Month: July 2024

 

Trump and some of his followers are claiming that he survived the shooting because of divine intervention. Some even claim that this proves he is chosen by God. In the previous essay I looked at the metaphysics of God’s causal relation with the world in general terms. In this essay, I will focus on the metaphysics of God protecting chosen people.

For some, divine protection is described in terms of the armor of God. While this is not literal magical armor (like +3 plate), it is an appealing way to describe divine protection. While there are various theological views on this matter, my concern is with the metaphysics of how God’s armor might protect those chosen to wear it, such as Trump (according to some of his followers). In more general terms, this is an exploration of divine protection.

Throughout human history people have told stories of gods offering supernatural protection to mortals. A well-known example is when the goddess Thetis magically protected her son Achilles. This protection was imperfect, and Achilles was slain at the battle of Troy. Prior to the concept of a perfect monotheistic God, the gods of the polytheistic faiths were usually limited in their powers and subject to opposition from other supernatural beings (and even mortals). They were not omniscient or omnipotent and they tended to be portrayed as very powerful human-like beings, complete with human flaws. So, if a god protected a mortal (such as a child, spouse or favored one) this protection could be overcome or defeated, and it would make sense for a protected mortal to still be cautious. But things are rather different with God.

On the usual philosophical conception of God, God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. He is sometimes presented as having character defects, such as being jealous or wrathful (although some people see these as virtues and not vices). But being all knowing, God would be aware of any threat to those He has chosen to protect. Being all powerful, there is no threat that God could not neutralize. Being all good, God would want to protect His chosen from evil. As such, if Trump is wearing God’s armor, then he would seem to be immune to all harm. After all, God knows of every threat to Trump and can prevent them all. He presumably also wants to prevent them, given that it is claimed that He intervened to save Trump because Trump is chosen, and God has a purpose for him. Conveniently, this provides the basis for an empirical test for whether Trump is chosen or whether God has a purpose for him that will ensure divine protection. If Trump has God’s protection, then Trump should be unkillable until he fulfils God’s purpose. Since God is all powerful, Trump could open the door of his jet at 10,000 feet and leap out or crash it into a mountain and be fine. He could go into the lion exhibit at a zoo and hug the lions and they would be like kittens. He could drink a gallon of bleach and it would be like drinking Diet Coke and so on. After all, keeping Trump alive through all this would not even be inconvenient for an omnipotent being. But, of course, Trump will do none of these things and his followers would probably be angry at my proposed test.

As criticisms, some might say that to put divine protection to the test would be arrogant and disrespectful to God. It would be like Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane doing something intentionally dangerous to prove that Superman is protecting them. While this does have some appeal, it does seem to be a way of avoiding testing the claim of God’s protection under the pretense of it being disrespectful. After all, God presumably would not get pissed off and just decide to let Trump die if Trump has a purpose to God and is Chosen. But maybe God would do just that, so those protected by God must take care to remain protected. That is, God could decide to withdraw His protection if He is disrespected. But if God could pick a new chosen one and replace Trump, then Trump is not very special. Fortunately, there are tests that do not require that Trump try to harm himself.

If Trump is protected by God’s armor and God will, for example, deflect bullets away from him, then Trump does not need mortal protectors. If Superman is guarding Lois Lane, she does not need a cop with a gun to protect her. If Trump and his followers truly believe that God is protecting Trump, then he should forgo the protection of the Secret Service and law enforcement. These mortals are not all knowing or all powerful, so they provide infinitely inferior protection. And adding them to God’s armor would do nothing and they cannot make Trump any safer. So, he could save a lot of taxpayer money and forgo the protection.

Trump’s followers could argue that this would, once again, be arrogant and disrespectful to God. But that is absurd, since insisting on the protection of mortals when one has divine protection would be what would insult God. Trump’s followers might try to argue that God’s protection is fallible, which would require accepting a limited and fallible God. They could also argue that someone trying to harm Trump might be aided by the devil and hence Trump needs the mortal protection. There are two obvious problems with the devil gambit. One is that the devil cannot do anything that God does not allow, unless God is not omniscient (so the devil can be sneaky) or not omnipotent (so the devil can overpower God). The other is that if the devil can beat God, he can easily beat any mortal guardians of Trump. So, he and his followers face the dilemma of rejecting protection or admitting that God’s protection is not adequate.

Trump and his followers do have one good argument they could use, and this is to argue that the protection needs to be present not for Trump but for all the unfortunate souls who God does not care about. Those people can, as we have seen, be wounded or killed and God will not do anything to save them. While this does have some appeal, this would entail that the approach at Trump events would need to change; they should ignore any threats aimed directly at Trump and focus entirely on protecting everyone else. In fact, it would be best for Trump to be on stage alone, with clear paths in front of and behind him. As God will save Trump, this will make it less likely that divinely deflected bullets will kill or injure bystanders.

One might be wondering what his followers would think if Trump was killed. I suspect that it would be claimed that this was God’s plan and purpose, perhaps to allow J.D. Vance to become president. From a practical standpoint, there is probably nothing that would disprove beliefs about God’s plans, who He has chosen or what His purpose might be. Since Trump survived the attack (by someone believed to have really bad aim), this was attributed to divine intervention. If Trump gets killed or dies, this would presumably also be attributed to God’s plan.

 

Trump and some of his followers are claiming that he survived the shooting because of divine intervention. Some of his followers are also taking this as evidence that God has chosen him. In the previous essay in this series about the epistemic issue, I argued that there is no evidence of divine intervention. The gist of this argument is that explaining Trump’s survival does not require a divine element because the fact that shooters can miss their target suffices. I now turn to the metaphysics of divine intervention.

Many philosophers have attempted to discern the nature of God and how He interacts with the world. Some, like Spinoza, claim that there is no chance and no choice in the world. Each event that occurs must occur and could not be otherwise. God does what He does because He is what He is and He cannot do otherwise. On this sort of view the world is deterministic.

While Leibniz rejects Spinoza’s pantheism (that everything is God and God is everything), he also embraces a metaphysics devoid of chance. On his view, God chooses to create the best of all possible worlds because He is good. He knows which world is best and has the power to make it so. God also decides what people will exist in this best of all possible worlds. Interestingly, everything a person will think, feel, do and experience is already part of them—their existence will unfold in accord with this. After all, this must unfold as the best of all possible worlds.

