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Month: January 2025

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Beyond the Numbers: Boris Johnson and the Fair Innings Argument

The world has changed a lot since COVID-19 burst onto the scene, upturned our lives, crashed economies, and killed millions. For some, the fear of the disease remains (not unjustly, either). For others, the fact that we went through such a massive event seems nearly unremarkable, or at least not unlike other generational traumas (like the Cold War), and those persons argue that we need to stop focusing on it and move on.

Governments, however, sit in an interesting liminal space between these two poles. On the one hand, they want people to return to work, which many, if not most of us, are. Yet, the lingering effects of the pandemic, direct or indirect, can still be felt throughout the workforce For example, figures recently revealed that the U.K. has record levels of economically inactive people — nearly a quarter of people of working age, a trend that started in the wake of the pandemic. To get economies moving and GDP on the rise then, states want citizens to be as active as possible.

On the other hand, governments cannot ignore the human and economic damage caused by the pandemic, something which, heaven forbid, might happen again. So, they must stick with the pandemic and investigate its emergence and our responses to it to better prevent (or, more realistically, mitigate) such a catastrophe in the future. This is the purpose of the U.K.’s COVID-19 Inquiry, launched in June 2022 by Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And it is with Johnson, and specifically his attitude towards the pandemic, that I wish to stay.

Now, for those blessed with memory or ignorance that obscures Johnson from recollection, let me provide the briefest of bios. Boris Johnson was the U.K.’s Prime Minister from 2019 – 2022. During that time, he and his government were hit by multiple scandals including, but by no means limited to, unlawfully proroguing parliament, ignoring a report that the Home Secretary had bullied members of staff, holding parties during the pandemic in contravention to the very laws he put in place, and supporting an MP who Johnson knew had a history of workplace sexual misconduct. It was this last scandal that eventually brought the now disgraced former PM down, with so many members of his party resigning from government that he couldn’t find people to fill any of the key roles. This eventually forced him out of office, but not before attempting a face-saving speech where he’d claim he’d be back (luckily, Johnson hasn’t returned; unluckily, he was followed by the catastrophic Liz Truss).

It is something Johnson reportedly said in December 2020 that I want to consider, however. In his diaries recounting his efforts to counsel the government during the pandemic, the Chief Scientific Advisor at the time, Sir Patrick Vallance, noted that Johnson seemed incapable of comprehending the sheer scale of the danger the emergency posed. Moreover, the PM appeared fascinated with older people accepting their fate for the greater good. In other words, he thought that those of an elderly disposition should die so that the country wouldn’t be impacted as hard. This was a position not only he held, but so did others supporting the PM (although few would admit it now). This stance is alluded to in WhatsApp messages from the PM to others, where he reflects repeatedly upon a correlation between fatality rates and age.

In short, then, it seems Johnson, the man in charge of the U.K.’s response to the pandemic, held a quasi-Darwinian stance to resource allocation and policy: If you’re too old, and thus too weak, to fight the disease, tough luck. You’ve had your life; accept your fate, and let the young, who can typically survive the infection, carry on.

This is an undoubtedly callous position to hold. Yet, callousness alone isn’t a valid reason to reject it. After all, if one can make an argument that the old should accept one’s fate, that they have lived a life and so expecting younger people and the country to sacrifice for them is unreasonable, then there might be something to the position even though it is, much like the man himself, detestable. And, as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed, there is such an argument—the fair innings argument (FIA).

The FIA is, on the face of it and in the abstract, one that many of us would find appealing. As conceptualized by John Harris:

The [FIA] takes the view that there is some span of years that we consider a reasonable life… Let’s say that a fair share of life is the traditional three score and ten, seventy years. Anyone who does not reach 70 suffers, on this view, the injustice of being cut off in their prime. They have missed out on a reasonable share of life; they have been short-changed. Those, however, who do make 70 suffer no such injustice, they have not lost out but rather must consider any additional years a sort of bonus beyond that which could reasonably be hoped for. The fair innings argument requires that everyone be given an equal chance… to reach the appropriate threshold but, having reached it, they have received their entitlement. The rest of their life is the sort of bonus which may be cancelled when this is necessary to help others reach the threshold.

