Ugh. I woke up this morning, immediately got into a substantive discussion, and found myself unable to think of not one but two names I believe are important to remember. The most important of the two was Kurt Gödel, whose “Incompleteness Theorems” led me to the Ethics Incompleteness Theorem, which is an important concept I haven’t discussed lately but is in the Ethics Alarms concepts and special terms list above.
The other name that I had to dig into my neurons to locate was Jill Corey, whom I had vowed to remember because it is so unfair that she has been almost totally forgotten. I wrote about her in 2023, here, on the occasion of Corey’s death.
Try to remember what you have been thinking about in the world of ethics over the last week and share it with us, will you?
(Incidentally, almost nobody except musical theater geeks remember that before he starred in “Law and Order,” Jerry Orbach was the star of “The Fantasticks,” the longest running musical ever. That’s him singing in the video above, when he was in his twenties, in the original Off-Broadway production.
Ethics Alarms 
Well, I’m not sure of the ethical implications (as it isn’t my best subject, sorry Jack!) of this incident I just recalled in the last week. It happened in 2015, the story of hitchBOT. From Wikipedia:
https://youtu.be/ERr2gqqM4i8?si=EkTLEvL_f5e6JGNU
hitchBOT’s fate wasn’t just about a destroyed machine—it was a kind of a test for societal ethics I think. Its story forces us to confront how we treat non-human entities that mimic social bonds, and what that says about us. Or at least some of us.
I wonder what would happen today if this experiment was attempted again?
I think it’s more a test on how we handle other people’s property. I doubt that anything left on its own devices will last long in most of the United States.
Nor do I think things have changed all that much since 2015 that a similar thing wouldn’t happen today.
Was it wearing any New York sports team paraphernalia?
That would certainly account for it’s severe demise in Philly….
There is some sort of poetic beauty to a bot being dismembered in Philly, the City of Brotherly Love.
jvb
HitchBOT was a little more complicated than is being described here… It had a very basic, kind of like 20 questions AI to explain to people what it was and where it was trying to get, and needed to be plugged in every now and again. It was kind of a phenomenon; People dressed it up, took it to bars and took pictures with it.
Let’s say that in the near future we will pass the singularity predicted by Ray Kurzweil and we develop AI robots that pass the Turing test (as in the A24 movie “Ex Machina”), will that change the moral equation? Do we have to treat this AI robot as a piece of equipment and a piece of property, or does this raise additional moral concerns, and do we have to treat this AI robot as a sentient being with rights, or as an independent object of moral concern?
Why would we?
People get hung up on hypotheticals, but we have practical examples already: Animals are sentient, and generally don’t have much for rights. Go one step further and consider intelligence… Parrots develop intelligent capabilities similar to a small child, but don’t have any additional rights because of that. They might have more protections if they’re rare, but not if they’re more or less intelligent.
Animals do not have rights, but animal abuse is considered unethical. So if we develop sentient and highly intelligent robots will we then have ethical responsibilities to these robots?
Best “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode ever covered that dilemma beautifully.
“The Measure of a Man”. One of the gems of season 2!
Transhumanists may certainly argue that robots have “rights” because the false appearing real has value to them. A robot is a machine and nothing more. Whether or not it mimics sentience, it is not highly intelligent, it is instead a machine that has been programmed to appear intelligent. If we’re advocating for “rights” to machines here, you should feel bad every time you bang on a toaster, television, or washing machine to get it to work properly. You should say thank you when your printer prints, or refrigerator keeps food cold. After all, these are pretty cool skills that we humans are not able to do.
As someone who professionally works domesticated animals, I find the comparison to animals interesting. While we certainly want our pets in particular to perform behaviors or even work (like police dogs), they can think on their own. A machine may be programmed to process data, but this isn’t the same as having a biological and chemical imperative to process stimuli to survive.
Robot rights is a windy road toward technocratic control of humans. Getting us to believe machines have rights seems to be a decent way of getting us to eventually comply to their programmed commands. We don’t have any ethical responsibilities towards machines themselves other than within the context of property rights. By the way, tell your oven I said “Hi.”
Depends… If you’re asking “Would we have the same ethical obligations we would for anything?” The answer is yes. It’s unethical to destroy someone else’s property. It’s arguably unethical to destroy your own. And the more valuable or rare the property, the more obvious the ramifications are, and an AI good enough that it mimics sentience would obviously be valuable.