While a somewhat crude analogy, all things and people are running their pre-written scripts, and they operate without chance or choice. On these sorts of deterministic (or pre-determined) views, then no divine intervention was needed to save Trump. There was no more chance of him dying than there is for a triangle to have twelve sides. It can, of course, be argued that God did save Trump. On this view, that would be true, but there would be nothing special about Trump in this regard since God is the cause of everything that occurs. So, he “saved” Trump, but also killed Corey Comperatore. Leibniz would not say that Trump living and Corey Comperatore dying were the best individual outcomes, since he argues that the best of all possible worlds is different from a world in which everything is the best. As such, Trump living is part of the best of all possible worlds, but it must be noted that Hitler, Stalin, earthquakes, tuberculosis, cancer and mosquitoes are also part of the best of all possible worlds. The point is that just because something occurred or exists in the best of all possible worlds it does not follow that it is therefore the best. This causal model of the world does entail that whatever occurs is caused by God. While this entails that God is the cause of all that is good, it also seems to entail He is on the hook for all the evil, which I’ll discuss in that essay.

George Berkeley, in addition to owning slaves, tried to defeat the atheists and deists with his metaphysics. One of his concerns about deism is that it does not give God much of a role in the world. On one form of deism, God is seen as creating a clockwork world and then walking away. On this sort of view, while God created the world in which Trump survived, God did not intervene to save Trump; it was just the machinery of reality operating like clockwork. Berkeley worried that this conception of God was a threat to piety and morality, so he had a different notion of God.

Berkeley’s conception of God is that He must be constantly active in the world. Rather than having a clockwork world that takes care of itself, Berkeley’s world is “manually operated” by God. For him, God “watches over our conduct and takes care of our minutest actions and designs” and “directs incessantly in a most evident and sensible manner.” Berkely also holds that this conception of God allows for miracles to be easily explained: all natural events are directly caused by God so He can deviate from the usual order as He wills, which is something Spinoza and Leibniz reject.

On Berkeley’s conception of God, then God did save Trump. But this conception of God entails that God has also saved everyone in every situation in which they did not die, which would make Trump just one among billions and nothing special. But one could argue, Trump not dying was a miracle because it deviated “from the usual order.” The challenge would be to prove this deviation, since people surviving being shot at because the shooter fails to score a fatal hit happens relatively often. One the downside, while this view does allow one to argue that God saved Trump, this view also entails that God killed everyone who has died or at least let them die. So, to claim that God saved Trump is to claim that God killed Corey Comperatore. While Berkeley believed that his “hands on” God solved various problems for his theory, this conception of God leads into the problem of evil. After all, God could have saved everyone at the Trump event but did not.

Berkeley’s conception of God seems to be close to how those who claim God saved Trump might think of God. After all, their claim is that God had to intervene to save Trump and that it was a miracle because, one must infer, God had to “deviate from the usual order.” This seems to entail that God chose to leave the “usual order” in place for everyone else and hence chose to allow one person to die and others to be badly injured. This entails that God could always intervene, but usually choses to not do so. This leads to the moral aspect of the issue, which I will examine in the  essay on the problem of evil

Some of Trump’s followers claim divine intervention saved him during the shooting in which Corey Comperatore died protecting his family. Trump initially credited himself, explaining he had turned his head to look at a chart and thus narrowly avoided death. He soon embraced the narrative that God had saved him. While there are psychological and theological issues here, my focus will be on the philosophical aspects of the issue of whether God saved Trump.

Looked at philosophically, three of the domains of concern are epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. A key epistemic issue is how one would know whether God saved Trump. The metaphysical challenge is sorting out the mechanics of reality and divine intervention. The ethical aspect is the classic problem of evil or, in this case, the problem of good. I will start with epistemology.

The details of the shooting have been reconstructed in detail,  but the key facts are that Trump suffered a minor wound to his ear, Corey Comperatore was fatally wounded, and David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both critically wounded. Assuming the shooter was trying to hit Trump, Trump was lucky to escape with only a minor injury. That is, he survived as a matter of chance. Some of his followers are denying that it was chance and are claiming that God saved Trump. Some are even taking this as a sign that Trump is the chosen of God. From an epistemic standpoint, the key question here is: how do we know that God saved Trump? That is, what evidence is available that would prove divine intervention as opposed to alternative explanations, such as chance? I am asking these as serious epistemic questions.

One approach is to attribute the knowledge to some special epistemic ability possessed by some of Trump’s followers that enabled them to somehow know that God saved Trump.  They cannot point to any empirical evidence in the shooting that would prove this, but they know. They could appeal to divine revelation or other avenues of knowledge. The problem is, of course, that there is no way for anyone other than his epistemically special followers to have such knowledge. Which is certainly adequate for Trump’s purposes. On this view, the way divine intervention is determined is via a special epistemic capacity possessed only by dedicated followers of Trump. But what about everyone else? They would need to rely on more mundane means of discerning divine intervention.

I will assume that evidence of divine intervention would require something unusual that could not be better explained by alternatives. To illustrate this, I will present a few examples of how this process might work. They will also involve shootings.

Imagine that Margorie is at the range and sees that a shooter has set up some cans. The shooter aims at a Diet Coke can. One shot grazes the can and other shots hit nearby cans. Margorie tells you that God intervened to save the Diet Coke can. At first you think she is joking, but she is serious and starts talking about the can being the chosen of God. On the face of it, her claim would be absurd. We know that people often miss what they aim for, and these results are not unusual. They can be explained in purely mundane terms and there is no need to posit divine intervention.

Now imagine that Margorie is at the coast when someone is duck hunting. The hunter shoots at some ducks, grazing one with a pellet, killing another duck and wounding two others. Margorie tells you that, once again, God has intervened. This time, He has chosen to save one duck while letting another die and two more be wounded. She insists that God has chosen the duck. This would be absurd, since the fate of the ducks is explainable in mundane ways that do not require divine intervention.