Thus, it is an argument grounded in fairness and justice. Each year is a unit of value which we accrue as we age. The elderly are more prosperous than the young regarding their life experience. And so, when there is a clash of interests between the young and old, between those who have lived a life and those who have not, it seems not entirely unfair to expect the former to make a sacrifice to benefit the younger. They’ve lived a life, and they should pay that forward where necessary.

Now, there are problems with the argument, not least of which is where one draws the line between fairness and unfairness, between too young to die and too old to live. But, in the context of COVID-19 and in light of Johnson’s multiple professional indiscretions, I think the bigger picture here is that he discounted the inhumanity of his position and, indirectly, of the fair innings argument.

No matter which way you slice it, the argument is cold. It boils human experience down to a base numerical value and disregards experiential or relational qualities. All that matters is that the old have lived a life. The quality of that life? Well, that’s of no concern here. The human factor involved,  the all-consuming fear of dying? Not Johnson’s concern. And this is what aggravates me so here. Johnson reduced human life to a numbers game, something he could track and try to balance on a spreadsheet. I would say it betrays a sense of superiority and control — that it reveals a self-perception of himself as someone playing a strategy game, directing his units in battle, and trying to balance an economy for no other reason than the fun of it — but that would be a lie. We already knew this about him. After all, this is the man who, when asked as a boy what he wanted to be when he was older, said, “World king.”

It is this mentality — that life is reducible to a numerical value — that irks me so much. During the pandemic and the countless other tragedies that have occurred over our lifetimes, we saw that suffering, despair, fear, and loneliness are not problems to be solved by sacrificing those who experience them the most acutely. They are failures on our part as a society to empathize with those who go through such hardships.

Johnson forgot (and never appreciated) this, and I worry that if the FIA gains traction, we may all do the same.

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Pathologizing Values: When Should Patients Be Treated Against Their Will?

Many sufferers of anorexia nervosa — and similar eating disorders — intensely value thinness. They believe that thinness is of the utmost importance, more so than school, work, personal relationships, and their own physical health. Valuing thinness so strongly is harmful not only because of the malnutrition that follows but also because of how it undermines treatment. Treatment for anorexia leads (one way or another) to weight gain. Just as valuing thinness causes people with anorexia to lose weight, it can also cause them to refuse treatment that leads to weight gain.

How should clinicians respond when their patients refuse treatment? One possibility is to treat them against their will. In the case of anorexia, this involves detainment in in-patient facilities, which enforce strict protocols around feeding. In severe cases, it can also involve force-feeding through a tube. But is this ethical? On the one hand, such treatments can help sufferers to improve and prolong their lives. On the other hand, clinicians have a duty to respect their patients’ decision-making autonomy. This means respecting their decisions about what (if any) treatment they will receive — even decisions that seem irrational or harmful.

An illustrative example of the principle of decisional autonomy involves religion. Jehovah’s Witnesses often refuse blood transfusions due to their religious beliefs. That can result in death and could seem unreasonable from the perspective of those outside their faith. Nevertheless, such decisions are generally respected.

To exercise their decision-making autonomy, patients must be able to understand and appreciate the relevant medical facts. Many conditions, like psychosis or dementia, undermine this capacity. In such cases, patients are judged to lack decision-making competence, and coercive treatment is generally seen as warranted. Anorexia is a particularly perplexing case because those who suffer from the disorder often maintain their ability to understand and comprehend their treatment options. They are simply opposed to treatments that undermine their desire to be thin.

The philosopher and clinician Dr. Jacinta Tan advocates for one approach to justifying coercive treatment in the context of anorexia. She argues that the thinness values associated with anorexia are pathological — they belong to the disorder, not the individual. Because they are pathological, they can (and should) be distinguished from the agent’s authentic values, i.e. those that are genuinely her own. So, while someone with anorexia may be able to weigh their options and understand the relevant medical facts, they cannot freely decide on treatment because these (inauthentic) values get in the way.