But if the question was whether a sufficiently “aware” AI would create new ethical duties, then no. For exactly the reasons I stated: What’s the standard that creates that new duty? Life? Sentience? Intelligence?
Frankly, I don’t think that you’re prepared to actually follow your own logic to a natural conclusion… Because if you believe that considering the abuse of something unethical confers some some kind of ethical responsibility to maintain it, then we probably shouldn’t be eating animals.
We shouldn’t be eating animals. But as John Travolta memorably tells Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction,” “Bacon tastes gooood!”
I didn’t expect that response…. Why not?
Why? They are more sentient than we like to believe, and it is nutritionally unnecessary. Livestock and chickens suffer horribly in many cases. The arguments for eating meat (and fish) are mostly rationalizations.
Jack,
Now I’m curious about this matter. What are you reading that suggests that meat is unnecessary? I’ve seen a big mixture of literature that runs the gamut of opinions, and my poorly-research survey suggests that while most people could, with some effort, get all the nutrients they needed from other food sources, it would be easy to miss some important nutrients, and some people could not make the transition at all.
Regarding the cruelty toward livestock and chickens, that’s an argument for better treatment of the animals, and perhaps an argument that we should accept higher prices for our meat, but that’s not an argument against eating meat. Reduce meat consumption, maybe; eliminate meat consumption, no.
They are living things. They feel paid and experience fear. They are capable of love, or something similar. Indeed, getting the necessary nutrition without meat is inconvenient, expensive, and difficult. But measured against life, it fails the test of utilitarianism. If people had to kill their own meat, there would be many more vegetarians.
Jack,
If I put your argument into a syllogism, we have:
If we accept this syllogism, we would have to determine what sufficient levels of sentience make eating a being unethical, and then we would have to discuss which, if any, animals meet that level of sentience. Otherwise, eating animals doesn’t seem to be an ethical matter, but rather in the “ick” realm, as the only remaining argument is, “I feel bad for killing and eating this animal.”
I might agree that we’d have more vegetarians if we had to kill all our own food, but since I’m from Wyoming, where most people hunt at least some of the time, I don’t find that argument very convincing either, especially since that still seems to fall into the “ick” category, not ethics.
What levels of sentience should we specify that would disqualify a being from being killed and eaten? You put forward life, capacity to feel pain, the capacity to feel fear, and the capacity to love. Those are four different tiers. Obviously being alive is insufficient on its own, as almost everything we eat was alive before we ate it. The capacity to feel pain is higher level, as we think that lower lifeforms don’t have pain receptors. But we also question whether even higher animals experience pain as we do. We don’t just have a stimulus-response relationship with pain, but we have an experience of suffering, in that we pose ourselves to ourselves a subject to an unjust situation. It certainly seems to us that our pets especially have this concept of suffering, but it is also possible that our tendency to anthropomorphize animals creates that perception. I would argue the same regarding fear, since we might be mistaking an instinctive reaction to danger with a genuine anticipation of a foreseen event. Finally, we see animals demonstrate a great deal of affection, especially pets with owners. We see dogs demonstrate unbelievable loyalty, and we see cats (in their own feline way) react with what seems to be care and compassion with their owners. However, there are still some problems with these conditions. Even granted they are not illusions created through anthropomorphism, there is still something about animals that is lacking.
I would argue that the thing lacking is a higher tier than any of the ones we’ve discussed before, and that is being a rational agent. Even the animals we equate with the highest levels of cognition do not rise to being rational agents. Their natures simply are not equipped with that capacity. As companionable as animals might be, they do not have the self determinism, the philosophizing, the ability to conceive of abstract ideas, the notion of self and of life and death that characterize members of a rational species.
To help us see the difference, we can talk about other situations than eating the animals. We have no problems (in general) with killing rats and mice that infest our homes. They don’t even barge in with malice, like a burglar or murderer. Yet we still exterminate them in large numbers. We also take animals that we don’t want overpopulating the area and neuter or spay them, because they are not capable on their own managing their populations. We keep animals as pets, which to anyone of a rational species would be a degradation. We can ask why we think it is okay to do all these things to animals, and yet struggle with whether or not we can eat them.