It could be objected that my examples involve objects and animals, and God does not intervene for them. Given that Aquinas argued that it is no sin to kill animals, this does have appeal.  But we can turn to countless examples of people being slightly wounded rather than killed in situations that might have resulted in their death. This happens all the time in wars but is also something that happens in everyday life with hazards such as falling, vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, falling and so on. On any given day there are probably thousands of people who could have been killed but were only slightly injured. But these are usually not presented as cases of divine intervention. And, presumably, Trump’s followers cannot attribute these cases to divine intervention. After all, if God intervenes so much, then there would be nothing special about Trump’s survival and this would not be proof that he is chosen. It is also worth thinking about people who did not suffer even a slight injury in the shooting. There were many people around Trump who were not hurt at all, yet Trump’s followers do not say that God singled them out to spare them or that they are thus marked as chosen. This is only being applied to Trump, despite their being no evidence that his survival was beyond mundane explanation. On the face of it, the best explanation is that shooters can miss their targets and it just so happened that Trump was grazed while another person died, and two others were badly injured. There seems to be no miracle here. But what would divine intervention look like?

In the bible, divine intervention is usually presented as being clearly outside of the usual workings of the world. Things like the parting of the Red Sea, walking on water, curing of blindness, raising of the dead, destroying cities, and turning people into salt are good examples of divine intervention. As such, it would seem reasonable to expect that if God intervened to save Trump, this would be done in a suitably divine manner. This might have involved turning the shooter into salt or sending an angel to smite him. But nothing like that happened. It can, of course, be countered that God now does low-key interventions that are indistinguishable from cases in which He does not intervene. But the flaw with this response is that we would have no way to distinguish cases of divine intervention and we would be engaged in wishful thinking when attributing it to any outcome. As such, there is no evidence that God intervened to save Trump.

When I was a kid, I believed if a person was shot by a criminal, their treatment would be paid for.  I wasn’t sure how this would work, but I reasoned it would be unjust for them to have to pay for the misdeeds of another. As has turned out with most of my beliefs about American justice, I was wrong. Shooting victims are usually presented with the bills for their treatment and unless you are a presidential candidate, being shot comes with a high cost.

Dr. Joseph Sakran, who had been shot in his youth, co-authored a study of what shooting victims are charged for their treatment. Since gunshot wounds range from relatively grazing wounds to massive damage, the costs vary greatly. While the average is $5,000 it can be as high as $100,000. While such costs are often covered by insurance, uninsured or underinsured shooting victims become victims again: they must either pay or pass on the cost. When the patient cannot pay, their credit can be damaged and the cost is passed on in the form of premium increases. There can be costs beyond the initial medical bills, such as ongoing medical bills, the loss of income, and psychological harm.

In addition to medical expenses, there are also the costs of the police response, the impact on employers, and the dollar value of those who are killed rather than wounded (and dying in the hospital does not automatically clear the bill). While estimating the exact cost is difficult, a mass shooting like the Pulse Nightclub shooting will probably end up costing almost $400 million. While mass shootings and assassination attempts get the attention of the media, gunshot wounds are a regular occurrence in the United States with an estimated cost of $600 million per day. While some might dispute the numbers, it is indisputable that getting shot is expensive and it would be rational to reduce the number of shootings and address the high cost of being shot.

While the rational approach to such a massive health crisis would be to undertake a scientific study to find solutions, the 1996 Dickey Amendment bans the use of federal funding for gun research. There is also very little good data about gun injuries and death, and this is no accident. Efforts to improve the collection of data are routinely blocked by such things as the Dickey Amendment. Efforts to impose more gun control, even when there is overwhelming public support for such things as universal background checks, are consistently blocked. While this shows how much say the people have in this “democracy”, it also shows that trying to address the high cost of getting shot by reducing shootings is unlikely to succeed. As such the most practical option involves finding ways to offset the medical costs to victims. While victims can bring civil suits, this is not a reliable and effective way to ensure that the medical expenses are covered. After all, shooters are rarely wealthy enough to pay all the bills and are sometimes killed.

Some victims have set up GoFundMe pages to get donations to pay their medical bills and this has become a common practice for many medical expenses. One problem with this approach is that it is not reliable and depends heavily on luck and being appealing to the crowd. There is also the moral problem of people needing to beg so they can pay the bills arising from getting shot. I have two proposals to address this problem.

My first proposal is that gun owners be required to purchase a modestly priced insurance policy that is analogous to vehicle insurance. In the United States, people are usually required to have insurance to cover the damage they might inflict while operating a dangerous piece of machinery. This helps pool the risk (as insurance is supposed to do) and puts the cost on the operators rather than on those who they might harm. The same should apply to guns. They are dangerous machines that can do considerable harm and it makes sense that the owners should bear the cost of the insurance. Naturally, as with vehicles, owners can also be victims.

It could be objected that owning a firearm is a right and hence the state cannot impose such a requirement. The easy and obvious reply is that the right to keep and bear arms is a negative right rather than a positive right. A positive right is one in which a person is entitled to be provided with the means to use that right (such as how people are provided with free ballots when they go to vote). A negative right means the person must provide the means of exercising their right, but it is (generally) wrong to prevent them from exercising that right. So, just as the state is not required to ensure that people get free guns and ammunition or free TV or radio time to exercise their freedom of speech, it is not required to allow gun ownership without insurance, provided that the requirement does not impose an unreasonable infringement on the right.

Another reply is that rights do not free a person from responsibility. In the case of speech, people cannot simply say anything without there even being consequences. In the case of gun insurance, people would be acting in a responsible manner. They would be balancing their rights with a rational amount of responsibility. To refuse to have such insurance is to insist on rights without responsibility, something conservatives usually pretend to hate. As such, both liberals and conservatives should approve of this idea.

My second proposal, which is consistent with the first, is that there be a modest state fee added to the cost of firearms and ammunition. This money would go into a state pool to help pay the medical expenses of the uninsured who are injured in shootings. Yes, I know that this money would probably be misused by many states. The justification is that the people who buy guns that could hurt people should bear the cost for the medical expenses of those who are hurt. People already pay sales taxes on these items; this would merely allocate some money to help offset the cost of people exercising their second amendment rights. To go back to the vehicle analogy, it makes sense to add a fee onto the cost of gas to pay for roads and other infrastructure, that way the people who are using it are helping to pay for it. Likewise for guns.

