Tolkien
∞
In terms of ethics and law: who has access to the information confessed, and what is the legal status of that confession? Is there anything like the privilege of confidentiality enjoyed by clergy who hear private confessions from their parishioners?
*****
Update, 22 May 2018: Irina Raicu just published a very thoughtful reply to this, entitled "Parenting, Politeness, Poets, and Priests" at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Her article is very much worth the time it will take you to read it. You may find it here.
The Ethics of Automation: Poetry and Robot Priests
Philosophy professor Evan Selinger posted a question on Twitter yesterday about whether there are jobs that it would be unethical to automate.
As I am a Christian, an ethicist, and a philosopher of religion, this is
something I’ve been pondering for a few years: is there a case to be
made for automating the work of clergy?
A
German company recently automated a confessional. On the one hand, this
might have great therapeutic effects. On the other hand, it raises a
number of ethical, legal, and theological questions.
In terms of ethics and law: who has access to the information confessed, and what is the legal status of that confession? Is there anything like the privilege of confidentiality enjoyed by clergy who hear private confessions from their parishioners?
On the theological and ecclesiastical side: can a
meaningful confession be heard by someone who cannot sin, or does
confession depend on making a confession to a member of one’s own
community and church? Can a machine be a member of a church, or does it
have something more like the status of a chalice or a chasuble –
something the community uses liturgically but that does not have
standing in the deliberations and practices of the community? Another
important question: can a machine act as a vicar? That is, can a machine
stand in as a representative of God and proclaim the forgiveness of God
as we believe those who have been ordained may do?
Despite
the many weaknesses of religion, one strength of religion is that it
moves slowly. Yes, this too is a weakness at many times, but it is good
to move slowly when declaring sainthood, for instance. That’s a
decision that we should make carefully. Think about it like this: if we
are saying that person X is an example of good conduct, shouldn’t we
consider that person very carefully, from as many points of view as
possible, and do so after that person’s life has ended and all testimony
has been heard? Similarly, most religious traditions take time to
consider carefully whether someone should be ordained as clergy. In my
tradition, we speak of this as the “process of discernment,” and it is a
process that can take years, and that involves the whole community.
The downside is that this process is slow. The upside is that it keeps
us from making rash decisions, or at least it helps us to make fewer
rash decisions. We aren’t perfect.
My
first, gut response to Selinger’s question was that we should not outsource the writing of poetry to machines. My concerns here are twofold: one has to
do with the danger of persuasion: not much moves us as powerfully as
poetry does. My second concern is about the importance of having out
arts be the expressions of the heart of our communities. But I could be
wrong: maybe robots should be writing poetry – their own poetry, from
one machine to another. I do not wish to deprive anyone of the right to
artistic expression, nor do I wish to deprive envy community of the
right to have its own forms of beauty. Still, I worry about the way a
machine could be used to produce arrangements of words, sounds, and
images that would persuade us to act as we should not.
My
second response to Selinger’s question is related to the first: poetry is
at the heart of most religions, and I find myself with a hesitant
uncertainty about whether we should allow robots to be priests.
It’s
not that I think we should be unwilling to automate the tedious parts
of clerical work. In fact, that might be a real boon to the community.
We have allowed automation in many areas that has benefited us: bank
tellers and airline pilots have given up portions of their work to
reliable machines, and the result has been convenience and increased
safety. Why could a robot not also tend the sick and the needy, read to
those in hospice, visit those in prison, and so on? As I've written before, my wife is an Episcopal priest, and her work can be very demanding. There might be some parts of it that could be automated, freeing her up for other work that only people can do.
My
concern is not about the feasibility of having machines do this work.
On the whole, I’m in favor of it. But I do worry that if we hand over
caring for others to our machines, we might do so to our own detriment.
We should use the technologies we have to serve those in need. Of this I
have no doubt. But we should not pretend that in so doing we have done
all that we must do. I agree with Dr. King and Gandhi on this: we
ourselves need to care for those in need. Caring for those in need is
not a one-way transaction that serves only the sick and the poor; it is
something that the powerful and hale need as well.
I
have more to say about all of this, so this post is a too-hasty start,
but I want to risk continuing Evan Selinger’s conversation rather than risk
neglecting it. Evan has raised for us one of the more important
questions the current generation will face, I think.