I begin with this: Not killing anything that is alive is ethically preferable to killing it. People who kill animals for no reason are regarded as sadists and sick. Is an animal more or less of a rational agent than a fetus? A human suffering from dementia? A human in a coma? I would guess more. So the difference is just…what, we’re humans and rule the food chain, so there? Kant said that human life trumps all other considerations. Why wouldn’t non-human life trump all considerations except human life? So—we can ethically kill an animal in self defense. We (ethically) kill dogs to discover new medicines that help humans? Ok…why do we feel killing whales and dolphins and elephants is unethical but killing deer is OK? Recent research suggests that animals are much more sentient than we have assumed. Ravens play games. So do bears. There are videos of elk playing “tag” with dogs. You say: “As companionable as animals might be, they do not have the self determinism, the philosophizing, the ability to conceive of abstract ideas, the notion of self and of life and death that characterize members of a rational species.” None of this is definitively proven. Many mammals show mourning behaviors, or what may be that.
If we have to kill animals to survive, that settles the issue. But do we?
Incidentally, when I trap mice in my house, I take them out to the woods and grassland, and let them go. My animal-loving wife insisted on it. And I sing “Born Free” as I release them.
I really do.
Jack,
Well, MY wife insisted that we take the one mouse we caught in our house outside and smash it with a rock. I was going to let the poor little thing go, but it had been traumatized by the cats, and was likely to die anyway. I was still heartbroken over it. (I love rats and mice, by the way.)
The main point to make is the notion of rational nature. I know EC takes umbrage when I start talking about nature, but it is an important concept. This is because, if I ever get my essay on this written, I think nature is fundamental to ethics, in that ethics follows upon nature. There is something about human nature that separates it from the rest of the animal world. This gives mankind an inherent dignity that is lacking in the rest of the animal world that we have seen thus far. That truly is what makes it okay to kill and eat animals, to keep them as pets, to conduct experiments on them, and render them infertile based upon our reasoning, not theirs.
But I do agree with you that the basic ethical principal is not to kill unnecessarily.
I see a beautiful discussion between Jack Marshall and Ryan Harkins about ethical behavior towards animals, and whether this requires vegetarianism. I am not going to jump into that specific discussion, and as the threat becomes very deep affecting readability I will start a bit higher. I think we can make some general observations:
As this started as a discussion about AI, can we make similar observations about future robots, assuming that we pass the singularity as described by Ray Kurzweil, and provided that these robots are sentient and perhaps pass the Turing test? Or should also in these cases robots be treated as nothing more than pieces of metal and plastic?
Jack, I’m not sure how important this is to anyone else, but Kurt Godel played a role in my journey back to the Catholic Church. There were five or six significant events in my reversion story, and encountering Godel’s incompleteness theorems was one of them. In technical terms, Godel was able to demonstrate that in any sufficiently descriptive axiomatic language, we can formulate statements within that language that are true that cannot be proven true from the axioms of that language. Even if we adopted that statement as an axiom, that new language would have statements that are true that cannot be proven true, and so on. But in layman’s terms, this amounts to the statement, “there are things that are true that we cannot ever formally prove true.” If there are things that are true, and they can’t be proven true, then we have two choices. We can either remain agnostic about its truth, or we can accept its truth without a formal proof. If we choose to believe it is false, that’s our right, certainly, but we’d be wrong.
Here is an interesting tweet from Jacob Shell.
https://x.com/JacobAShell/status/1914351201954472287
These democrats are ramping up the rhetoric. Just read Turley’s latest post.
These people have become unhinged or were always unhinged. “we are going to make sure you understand what democracy looks like, and this ain’t it”. I’m not familiar with her definition of democracy.
They’re going to be in our asses? Words fail me.
Recently, President Trump has gotten into the Baby Game, wanting to encourage and incentivize the birth of babies across the United States. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing. I can think of worse things to encourage. I’m not sure this is something the President of the United States should be involved with, but your mileage may vary.
The New York Times recently covered suggestions made that the administration offer $5000 to incentivize parenthood, reserving scholarships for parents or offering fertility classes. The Times also mention the suggestion of a Motherhood Medal.
I admit I was suspicious that any member of the administration might suggest such an award because, being a WWII buff, my mind instantly jumped to the notorious medals handed out to German women in Nazi Germany for birthing a bunch of kids.
It turns out, no one in the administration did suggest it:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/trump-motherhood-medal-pronatalist-nazi/
The relevant paragraph is here:
“This suggestion came from Malcolm and Simone Collins, a Pennsylvania couple who seem to have appointed themselves heads of the pronatalist movement and were the belles of the ball at NatalCon. The medal was part of a collection of draft executive orders on pronatalism that the Collinses recently sent to the Trump administration.”