The history of psychiatry suggests that we should tread carefully when it comes to pathologizing values. In the 1800s, drapetomonia was a supposed mental illness afflicting enslaved Africans. The central symptom was a strong desire to escape from captivity, leading to escape attempts. In trying to escape, these slaves were pursuing something they valued: freedom. But this value (according to certain psychiatrists from the Southern states) was pathological. The case of drapetomania illustrates an important principle: labeling values as pathological has serious consequences. We ought to, therefore, have a strong justification for the label.

Tan and her colleagues suggest basing such judgments on the co-occurrence between mental disorders and values. In the case of anorexia, intense thinness values occur (almost exclusively) in those diagnosed with the disorder, aren’t held before the disorder or after recovery, and their strength correlates with the strength of the disorder. According to Tan and colleagues, this strong co-occurrence between values and disorder justifies attributing thinness values to the disorder, not the person.

The cause of drapetomania illustrates the risk of this approach to pathologizing values. Escaping slaves who risked their lives to escape captivity did so because of their values — they valued freedom over a continued life in captivity, even one that brought (comparable) safety. However, having such a value system (and engaging in the escape behavior that follows from it) is precisely what attracted the ‘drapetomania’ label. Those values occur with drapetomania because having them is partly what it means to have drapetomania.

The same problem applies to anorexia. Intensely valuing thinness (and the resulting weight loss behavior) is deeply intertwined with diagnosis. Anyone who valued thinness with the intensity that anorexia sufferers do would engage in the same weight loss behaviors, therefore meeting the criteria for diagnosis. Co-occurrence tells us something about diagnostic categories but nothing about the authenticity of someone’s values. To dismiss thinness values as inauthentic, we cannot rely on co-occurrence alone.

One way to make progress on this issue is by better understanding the psychological factors that drive thinness values and how such factors relate to decision-making competence. Alternatively, ethicists might turn their attention to a different factor associated with anorexia.

Many sufferers of anorexia hold false beliefs about their body size. Experiments requiring patients to indicate their current size show that they consistently indicate body sizes much larger than their own. Indeed, sufferers of anorexia are often convinced that their bodies are larger than clinicians, family members, and friends insist.

Research suggests that these false beliefs are caused by misleading experiences of body size. Sufferers of anorexia genuinely perceive their bodies as larger than reality due to disturbances in the way their brain represents their body size. Their false beliefs are a natural response to these misleading experiences.

These false beliefs can, in some cases, undermine patients’ decisional competence. Consider an excerpt from an interview with a patient, recorded by Tan and colleagues:

Has the risk of death been mentioned? “Yeah.”

Do you believe these things you’ve been told? “No.”

About the risk of death, do you think it could happen? “Not to me.”

That’s the opinion of doctors, and I wonder why you don’t think it can happen to you. “Because you have to be really thin to die, and I’m fat, so it won’t happen to me.”

In this excerpt, the interviewee cannot understand that the relevant risks apply to them because of their beliefs about their own body size. This relates to an integral feature of decision-making competence. It isn’t enough that patients understand the relevant medical facts; they must also be able to appreciate how those facts apply to them. Some sufferers of anorexia are unable to do so because they don’t believe they are thin.

This illustrates how false beliefs about body size can undermine patients’ ability to reason about treatment, through a different route than what was proposed for thinness values. Tan and colleagues suggested that because thinness values are inauthentic, any treatment decisions that follow from them are similarly inauthentic. Body size beliefs, however, undermine decision-making competence not because they are inauthentic but because they distort sufferers’ reality. In doing so, they rob patients of the capacity to appreciate how medical risks apply to their situation.

It remains to be seen whether the thinness values associated with anorexia undermine sufferers’ decision-making competence and, if so, why. To solve that puzzle, we must understand more about the psychological factors that drive those values. But an equally important feature of anorexia related to decision-making competence is the body size beliefs involved. Such beliefs do not necessarily forfeit a patient’s right to choose their treatment. A clinician would need to probe the extent to which the beliefs are resistant to change and whether they are driving their patient’s treatment refusal. There is still much work needed to understand the relationship between body size beliefs and decision-making competence, but it represents a fruitful topic for future research.