For
right now, I will end this post by returning to poetry and mythology,
which is, as I said, a powerful resource for thinking about how we will
act. We need poetry, and we need to reflect on it together to sort out
the good poems from the bad. I’ll mention it here for your reflection:
J.R.R. Tolkien reflected on the poems of Genesis by creating his own
myth of creation in the Silmarillion. One element of that creation story
that my co-author Matthew Dickerson and I often return to is the story
in which one of God’s creations imitates God in making more sentient
beings, without God’s explicit permission. Here’s the passage I have in
mind:
“The making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of his father.”
Might it be possible for us also to make sentient life in imitation of God "without thought of mockery," and, if so, might it be that those lives we make could write poems and become priests? As anyone who has read Tolkien's myth knows, this raises a new set of ethical questions that now have to be resolved.--J.R.R. Tolkien, Silmarillion, p 43
*****
Update, 22 May 2018: Irina Raicu just published a very thoughtful reply to this, entitled "Parenting, Politeness, Poets, and Priests" at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Her article is very much worth the time it will take you to read it. You may find it here.
∞
Telling The Story Of Our Common Wealth
In his essay "Common Wealth," Scott Russell Sanders quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
And it is, for many of us, the story of our childhood Manifest Destiny dreams, stories we read and watched with delight, of finding long-forgotten buried treasure, unclaimed land, undiscovered islands and continents and planets. It is the story of crude Texas tea (oil, that is) that comes bubblin' up through the ground, of gold nuggets sitting unclaimed on riverbeds.
One of my favorite stories - one that I read as a boy and have written about as an adult - is Tolkien's The Hobbit. It's a classic treasure-hunt, a story of a far-off mountain of gold and gems held by a dragon that has no right to sleep on its bejeweled bed. Bilbo Baggins is drawn into an adventure that chooses him, along with dwarves whose desire to regain their treasure overshadows any willingness to share it with others, even in a blasted and impoverished land. My friends and I dreamed of such adventures when we were young; and the childhood dreams do not vanish so much as they grow. Which of us does not from time to time dream of suddenly striking it rich?
I often wonder why it is that "striking it rich" holds such appeal for us. We are unreflective people, all of us. We know what happens to the rich. We have read the story of King Midas, and of Lazarus and Dives, and of Lindsay Lohan. We know what becomes of those who do not have work, or who do not need work. We know what comes of those for whom money matters more than people, because they have become infected with the fact that money can be used to get people to do many things, even if it cannot make them do the best things.
So we settle for second best, as long as we can have second best as often as we want it.
Once this place was open grassland for hundreds of miles. Fencelines crisscross the prairie now, etching lines across fields and defining them. In late October, as I walk the prairie miles, I step over barbed wire as I have been taught, laying down my shotgun on the other side then crossing over before picking it up again. Sometimes I don't see the wire until it strikes my thigh in tall grass. Sometimes it is the barb that strikes me, piercing even my heavy chaps, if I walk too fast.
Thoreau once said that you may own the land, but the landscape belongs to all of us. The view is, in Sanders' words, common wealth.
As it turns out, we hold quite a lot in common, in our common wealth: Air, water, sunlight, the view, literature, history, languages, rivers, parks, tradition, culture and custom, a past and a future, the very ideas that shape us. Laws, constitutions, rights. The story we tell of our nation. Education. Genetics. Health. Knowledge.
Obviously some of the things we own are our possession. Some are ours to steward. Some represent our unique responsibility.
The story of our people is no longer told by poets and prophets. We have no Moses, no Homer, at least not yet. Our story is told piecemeal, in increments. We tell it by the habits we form as a culture. You become the person you act like every day. The story that will be told of your life will include some exceptional events, perhaps, but in all likelihood your "exceptional" behavior will emerge not as an exception but as the culmination of other smaller but similar decisions. This is why athletes and firefighters and musicians all train themselves, so that their bodies will know what to do in the decisive moment.
So it is with a nation, with a people, and with our species. The story that will be told of us is one we are writing right now, one political decision at a time, one television advertisement at a time, one credit-card purchase at a time.
It's not easy to see what our decisions will lead to, and no doubt the results will be mixed: barbed wire stops the bison from migrating, but it also stops the combine harvester and the plow. But our inability to see the end does not free us from taking the next step on the journey.
Wherever we erect fences, or pull them down, let it be said of us that we did so because we intended the best for our common wealth, and not just because we longed to turn all things we touched to gold for our private gain. Love, and virtue, do not hope for second best.