An obvious objection is that this fee would be paid by many people who will never engage in a gun crime. This is a reasonable concern, analogous to other concerns about paying into anything that one is not directly responsible for. There are two reasonable replies. One is that the funds generated could cover uninsured medical expenses involving any firearm crime or accident and anyone can have an accident with a gun. Another is the responsibility argument: while you or I, as gun owners, will probably never engage in a gun crime, being able to exercise our right to own guns allows people who will engage in gun crimes to engage in those crimes. For example, the person who tried to kill Trump was operating under the protection of the same gun rights that protect all gun owners up until the moment he started firing. This fee would be our share of the responsibility for allowing the threat of gun violence to endanger everyone in the United States. Such a modest fee would be a very small price to pay for having such a dangerous right. Otherwise, we would be selfishly expecting everyone else to bear the cost of our rights, which would not be right. So, to appeal to principled conservatives, this would be a way for taking responsibility for one’s rights. As people love to say, freedom isn’t free.

While disinformation is usually condemned, it was once employed as weapon against the Nazis. While the effectiveness of the tactic can be debated, Sefton Delmer waged his own disinformation war with various radio shows such as Der Chef. Given the evil of the Nazis and the context of a war, it seems reasonable to regard this use of fake news disinformation as morally acceptable. This, of course, provides a launching point for arguing in favor of fake news and disinformation in general.

Disinformation involves lying. If the person making an untrue claim does not know it is not true, they are engaged in misinformation. Things can get a bit complicated when someone is misinformed because they believe disinformation. But this will be set aside to focus on sorting out the ethics of disinformation by considering the ethics of lying. Sticking with the WWII theme, an obvious focus for a discussion of lying is the allies’ disinformation campaign aimed at deceiving the Germans about the landings in France. The allies were lying to the Germans, but this can be justified. One approach is utilitarianism: whatever harm might arise from lying would be offset by the benefits gained by these deceptions. In this case, the saving of lives and the start of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. Naturally, from the perspective of the Nazis, the utilitarian calculation would be different, but it is (I hope) still easy to convince most people that Nazis were evil.

Another approach is a conditional approach based on the ethics of war: if it is acceptable to kill people in war to achieve military goals, then the use of the lesser evil of deception to achieve military goals would seem to be acceptable. But there is a potential flaw in this reasoning because some lesser evils seems to be unacceptable even when greater evils are allowed. To use a disturbing example, while sexually assaulting a person is a lesser evil than killing them, the use of sexual assault as a weapon of war certainly seems unacceptable. One possible reason for this is that killing is an inherent part of the nature of armed conflict while sexual assault is not. That is, waging war without killing people is all but impossible but waging war without using sexual assault is possible. Of course, the general argument could be countered by arguing that killing, even in war, is unacceptable and a successful counter of this sort would defeat this justification for lying in war or similar conflicts.

A third easy justification is based on the idea that doing bad things to bad people is justified because they are bad. That is, the evil of the Nazis justifies deceiving them because they have no moral right to expect to be told the truth. While appealing, this can be problematic, and the obvious counter is to argue that doing bad things to bad people is still bad. These three justifications can be deployed in defense of the use of disinformation in American politics and it is to this that I now turn.

One interesting way to justify disinformation in American politics is to argue that we are in a state of war, and this justifies its use as a weapon in that war. On this view, Alex Jones calling his show Infowars is appropriate. There is also the notion that the United States is engaged in an endless culture war. If these metaphors are taken literally, then the ethics of war could be used to justify the use of disinformation in the same manner that it could be used to justify the deception of Der Chef. The challenge is to show that such a state of war exists and that it warrants the use of deception to achieve these ends. As this is being written, the culture war is more metaphorical than literal and thus the war justification does not seem to hold. But the political winds are blowing in the direction of violence, with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts saying that the “second American revolution” will be bloodless “if the left allows it.”

Arguing in defense of disinformation on utilitarian grounds involves making the case that the good done by it outweighs the harms. To illustrate, it could be argued that Biden being elected president would be so harmful that the use of disinformation to prevent this would be justified. The obvious problem with this justification is that if someone, such as Biden, is that bad, then the use of the truth should suffice. This creates a bit of a paradox: if someone is so bad that deception would be justified to defeat them, then no deception should be needed because the truth should suffice. From a practical standpoint, there can be cases where what would be seen by some as bad about the target of disinformation is good from the standpoint of those engaged in disinformation. For example, people on the left criticize Nancy Pelosi for exploiting her position of the speaker of the House to grow her net worth to close to $250 million. Obviously, the Republicans are not going to sincerely launch an attack on wealth inequality and take on the exploitation of political office as a cause, so they went after Pelosi on other grounds, often pushing disinformation. As another example, Republicans are not going to criticize Biden for outpacing Trump in handing out oil drilling permits; they will instead lie about other things. So, if a target is bad but in ways that one sees is good, then the truth would not suffice, which explains some of the lies Republicans tell about Democrats.

Of course, one could argue that the truth would not suffice even if someone were very bad. It could be claimed that people are not informed or intelligent enough to see the significance of the terrible truth and thus lies that they can understand are needed. This would be somewhat like the idea of the noble lie, that the people must be deceived for their own good. This is analogous to lying to children to get them to do the right thing because the truth is either beyond their understanding or would not motivate them to do the right thing. This counter does have considerable appeal and could certainly justify deceit to defeat the greater evil when people are unable to grasp or be motivated by the truth. So, for example, Republicans could argue that they need to falsely accuse Democrats of being pedophiles because the people are incapable of grasping or being motivated by facts about the true evil of the Democrats. But for this to be morally acceptable, disinformation would need to be necessary because the evil in question, though great, is incomprehensible to many and they can only understand an equal, but simpler, evil.

There is also the option of defending disinformation by arguing that the target is bad and thus has no right to expect truth. To illustrate, one could argue that Biden’s badness means that lying about him is okay—he is bad, so doing bad things to him is morally acceptable. While this might have some appeal, there is the problem that even if the subject of the lies is bad, there is the matter of the evil being done to the people being lied to. If the justification is used that bad people can be treated badly, this would require that the people being lied to also be bad. If they are not also bad, then this justification would not work, since they would seem to merit the truth. The counter is, of course, to argue that the evil of lying to people would be bad, but would be outweighed by the good done by doing a necessary evil to a bad person.

Thus, there do seem to be reasonable arguments in favor of disinformation—it is acceptable to lie when doing so would prevent a greater evil. In the ideal, speaking the truth should suffice, but perhaps a case can be made that the masses cannot grasp the truth and must be given a false evil they can grasp. However, one might suspect that purveyors of disinformation are lying about their target being bad and hence the justification of the disinformation would itself be a lie. Which would be a perfect circle of dishonesty.