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PSai: Singer’s Ethical Insights on Demand

Peter Singer is arguably the most influential living philosopher. For over 50 years, his articles, newspaper columns, blog posts, and books have challenged the views of those who read them. In 1975, he wrote what could be considered his most influential work, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. This text had such an impact that animal rights activists used it as a calling card during their raids on laboratories engaged in animal testing, leaving copies as a challenge to the staff from whom they rescued the animals. He has worked at the universities of Oxford, New York, Monash, and Princeton. His Google Scholar profile indicates that he has been cited over 80,820 times. He has won multiple awards, including the Berggruen Prize, which came with $1 million and, characteristically, Singer donated this money to charities he considered capable of doing the most good.

Yes, he has courted controversy. His opinions on infanticide and euthanasia have won him several vocal detractors. Yet, despite this, one cannot deny that he is a — if not the — modern-day giant in the philosophical field.

Given his academic stature and the sheer number of outputs he has had over his fifty years in the business, it seems reasonable that some might want to consult him when faced with ethical dilemmas. After all, if you’re in a moral quandary, who better to turn to than Singer for help? (I know other options are available, but humor me). The only problem is that as Singer has been writing and thinking about morality and ethics for over half a century, there’s much to consult. Unless you’re intimately familiar with his work (and that’s a lot of work to be familiar with), how can you be confident that what you think Singer might advise is accurate? Sure, you know he subscribes to a hedonistic version of utilitarianism, but knowing that fact alone might not be enough to make the right decision in the heat of the moment. When ethical uncertainty strikes, you need to have Singer with you, advising you on your best course of action. This possibility, however, is impossible (he’s a busy man, after all).

Luckily, we have the next best thing (or the early stages of the next best thing): an AI Peter Singer (PSai).

Created by Sankalpa Ghose, PSai, much like ChatGPT, responds to prompts and questions. While it lacks the robust knowledge portfolio of other generative AIs like ChatGPT, when asked a question about philosophy, which the real Peter Singer has written about, PSai can provide a not unreasonable answer; or at least, it can offer an answer that one might imagine Singer giving (although it as a strange habit of always trying to prompt you for a response). Indeed, Singer himself was involved in the AI’s development and was happy enough with the bots’ performance that he gave Ghose the go-ahead to make it public. Since that launch, PSai’s performance has steadily improved as its designers tweak it. As Ghose writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics: Forum:

It is in this way that Peter and I have progressed on PSai, releasing it publicly and reviewing how it performs in dialogue as measured by how those conversations with others go from our perspective of where it could be improved. Essentially, we have put forward a dialogue platform for others to engage, with that engagement driving its refinement.

The prospect of having a pocket-sized Peter Singer with you wherever you go, always ready to solve ethical riddles or dispense some needed wisdom, is an interesting one, and one that I must confess has some appeal. I like the idea of everyone having access to (a replica of) one of the foremost philosophical minds of our time whenever I need it. As a professional academic philosopher, I see some utility in being able to ask PSai a question about my research and how Singer’s writings might enhance what I’m working on. Rather than having to trawl through numerous books and papers, I could simply ask PSai what text might be the most useful when writing about de-extinction or how Singer might criticize a paper a draft paper on gene drives, which I could then respond and improve upon before submission. This could save a lot of time, which I could spend on other tasks.

For a less academic application, the app could simply function as a virtual Jiminy Cricket — a resource that’s on hand to share some wisdom in scenarios where the right course of action is obscured or where the user knows what’s right but needs some outside confirmation to solidify such knowledge and motivate action. This requires the user to consult the app before deciding to act, and the likelihood of this happening is, let’s face it, likely unlikely. Nevertheless, there is still a chance.