"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying 'this is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the first founder of civil society." (A Conservationist Manifesto. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. p. 26)Sanders knows that's too simple a story to tell of all civil society, but he also knows that there's a grain of truth in it: even if it isn't what happened in some imagined historical past, we see something like it played out in front of us all the time when individuals and corporations land sweet deals to purchase rights to something that until then was held as common property. It happens everywhere.
And it is, for many of us, the story of our childhood Manifest Destiny dreams, stories we read and watched with delight, of finding long-forgotten buried treasure, unclaimed land, undiscovered islands and continents and planets. It is the story of crude Texas tea (oil, that is) that comes bubblin' up through the ground, of gold nuggets sitting unclaimed on riverbeds.
One of my favorite stories - one that I read as a boy and have written about as an adult - is Tolkien's The Hobbit. It's a classic treasure-hunt, a story of a far-off mountain of gold and gems held by a dragon that has no right to sleep on its bejeweled bed. Bilbo Baggins is drawn into an adventure that chooses him, along with dwarves whose desire to regain their treasure overshadows any willingness to share it with others, even in a blasted and impoverished land. My friends and I dreamed of such adventures when we were young; and the childhood dreams do not vanish so much as they grow. Which of us does not from time to time dream of suddenly striking it rich?
*****
I often wonder why it is that "striking it rich" holds such appeal for us. We are unreflective people, all of us. We know what happens to the rich. We have read the story of King Midas, and of Lazarus and Dives, and of Lindsay Lohan. We know what becomes of those who do not have work, or who do not need work. We know what comes of those for whom money matters more than people, because they have become infected with the fact that money can be used to get people to do many things, even if it cannot make them do the best things.
So we settle for second best, as long as we can have second best as often as we want it.
*****
Once this place was open grassland for hundreds of miles. Fencelines crisscross the prairie now, etching lines across fields and defining them. In late October, as I walk the prairie miles, I step over barbed wire as I have been taught, laying down my shotgun on the other side then crossing over before picking it up again. Sometimes I don't see the wire until it strikes my thigh in tall grass. Sometimes it is the barb that strikes me, piercing even my heavy chaps, if I walk too fast.
It's not all bad, this barbed wire. Where farmers put wire, they don't plow or mow. The grass grows unchecked, and falls, and grows again. While the soil of the fields washes away, the fenceline grows taller, a guard against erosion, a tiny ark in which small animals find refuge from machines. It marks private land, or private use of land, but the boundary becomes a place of common life. It is, I suppose, a metaphor: without the hedge of common concern, private property vanishes.
*****
Thoreau once said that you may own the land, but the landscape belongs to all of us. The view is, in Sanders' words, common wealth.
As it turns out, we hold quite a lot in common, in our common wealth: Air, water, sunlight, the view, literature, history, languages, rivers, parks, tradition, culture and custom, a past and a future, the very ideas that shape us. Laws, constitutions, rights. The story we tell of our nation. Education. Genetics. Health. Knowledge.
Obviously some of the things we own are our possession. Some are ours to steward. Some represent our unique responsibility.
*****
Sanders' point is one that I've made a few times on this blog: we need good laws, but we also need to become good people; and one important part of becoming a people is telling the story of what it means to be that people. The story of our people is no longer told by poets and prophets. We have no Moses, no Homer, at least not yet. Our story is told piecemeal, in increments. We tell it by the habits we form as a culture. You become the person you act like every day. The story that will be told of your life will include some exceptional events, perhaps, but in all likelihood your "exceptional" behavior will emerge not as an exception but as the culmination of other smaller but similar decisions. This is why athletes and firefighters and musicians all train themselves, so that their bodies will know what to do in the decisive moment.
So it is with a nation, with a people, and with our species. The story that will be told of us is one we are writing right now, one political decision at a time, one television advertisement at a time, one credit-card purchase at a time.
*****
"It is not your job to finish the work, but you are not free to walk away from it." (Talmud, Pirke Avot, 2.21)
It's not easy to see what our decisions will lead to, and no doubt the results will be mixed: barbed wire stops the bison from migrating, but it also stops the combine harvester and the plow. But our inability to see the end does not free us from taking the next step on the journey.