 

Some will remember that driverless cars were going to be the next big thing. Tech companies rushed to flush cash into this technology and media covered the stories. Including the injuries and deaths involving the technology. But, for a while, we were promised a future in which our cars would whisk us around, then drive away to await the next trip. Fully autonomous vehicles, it seemed, were always just a few years away. But it did seem like a good idea at the time and proponents of the tech also claimed to be motivated by a desire to save lives. From 2000 to 2015, motor vehicle deaths per year ranged from a high of 43,005 in 2005 to a low of 32,675 in 2014. In 2015 there were 35,092 motor vehicle deaths and recently the number went back up to around 40,000. Given the high death toll, there is clearly a problem that needs to be solved.

While predictions of the imminent arrival of autonomous vehicles proved overly optimistic, the claim that they would reduce motor vehicle deaths had some plausibility. Autonomous will do not suffer from road rage, exhaustion, intoxication, poor judgment, distraction and other conditions that contribute to the death tolls. Motor vehicle deaths would not be eliminated even if all vehicles were autonomous, but the promised reduction in deaths presented a moral and practical reason to deploy such vehicles. In the face of various challenges and a lack of success, the tech companies seem to have largely moved on from the old toy to the new toy, which is AI. But this might not be a bad thing if driverless cars were aimed at solving the wrong problems and we instead solve the right problems. Discussing this requires going back to a bit of automotive history.

As the number of cars increased in the United States, so did the number of deaths, which was hardly surprising. A contributing factor was the abysmal safety of American cars.  This problem led Ralph Nader to write his classic work, Unsafe at Any Speed. Thanks to Nader and others, the American automobile became much safer and vehicle fatalities decreased. While making cars safer was a good thing, this approach was fundamentally flawed.

Imagine a strange world in which people insist on constantly swinging hammers as they go about their day.  As would be suspected, the hammer swinging would often result in injuries and property damage. Confronted by these harms, solutions are proposed and implemented. People wear ever better helmets and body armor to protect them from wild swings and hammers that slip from peoples’ grasp. Hammers are also regularly redesigned so that they inflict less damage when hitting people and objects.  The Google of that world and other companies start working on autonomous swinging hammers that will be much better than humans at avoiding hitting other people and things. While all these safety improvements would be better than the original situation of unprotected people swinging dangerous hammers around, this approach is fundamentally flawed. After all, if people stopped swinging hammers around, then the problem would be solved.

An easy and obvious reply to my analogy is that using motor vehicles, unlike random hammer swinging, is important. A large part of the American economy is built around the motor vehicle. This includes obvious things like vehicle sales, vehicle maintenance, gasoline sales, road maintenance and so on. It also includes less obvious aspects of the economy that involve the motor vehicle, such as how they contribute to the success of stores like Wal Mart. The economic value of the motor vehicle, it can be argued, provides a justification for accepting the thousands of deaths per year. While it is certainly desirable to reduce these deaths, getting rid of motor vehicles is not a viable economic option. Thus, autonomous vehicles would be a good partial solution to the death problem. Or are they?

One problem is that driverless vehicles are trying to solve the death problem within a system created around human drivers and their wants. This system of lights, signs, turn lanes, crosswalks and such is extremely complicated and presents difficult engineering and programing problems. It would seem to have made more sense to use the resources that were poured into autonomous vehicles to develop a better and safer transportation system that does not center around a bad idea: the individual motor vehicle operating within a complicated system. On this view, autonomous vehicles are solving an unnecessary problem: they are merely better hammers.

My reasoning can be countered in a couple ways. One is to repeat the economic argumen: autonomous vehicles preserve the individual motor vehicle that is economically critical while being likely to reduce the death tax vehicles impose. A second approach is to argue the cost of creating a new transportation system would be far more than the cost of developing autonomous vehicles that can operate within the existing system. This assumes, of course, that the cash dumped on this technology will eventually pay off.

A third approach is to argue that autonomous vehicles could be a step towards a new transportation system. People often need a gradual adjustment to major changes and autonomous vehicles would allow a gradual transition from distracted human drivers to autonomous vehicles operating with the distracted humans to a transportation infrastructure rebuilt entirely around autonomous vehicles (perhaps with a completely distinct system for walkers, bikers and runners). Going back to the hammer analogy, the self-swinging hammer would reduce hammer injuries and could allow a transition to be made away from hammer swinging altogether.

While this has some appeal, it still makes more sense to stop swinging hammers. If the goal is to reduce traffic deaths and injuries, then investing in better public transportation, safer streets, and a move away from car-centric cities would have been the rational choice. For the most part it seems that tech companies and investors have moved away from solving the transportation problem and are now focused on AI. While the driverless car was a very narrow type of AI focused on driving vehicles and supposedly aimed at increasing safety and convenience, the new AI is broader (they are trying to jam it into almost everything that has a chip) and is supposed to be aimed at solving a vast range of problems. Given the apparent failure of driverless cars, we should consider there will be a similar outcome with this broader AI. It is also reasonable to expect that once the current AI bubble bursts, the next bubble will float over the horizon. This is not to deny that some of what people call AI is useful, but that we need to keep in mind that the tech companies seem to often focus on solving unnecessary problems rather than removing these problems.

 

The heat and humidity of my adopted state of Florida are not just uncomfortable but dangerous. From 2010 to 2020 Florida had 215 reported heat-related deaths but these deaths have increased 95% from 2010 to 2022. This is what would be expected, given that climate change has led to ever warmer summer temperatures in Florida. In my own experience, running or doing outside work in the summer is brutal. As such, it makes sense that recently Miami-Dade County had proposed requiring that construction and farm workers get 10-minute breaks in the shade for every two hours worked outside. In response, the Republican controlled Florida legislature and Governor DeSantis rushed into action, passing and signing HB433. This law makes all local heat protection measures “void and prohibited.” Instead, the state standards would apply, although none exist. Florida is, of course, subject to Federal OSHA requirements (state and local workers are excluded) and these require employers to keep workplaces free of recognized hazards that cause or are likely to cause death or serious harm and this includes heat dangers.