The Collins are not members of the Trump Administration nor do they appear to be operating in an official government capacity. I could send suggestions to the Trump Administration about a great many things and it would mean nothing. It certainly would not mean that the government is considering it, pondering it, giving it a second thought or anything else.
Sure enough, the reliably liberal media made sure to link the suggestion to the Nazis. Further along in the Mother Jones article:
“But the Collinses can’t take full credit for the idea of a motherhood medal. France has issued a similar medal since 1920, but the idea really picked up steam when Adolf Hitler first conferred a similar honor on German mothers of eight or more children in 1939, calling it the Cross of Honour of the German Mother. (Naturally, Jews were not among the 3 million women who received the medal between 1939 and 1944.) The fascist Soviet Union Leader Joseph Stalin followed suit, offering a similar medal in 1944. The highest honor went to mothers of nine or more children, though mothers of seven and eight children were also recognized. Since then, the motherhood medal has been especially popular in authoritarian regimes the world over, including in Hungary, Khazakstan, and Russia.”
Let’s set aside the fact that the article calls Stalin a fascist. Yes, it actually does. Notice that they are intent on attaching the idea and predominant use of Motherhood medals to authoritarian regimes.
Like Trump’s, ya know.
I find the idea (and the suggestion) of a Motherhood medal to be silly. I would love for someone in the Trump administration to disavow that such a thing would even be considered but, at this point, I know it wouldn’t matter because the media will always find a way to spin it in their favor (“Trump Walks Back Nazi Motherhood Medal Idea”). Mostly, I would love to be a consultant on Nazi Germany for the administration.
So here it is.
Dear President Trump,
Whenever there is a suggestion made about anything, send it to me so I can tell you if the Nazis did anything close to it so you can quickly go on record with, “No, no, no, that suggestion will not work! Don’t you know the Nazis did that? Banning smoking on public transportation? Nazis! Strict laws to prevent cruelty to animals? Removing religious instruction and symbols from public schools? Nazis! Military parades? Nazis! Silly Motherhood Medals? Especially the Nazis!”
I am not really in favor of this initiative.
The root cause of declining birth rates is the decline in marriage rates and increase in age of first marriage. That means that the fertility window of married women has decreased significantly since, let’s say 1970.
How we got here is a long story, but in includes a) birth control b) sexual revolution c) feminism with attendant change in gender roles d) no fault unilateral divorce. Lately, thanks to dating apps and social media, which contribute to unrealistic expectations about marital partners, a lot of young people are unable to find a suitable mate.
Having the government issue breeding premiums is not addressing these underlying root issues.
That’s rather the point, isn’t it? That should you add weight to the other side it will (hopefully) change the net incentive.
And then you don’t have to do any of the messy work of fixing the original disfunction.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/he-bought-an-entire-city-street-now-trenton-wants-it-back-but-the-owner-says-they-arent-paying-its-worth
Around 2021, a man in Trenton Ohio thought he was buying an empty plot of land in a Sheriff’s auction. What he (and possibly the auctioneers) didn’t understand was that the plot listed also included the street of Bloomfield Court, in Trenton Ohio.
It sounds like the land they paved to make Bloomfield Court was owned and maintained by an HOA, the HOA was foreclosed on, and the street went to auction. The man paid $5000 for the plot of land and the road, and the contract for the sale was completed. Trenton wants to reclaim the land through eminent domain to turn the private roadway into a public roadway, and they’re fighting over the valuation of the land. Trenton only appraised the lot, which is *really* weird, because that’s technically the only land they wouldn’t need for their stated purpose.
I think there’s layers here.
The obvious conflict is between the owner and the city. Reading between the lines, I have the feeling that negotiations broke down a long time ago between the parties. The owner probably doesn’t want to be responsible for the roadway, but feels like he’s owed something because he technically owns the road, and it ought to have *some* value. The city probably doesn’t want to pay anything to take on the responsibility of road maintenance. Adults could have come to an agreement, but they’re in short supply.
Next step down is how this all happened… You can kind of squint and see how something like this could happen… There wasn’t a structure on the lot other than the pavement. But in reality, this wasn’t a stake moved a couple feet.