Wherever we erect fences, or pull them down, let it be said of us that we did so because we intended the best for our common wealth, and not just because we longed to turn all things we touched to gold for our private gain. Love, and virtue, do not hope for second best.
∞
Surveillance and Virtue
The recent news that a no-fly zone was enacted over the site of the Exxon tar sands pipeline spill in Arkansas is in line with the movement in state legislatures to make it a crime to record animal cruelty, even when it is plainly in the public interest to do so. I recently learned it is a crime to film trains carrying nuclear waste, leading me to wonder how I'm supposed to know what any given train is carrying. So taking a family photo while a train passes in the distant background could be a felony? Bizarre.
These are signs that our technology is racing ahead of us. It is easier to create new machines for surveillance than it is to devise a set of rules for ethical use of those machines. The problem of Google Glass is not something altogether new; but the technology sharpens the ethical issues: can I wear it in the locker room at the gym? Can I wear it while talking with the police, or border guards? Can I wear it at a party where co-workers are drinking?
The problem of drones is similar: we have increased our ability to watch others without being watched. As Foucault observed, this is one of the main functions of the prison, a relatively modern invention. The prison is an architectural technology that allows us to watch over our fellow citizens without having them watch us.
The technology is helpful, and it's not patently evil. Information is power, we are told, and everyone likes power. But we should remember the Ring. The Ring of Gyges, or the One Ring of Tolkien, either one will do; in both stories, the ability to observe while unobserved, this ultimate and total camouflage, is too much power. And there is some truth to the dictum that power corrupts.
We are unlikely to slow our own technological progress, so we must devote equal energy and resources to ethical reasoning and to ethical living. Here is where I suggest we start:
First, if you're ashamed of someone seeing what your community is doing, don't do it. It is one thing to protect trademarked secrets and patented methods of production, to enjoy the economic benefits of one's creativity. But if your reason for concealing your business process is that you know I won't buy your product if I know how it's made, you deserve to be exposed because you are manipulating me by concealing information that would affect my decisions.
Second, devote yourself to respecting the privacy and dignity of others. Do this not just for others, but for yourself. We know ourselves to be less than we wish we were; and we know that the social impulse is balanced in our species by a desire to do some things alone, unobserved, or only in intimate company. To expose those things unbidden is to dominate. It is crass, and unkind. If you do not respect others, the technologies of surveillance will become your Ring, and you will destroy your own soul.
At times these two principles will be in conflict with one another - underscoring the importance of continued ethical reasoning. We can't simply fall back on facile rules. We have got to keep thinking, and thinking hard, together. The simple principles, however, can provide a good place to start: do not attempt to dominate or destroy others. Put positively: love one another.
These are signs that our technology is racing ahead of us. It is easier to create new machines for surveillance than it is to devise a set of rules for ethical use of those machines. The problem of Google Glass is not something altogether new; but the technology sharpens the ethical issues: can I wear it in the locker room at the gym? Can I wear it while talking with the police, or border guards? Can I wear it at a party where co-workers are drinking?
The problem of drones is similar: we have increased our ability to watch others without being watched. As Foucault observed, this is one of the main functions of the prison, a relatively modern invention. The prison is an architectural technology that allows us to watch over our fellow citizens without having them watch us.
 |
| Be kind; love one another. |
We are unlikely to slow our own technological progress, so we must devote equal energy and resources to ethical reasoning and to ethical living. Here is where I suggest we start:
First, if you're ashamed of someone seeing what your community is doing, don't do it. It is one thing to protect trademarked secrets and patented methods of production, to enjoy the economic benefits of one's creativity. But if your reason for concealing your business process is that you know I won't buy your product if I know how it's made, you deserve to be exposed because you are manipulating me by concealing information that would affect my decisions.
Second, devote yourself to respecting the privacy and dignity of others. Do this not just for others, but for yourself. We know ourselves to be less than we wish we were; and we know that the social impulse is balanced in our species by a desire to do some things alone, unobserved, or only in intimate company. To expose those things unbidden is to dominate. It is crass, and unkind. If you do not respect others, the technologies of surveillance will become your Ring, and you will destroy your own soul.
At times these two principles will be in conflict with one another - underscoring the importance of continued ethical reasoning. We can't simply fall back on facile rules. We have got to keep thinking, and thinking hard, together. The simple principles, however, can provide a good place to start: do not attempt to dominate or destroy others. Put positively: love one another.