This provides another good example of the inconsistency in the professed principles of the Republican party. After all, Republicans usually stress how they support states’ rights against the federal government and local rights against state government. However, Republicans do not seem to believe in this principle. Rather, their position on bigger versus smaller governments seems to depend entirely on which level of government is doing what they want. For example, since the Democrats could (but will not) pass a federal abortion law, the Republican’s profess the principle that the states should decide on this issue.

But the party wants to put a federal abortion ban in place when Trump is re-elected. When that happens, they will employ their stock argument for when they want the bigger government entity to decide, which is to contend that allowing local control will create a patchwork of laws and regulations and that it is better to have uniform laws. As HB433 and other example show, they only apply this principle when the uniform laws are the laws they want. When the uniform law is one they do not like, they profess a love of local governance. That is, their principle is that they want the law to be what they like and not what they do not like. Being honest about this might look bad, hence they present the illusion of having a principle in their arguments and rhetoric. But I often wonder if they even need to do this. The fact that they take time to profess a principle they clearly do not follow suggests that they think they need to do so. This might be because they think it will fool those who care about the principle but somehow do not notice that they do not follow it. Alternatively, it might be aimed at allowing rationalization. For example, a Republican voter can tell themselves that this law is good because it makes the law uniform and avoids a patchwork. Then, when the same voter hears Trump say that abortion should be decided by the states because local governments should decide, they can tell themselves that this is good and true. It seems simpler to just be honest, but there is probably some reason why Republicans persist in professing principles they clearly do not believe.

The defense of the bill also provides another good example of how Republicans argue against regulations aimed at protecting people from harm inflicted by businesses. Republican Rep. Tiffany Esposito ably presented the stock jobs argument of the Republican party: “This is very much a people-centric bill. If we want to talk about Floridians thriving, they do that by having good job opportunities. And if you want to talk about health and wellness, and you want to talk about how we can make sure that all Floridians are healthy, you do that by making sure that they have a good job. And in order to provide good jobs, we need to not put businesses out of business.” The structure of the jobs argument is this:

 

Premise 1. Something is proposed to protect the health and wellness of consumers or workers from harm caused by a business.

Premise 2. It is claimed that health and wellness come from having a good job.

Premise 3. Business must be in business to provide good jobs.

Premise 4. This something would put business out of business.

Conclusion: This something must be prevented.

 

On the face of it, the reasoning has a certain appeal in that if it were true that something intended to protect health and well being would have the opposite effect, then it should not be done. But are these claims true? The second premise can be seen as true because health insurance is linked to employment and because you generally need a job to get food, shelter, and other survival essentials. Presumably a good job would provide benefits and adequate pay. The third premise is true. The fourth premise is the most critical. Republicans almost always claim that regulating business would put business out of business, despite that fact that businesses have been both regulated and profitable since the start of the United States. This is not to deny that there can be bad regulations, but simply saying that something would put businesses out of business is not enough to prove this is true. For example, the 10-minute break rule would not put a business out of business. In fact, allowing such breaks would be more likely to increase productivity of workers since it would allow them time to recover somewhat from the heat.

But it might be objected that some local governments might put requirements into effect that would put business out of business and hence this law is needed to prevent that from happening. My first reply is to point out that another professed Republican principle is that they are for small government, and this would mean not expanding government by creating more laws unless there is a clear need. But the proposals seem quite reasonable and unlikely to destroy businesses. Now if some county went rogue and started a war on capitalism, then perhaps such a law would be needed. My second reply is to note that Florida essentially did nothing about the increasing danger presented by heat and is only complying with the OSHA requirements that amount to businesses mostly not being allowed to kill or harm workers. That is, Florida is doing the least it can possibly do to address the increasing danger presented by heat and ensuring that no one in the state can do more. While this is presented as pro-business and “not having more heat protection is good for the workers, actually” it also seems to be an act of cruelty, which is consistent with what seems to be a true principle of the Republican party, namely cruelty for the sake of cruelty.

 

As a philosopher, my interest in AI tends to focus on metaphysics (philosophy of mind), epistemology (the problem of other minds) and ethics rather than on economics. My academic interest goes back to my participation as an undergraduate in a faculty-student debate on AI back in the 1980s, although my interest in science fiction versions arose much earlier. While “intelligence” is difficult to define, the debate focused on whether a machine could be built with a mental capacity analogous to that of a human. We also had some discussion about how AI could be used or misused, and science fiction had already explored the idea of thinking machines taking human jobs. While AI research and philosophical discussion never went away, it was not until recently that AI was given headlines, mainly because it was being aggressively pushed as the next big thing after driverless cars fizzled out of the news.

While AI technology has improved dramatically from the 1980s, we do not have the sort of AI we debated about, namely that on par with (or greater than) a human. As Dr. Emily Bender pointed out, the current text generators are stochastic parrots. While AI has been hyped and made into a thing of terror, it is not really that good at doing its one job. One obvious problem is hallucination, which is a fancy way of saying that the probabilistically generated text fails to match the actual world. A while ago, I tested this out by asking ChatGPT for my biography. While I am not famous, my information is readily available on the internet and a human could put together an accurate biography in a few minutes using Google. ChatGPT’s hallucinated a version of me that I would love to meet; that guy is amazing. Much more seriously, AI can do things like make up legal cases when lawyers foolishly rely on it to do their work.

Since I am a professor, you can certainly guess that my main encounters with AI are in the form of students turning in AI generated papers. When ChatGPT was first freely available, I saw my first AI generated papers in my Ethics class, and most were papers on the ethics of cheating. Ironically, even before AI that topic has always been the one with the most plagiarized papers. As I told my students, I did not fail a paper just because it was AI generated, the papers failed themselves just by being bad. To be fair to the AI systems, some of this can be attributed to the difficulty of writing good prompts for the AI to use. However, even with some effort at crafting prompts, the limits of the current AI are readily available. I, of course, have heard of AI written works passing exams, getting B grades and so on. But what shows up in my classes is easily detected and fails itself. But to be fair once more, perhaps there are exceptional AI papers that are getting past me. However, my experience has been that AI is bad at writing and it has so far proven easy to address efforts to cheat using it. Since this sort of AI was intended to write, this seems to show the strict limits under which it can perform adequately.

AI was also supposed to revolutionize search, with Microsoft and Google incorporating it into their web searches. In terms of how this is working for us, you just need to try it yourself. Then again, it does seem to be working for Google in that the old Google would give you better results and the new Google is bad in a way that will lead you to view more ads as you try to find what you are looking for. But that is hardly showing that AI is effective in the context of search.