Next step down is what I actually want to talk about: HOAs. We could spend time talking about the ethics and petty tyrannies of HOAs, but people generally have (or should have) some kind of idea either before joining, or before buying a property that is part of an HOA. But what I want to talk about is the relatively new phenomenon of HOA’s owning their access roads. Municipalities like this practice because it hoists the costs of road maintenance onto the HOA, HOAs seem to like this because it gives them more of that sweet, sweet control they’re addicted to, and they like installing gates. The problem is that HOA’s are notoriously poorly run, and often don’t squirrel away enough of their sweet, sweet lucre to actually pay for the expenses they’re responsible for (like roof maintenance on HOA properties with a shared canopy) and those damned gates often end up plowed by a fire truck with no other option other than to destroy the barrier onto their way to an emergency call.
I’m of the opinion that municipalities shouldn’t be allowing private streets like these generally, but particularly in urban areas, for a whole lot of reasons. Nevermind the problems already mentioned, but it makes everything more difficult for everyone involved… Think sewer and power hookups, snow removal, liability for accidents… Privately owned semi-public roads owned by HOAs are a recipe for disaster.
/soapbox
I’m trying to decide whether or not to attend my Yale Law School 40th reunion in the fall. Everything about the place–the program, administration, professors, students–is repugnant to me. I think society would be better off if the campus reverted to farmland. Although I got along well with my classmates, they are all super lefties and I don’t have any contact with them.
On the other hand, I guess I attended the school in what seems like a golden age in the 1980’s, when free and open discussion was the norm and you could argue about anything with anyone without fear of being cancelled (although in retrospect, I think the winds of culture war were starting to blow even then) And I recognize that the diploma led directly to a career that would never have been possible without it.
So, what will it be? Will I make the long trip to New Haven or will I stay home?
Well, you know where I come out on that one, because I chose to boycott my big reunion and write a detailed explanation why in the reunion book.
What frosted my cupcake was that the school couldn’t bring itself to acknowledge, except in a terse, one paragraph announcement, that J.D. Vance–the VPOUS– was a graduate when it literally swooned over Bill and Hillary!
This shows poor judgment all around:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/judge-arrested-for-allegedly-helping-undocumented-immigrant-evade-arrest/ar-AA1DCiFa?ocid=BingNewsSerp
In particular, a judge assisting a criminal defendant to avoid arrest by immigration officials. This could be construed as showing partiality toward a party in a case before her.
-Jut
Just wait; Lefty’s handlers will deftly herd the glassy-eyin’ lock-steppin’ unquestionin’ base to deify her like she’s the Second Coming!
PWS
Some already are.
Read this Reddit threadl; they already are.
Feel free to join the conversation.
Do Tell…
PWS
Indeed.
The appearance of impartiality is needed, even if what she is proven to have done is not technically a crime.
All I want to say is that I always loved loved loved Jerry Orbach and was so sad when he died. And that song is one of my all-time favorites. “Deep in December, it’s nice to remember the fire of September that made you mellow.”
I played that part (and sang that song) in my first professional stage production. They dimmed the lights on Broadway when Jerry died, an honor reserved for the greatest of the great, most recently Chita Rivera and Angela Lansbury.
The Fantatiks was fantastic. saw it for the first ime at the Sullivan in 1961 as a high school fresham. saw it again, in 1969, when it toured Vietam as a combatant
Would it be ethical for the Trump administration to simply defy the all the injunctions and TRO’s by the courts by denying the doctrine of judicial supremacy, and simply execute the Trump agenda as authorized by article II of the Constitution?
I am aware of the Marbury v. Madison (1803), since when the executive branch and legislative branch defer to the judicial branch in matters of legal interpretation. However my impression is that the three branches of government are co-equal, and that in a system of checks and balances on the powers of the three branches the judicial branch is not exempt from being checked by the other branches.
I see a lot of whining at conservative websites about the lawlessness of the courts; am I being wrong in the assumption that the power of the courts can be checked by the executive branch by simply ignoring the rulings of these courts? After all, the doctrine of judicial supremacy is not found in the Constitution, and the judiciary’s claims to final authority cannot be simply based solely on their say so.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/25/scotuss-refusal-to-end-leftists-judicial-coup-is-damaging-its-credibility-more-than-the-media-ever-could/
No.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Texas_gubernatorial_election
I was told bipartisanship was dead.
https://x.com/SecNavSpox/status/1916815235295613410
Secretary of the Navy twitter accounted posted a comment about visiting Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial “to pay [his] respects to the service members and civilians we lost at Pearl Harbor on the fateful day of June 7, 1941″
Shortly, the spokesman took the blame for the error.
It’s his account, it’s his error, even if the spokesman did make the error. Regardless of who forgot the day…
How?
Wow. That’s embarrassing.