mean what they say in contracts, that businesses honor transactions, that doctors give honest diagnoses, and that countless routine interactions are based on good faith. Without this basic presumption, voluntary exchange collapses, institutions grind to a halt, and every interaction becomes a negotiation over proof.

As a lawyer, I could only smile reading these words, because I practice in precisely those areas — commercial litigation and medical malpractice. In a sense, Hsiao is right: in everyday life, we routinely presume that others will act in good faith — sort of. But particularly in areas like contracts, business transactions, and other interactions with strangers, that “trust” is undergirded by three things: (1) our awareness that should others act in bad faith, we have a remedy — specifically, a legal remedy; (2) others’ awareness that we have that remedy; and (3) our awareness of (2). Our trust in others, particularly strangers, is possible only because we know that the law makes the cost of bad faith prohibitive. And of course, in reality we know that people sometimes cheat anyway, so we often are wary of entering into contracts and other transactions. Companies spend billions in lawyers’ fees and other costs vetting their prospective agreements and the people on the other side of the table.

Social trust is only possible if underwritten by the iron rules of law — the dictates of the state, backed by the threat of force. In addition, the existence of the law itself expresses an immutable skepticism about our own fellow citizens’ honesty and integrity. To see why, imagine instituting a rule requiring your partner to pay a $1500 fine for infidelity. Surely, such a rule does not bespeak trust in one’s significant other. Rules of law are deterrents to bad action, so the imposition of law implies a sense that bad action is afoot.

There is a tradition of thought that contrasts social trust and law. It is easy to see why: the law is not expressive of trust. But as I suggested above, the law enables social trust by assuring us in our everyday interactions that others can usually be trusted. This is true even in Hsiao’s case of the rule giving presumptive credibility to police testimony regarding the existence of probable cause. The only reason the law extends this presumptive credibility to the officer is because a police department is (or should be) a highly regulated organization. Those legal and regulatory safeguards are all supposed to ensure that a police officer’s testimony will generally be reliable—because the officer is well-trained pursuant to regulations, because the officer is subject to reviews and disciplinary procedures, because the officer, in the end, is not above the law. Again, the fruit of skepticism is trust.

This line of reasoning also shows why the rule giving presumptive credibility to a 9-11 caller is very different from the one giving presumptive credibility to a police officer’s testimony regarding probable cause, even if both are reasonable. We extend presumptive credibility to a 9-11 caller because we want the police to err on the side of over-responsiveness to citizens’ distress calls. That is the policy rationale underlying the rule. There is, by the way, a law against giving a false report to the police, which could include a fake 9-11 call. That legal threat is another guarantor of credibility. By contrast, we give presumptive credibility to a police officer’s testimony because police officers are (or should be) members of a highly-regulated government agency, and the many procedural safeguards in place to regulate their conduct are supposed to ensure that they are conducting themselves in good faith. That, plus the necessity of relying upon police officer testimony to effectively enforce the criminal law, may justify the rule of presumptive credibility. Thus, Hsiao may be mistaken in thinking that logical consistency demands that we extend presumptive credibility in both cases or none, because the underlying policy rationales in these cases are very different.

The rule of law is thus the rule of a skeptic. Yet, while skeptical about our own fellow citizens’ honesty and integrity, the law is the midwife of social trust — if instituted legitimately and administered justly. That is a big “if.”

Here again, though, skepticism is part of the answer. We don’t trust our officials enough not to jealously guard the power to throw them out of office should they cross us — not in a democracy. The power of the vote implies a suspicion of power. Thus, the skepticism of the voters is, in theory, the ultimate guarantor of a well-functioning democracy. Another mechanism common to many liberal democracies is a scheme of divided powers. Again, such a scheme is premised on the expectation that people with power will try to abuse it.

Where Hsiao sees a threat to social functioning if skepticism run rampant, I see that the most successful societies in the world are also the most law-bound. A law-bound society is not one that takes its members’ good faith for granted. It is one that provides remedies for their bad faith — remedies that inflict significant pain on the wrongdoers. The relatively just, impartial administration of those remedies underwrites social trust. I also see that the most successful societies are liberal democracies, whose electoral mechanisms and schemes of divided powers are premised on the expectation of abuses of power. In short, social trust flourishes in societies under the rule of law because the law keeps people honest.