Microsoft has been a major spender on AI and they recently rolled out Copilot into Windows and their apps, such as Edge and Word. The tech press has been generally positive about Copilot and it does seem to have some uses. However, there is the question of whether it is, in fact, something that will be useful (and more importantly) profitable. Out of curiosity, I tried it but failed to find it compelling or useful. But your results might vary.

But there might be useful features, especially since “AI” is defined so broadly that almost any automation seems to count as AI. Which leads to a concern that is both practical and philosophical: what is AI? Back in that 1980s debate we were discussing what they’d probably call general artificial intelligence today, as opposed to what used to be called “expert systems.” Somewhat cynically, “AI” seems to have almost lost meaning and, at the very least, you should wonder what sort of AI (if any) is being referred to when someone talks about AI. This, I think, will help contribute to the possibility of an AI bubble as so many companies try to jam “AI” into as much as possible without much consideration. Which leads to the issue of whether AI is a bubble that will burst.

I, of course, am not an expert on AI economics. However, Ed Zitron presents a solid analysis and argues that there is an AI bubble that is likely to burst. AI seems to be running into the same problem faced by Twitter, Uber and other tech companies, namely that it burns cash and does not show a profit. On the positive side, it does enrich a few people. While Twitter shows that a tech company can hemorrhage money and keep crawling along, it is reasonable to think that there is a limit to how long AI can run at a huge loss before those funding it decide that it is time to stop. The fate of driverless cars provides a good example, especially since driverless cars are a limited form of AI that was supposed to specialize in driving cars.

An obvious objection is to contend that as AI is improved and the costs of using it are addressed, it will bring about the promised AI revolution and the investments will be handsomely rewarded. That is, the bubble will be avoided and instead a solid structure will have been constructed. This just requires finding ways to run the hardware much more economically and breakthroughs in the AI technology itself.  

One obvious reply is that AI is running out of training data (although we humans keep making more everyday) and it is reasonable to question whether enough improvement is likely. That is, AI might have hit a plateau and will not get meaningfully better until there is some breakthrough. Another obvious reply is that there is unlikely to be a radical breakthrough in power generation to enable a significant reduction in the cost of AI. That said, it could be argued that long term investments in solar, wind and nuclear power could lower the cost of running the hardware.

One final concern is the concern that despite all the hype and despite some notable exceptions, AI is just not the sort of thing that most people need or want. That is, it is not a killer product like a smartphone or refrigerator. This is not to deny that AI (or expert) systems have some valuable uses, but that the hype of AI is just that and the bubble will burst soon.

 

Relative to Trump, Biden has a reality problem. Biden’s supporters generally have a realistic view of him, seeing Joe as a well-meaning, decent old man who is probably not up to enduring another four years as President. In contrast, the Trump existing in the minds of his base barely resembles the real Trump, except (ironically) in terms of his worst traits and deeds. Biden also does not have the propaganda machinery of Fox News and its more extreme fellows, and his supporters include people who listen to NPR and check facts. As such a propaganda campaign of disinformation is not an option for poor Joe.

While I am wary of conspiracy theories, if we look at Hilary Clinton’s 2016 run and what Biden is doing now, it would not be unreasonable to think that the ruling elites of the Democratic party are intentionally throwing elections. One could also infer that the party is suffering from an ego problem in that some candidates are unwilling or unable to honestly assess their chances. In any case, the Democrats continue to disappoint, the Republicans seem intent on turning America into a white Christian nationalist authoritarian oligarchy griftocracy, and no third party is up to the task of challenging them. Given my values, which I am happy to debate, Biden is still by far the better choice. While I do think that even a fully senile Biden would be better than Trump, my main reason for supporting Biden is, well, everything else that goes with the presidency. While Biden and the Democrats do ably serve the ruling elites, they also endeavor to make things less bad for everyone else and value competence to some degree. Trump, if he follows the Project 2025 plan, will be creating that white Christian nationalist authoritarian oligarchy griftocracy. This will be bad for everyone, including white Christians, who are not economic elites who have the resources to endure the harm this project will inflict. So how can Biden win?

Interestingly, the Supreme Court just gave Biden the tool he needs to easily win, if he were only the sort of person Trump and Fox News claim he is. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, the ruling on presidential immunity would have the following effect: “Orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune,” she wrote. “Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” While I am not a constitutional scholar, based on the text of the ruling and dissent, Joe could take a wide range of official actions to neutralize Trump and perhaps much of MAGA and ensure he remains in office. Ironically, Trump and his MAGA Supreme Court judges know this is a safe move: unlike Trump, Biden will not do any of these things, even to preserve the United States from the destruction that Trump will bring. But he could and there are presumably those who would argue that he should, for example, send the Joe Commandoes to neutralize Trump and, while they are at it, other key MAGA figures, such as six supreme court justices. But, once again, they know that while Trump will run wild with this ruling, Biden will not—which is yet another reason why Biden should be president rather than Trump. But are there ways for Biden to beat Trump? One option is to use a third-party candidate to pull votes from Trump.

While third-party candidates have proven useful in winning elections, there are moral questions about intentionally using this tactic. One concern is the matter of deceit. Suppose that shadowy Democratic party operatives were to support, for example, RFK in ways that would draw votes away from Trump. This raises stock moral concerns about deception and manipulation. Because of my ethics, I could not endorse this tactic. Fortunately, I can openly encourage people who would otherwise vote for Trump to vote for RFK and do so in an ethical manner by being completely honest. I also openly encourage those Democratic operatives to use this tactic.

Perhaps the only time the MAGA base openly disagreed with Trump and booed him was when he admitted to getting a COVID-19 booster. This indicates that for at least some of the base, their anti-vax ideology is stronger than their MAGA commitment. This presents an opportunity to peel some voters away from Trump.

Trump was initially baffled by the anti-vax sentiments, as were some other Republicans (such as Ron DeSantis), and while they have been happy to change their rhetoric to appeal to these voters, they are not true believers. After all, they all got vaxxed because they knew it would protect them from a dangerous disease. More importantly, one significant achievement of the Trump administration was Operation Warp Speed which resulted in effective vaccines being developed at, well, warp speed. While I generally loath Trump, he and his administration deserve praise for this as despite their other failures, these vaccines saved lives and prevented serious illnesses. So, thank you President Trump for those vaccines. Ironically, this accomplishment can be weaponized against him.

Two of Trump’s many weaknesses are that he loves praise and loves to take credit, as such the success of Operation Warp Speed is something he would very much love to claim. But he also realizes that this objectively good success is seen very differently by his anti-vax base. As such, he has largely stopped talking about it. This, of course, is a situation that can be exploited in a way that allows complete honesty.

Biden and Democrats should praise Trump for the success of Warp Speed and emphasize how he and other Republicans served as role models by taking the COVID-19 vaccines. Unedited, honest clips of him praising the project and recommending the vaccine should be used. But how will this help peel off votes? Fortunately, or unfortunately, RFK is a solid anti-vax candidate who appeals to his fellow conspiracy theorists. That he has admitted to having a worm in his brain presumably only boosts his potential appeal to some elements of the MAGA base. While this is morally dubious at best, Democrats could assist RFK by promoting his anti-vax credentials and contrasting them with Trump’s. To avoid being evil, they would need to steer clear of promoting anti-vax disinformation. This is certainly a viable option since the goal is to get existing anti-vaxxers who would otherwise vote for Trump (but never Biden) to switch to RFK and not to create more anti-vaxxers.  But at this point I think people are probably set in their views on vaccines. There is, of course, a risk of pulling liberal anti-vaxxers away from Biden to RFK and this should be considered before this tactic is used. Fortunately for the Democrats, it is the Republicans who have largely embraced an anti-vax approach within their broader commitment to disinformation and misinformation. As such, this tactic would hurt Trump more than Biden.

While it might be wondered if the effort would be worth it, since this tactic is unlikely to peel off many MAGA voters. However, while Clinton and Biden trounced Trump by millions of votes, the electoral college is such that pulling a few votes away from Trump in key locations could make a difference. Assuming, of course, that votes will even matter in MAGA controlled zones.

 

In June 2024, Oklahoma’s state superintendent mandated that public schools teach the Bible. In a familiar move, the justification is that the Bible is “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”

To be fair and balanced, the Bible is an important historical document, and I would go so far as to say that knowing about it (and other major religious texts) is essential to understanding world history. It is also important in my field, philosophy. While I teach at the college level, the same reasoning applies since I teach at a state school.

When I teach Ethics, Metaphysics, Modern and Introduction to Philosophy, I include Biblical content. For example, discussing the Medieval dispute over metaphysical universals requires discussing such topics as original sin and the Trinity. My colleagues also include the Bible in appropriate classes, the most obvious examples being classes on the Old and New Testaments. While K-12 education tends to be weak in the areas of philosophy and religion, the Bible should be covered in appropriate classes—along with other important religious texts. As such, I obviously have no objection against covering the Bible and other religious texts as historic, religious and philosophical documents in the context of academic study. Likewise, I have no objection against including historically important works of atheists, anarchists, and Marxists. These are all important to history and philosophy and should be included.

Naturally, there is always the practical challenge of determining what content to include in courses and we educators can only include a microscopic sliver of all the important works. Ideally, we should make this decision in a principled manner and not based on our own ideology or n0n-academic agenda. As an honest educator, I must admit that we do not magically uplink to the Platonic forms of education when picking our content and our values, biases and experience influence us despite our efforts to build an ideal curriculum. As I somewhat jokingly tell my students when they ask why I included certain philosophers, my response is that we usually teach what we were taught, and this probably goes back to some trivial reason for inclusion. For example, my Modern class is mostly made up of the philosophers that were in the Modern class I took. I did add Mary Wollstonecraft to the class because I had the notes from my Ethics class, and I added her to that class at the suggestion of my ex-wife. But, as noted above, the Bible seems to be an objectively important work. But so does the Communist Manifesto.

There are also concerns about how content should be taught, which is usually framed as a conflict between teaching and preaching (indoctrination). While the right regularly accuses educators of indoctrination, this is not what we do as professionals. And, as professors joke, if we can’t even get the students to read the syllabus or look up from their phones, we are not indoctrinating them to be Islamic Transgender Homosexual Feminist Woke Atheist Socialist Post Modern Tik Tok Marxist Fascist Migrants. As the meme goes, every accusation of the right is a confession. This mandate and numerous laws being passed governing education are clearly aimed at mandating the teaching of a set of values. That is, they are aimed at indoctrination. The right, if one reviews the laws and mandates, is not opposed to indoctrination. What they are opposed to is a lack of indoctrination in their values.

A supporter of this mandate might raise the obvious objection: the mandate does not state that biblical content will be taught as a religion but that it will be taught as an historical document. As such, the mandate is not a problem. While this does have some appeal, there are some problems with it. First, schools can already include the Bible as an historical document, hence there is no need for such a mandate. Second, the mandate is just about the Bible, which is clearly favoring the text of one religion over all others (and non-religious texts). Third, this reply is likely to be a bad-faith reply, since Mr. Walters professed views are quite clear.

While it is obvious why non-religious people and people of faiths other than Christianity would be concerned about these sorts of mandates (and laws), Christians should also be concerned. There are, of course, all the historical arguments made by the Founders for separating church and state. After all, they understood the dangers arising from combining secular power with theological power. They also understood the history of Europe, including the bloody conflicts between sects of Christianity. But there is also a very pragmatic concern. While Christianity is monotheistic, it is not monolithic and sects have been splitting off from it since the beginning. As such, when an official mandates that the Bible be taught, the question arises as to which version of the Bible (will it be yours?) and which interpretation of that Bible will be taught. So, while a person might applaud the mandate, they should not assume that what will be taught will match their version of the Bible or their interpretation. To be fair, a supporter might reasonably believe that this mandate is code for culture war values they probably agree with (such as anti-LGBT views, capitalism, white supremacy, 1800s era gender roles, and misogyny) and they are probably right. But Christians should be concerned that the version of the mandated Bible and its interpretation will conflict with their own faith. For example, Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics presumably do not want the faith of the other sect imposed upon their children in school. But some might see this as better than a lack of biblical lessons.

Of course, if someone wants their children to learn about the bible, most churches offer Sunday school classes and, of course, they have regular sermons that people can attend. As such, it would be absurd to argue that there is some critical lack of biblical education that the state has a compelling reason to address with a mandate.