Of course, the idea that one might be able to consult Singer wherever they go is not universally appealing. As already mentioned, Singer has courted controversy when it comes to his historic claims around the permissibility of infanticide, as found in Practical Ethics (under very specific conditions, I must add). Suppose you are inclined to think that the arguments and claims made by the real Singer are incorrect or even repugnant. In that case, you are unlikely to find the possibility of consulting PSai when in ethical difficulty to be enticing. In such circumstances, people are likelier to wish they had a Socrates, Wollstonecraft, Anscombe, or Nietzsche AI. As far as I’m aware, however, these do not exist. But that doesn’t mean they cannot.

I do wonder if we might soon find ourselves awash with AIs trained on the philosophical writings of other philosophers. Might it be the case that, soon, instead of picking up several books, studying, and, over the years, becoming familiar with an ethical mode of life, you could simply jump on your phone, download the Aristotle AI, and have the clarity of morality in the palm of your hand? Such a possibility doesn’t strike me as too absurd. After all, if the PSai proves popular, it only seems natural to diversify.

This, however, brings us to two problems.

First, without wanting to make a point too bluntly, Singer is still alive. He was involved in the development of PSai and in efforts to refine it. This means that the AI has a real-life benchmark against which its performance can be measured. We don’t have to speculate if it says something that the real Singer wouldn’t. Singer himself can say, “nope, that’s wrong,” or, “the AI was correct in its reading of my work, but I’ve now changed my mind” (this is something which Singer and Häyry have considered). Ghose can then adjust the algorithm to perform better in the future. This isn’t possible with most philosophers whose names we are familiar with, as most of them are dead. So, we’d be stumbling around in the dark without a guideline in such cases, relying entirely on that person’s writings and the opinions of those familiar with their work. While an AI produced in such an environment might prove accurate, we lack the definitive authority to know.

Second, if we outsource our ethical deliberations to an AI, be that one based on Singer or any other philosopher, might we be doing a disservice to ourselves by simply following orders? Is it still doing the right thing if we don’t come to an understanding of right and wrong naturally but are simply instructed? For some philosophers, the answer may very well be in the negative. After all, for your classic virtue theorist, morality is like a muscle which one must train every day to be better than before. Each must deliberate using their faculties to identify a master in ethical living, emulate them, and always strive for more. I can’t help but laugh a little at the idea of an Aristotle AI, which, when asked by an unsuspecting user how they should behave in situation X, gets a response along the lines of “figure it out yourself, you lazy sod.” Is this a perfectly accurate representation? Probably not, but it isn’t so far removed as to be a meaningless scenario.

What do we do with PSai, then? Do we celebrate it? Decry it? Or see it as just another tool to help us if we choose? When faced with such a conundrum, it is appropriate to turn to the (figurative) man himself and to give it the last word. So, I asked PSai: Is the fact that this AI has been created a good thing? What justifies your existence? Why should I come to you for answers rather than reading Singer’s works?

Its response:

The creation of this AI aims to make ethical insights more accessible and to engage users in meaningful dialogue about moral issues. By offering interactive discussions, I can help people clarify their thoughts and explore ethical questions in a dynamic way.

While reading Peter Singer’s works provides comprehensive insights into his philosophy, engaging with this AI allows for a more personalized exploration of ideas and can help users apply ethical considerations to their own lives.

The justification for my existence lies in the potential to foster deeper understanding and reflection on ethical principles, contributing to a more thoughtful and compassionate society. What specific ethical questions or topics are you interested in exploring?

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Utilitarianism, United Healthcare, and the Trolley Problem

Many people misunderstand the trolley problem. It was not designed to illustrate the appeal of Utilitarianism – the modern, popular variation of the idea that good and evil lies solely in the results produced by an action. In fact, it is part of an argument against Utilitarianism, one designed to show that it is essentially incomplete and thus inadequate as a model of morality. The argument concludes that Utilitarianism fails because it fails to track our moral intuitions, by being unable to capture the distinction we tend to draw between acts (intentional acts done knowingly) and omissions (failures to act whether these be due to refusal, refraining, forgetting, overlooking, neglecting, etc.).

The trolley problem (originally designed by Phillipa Foot) confronts readers with a pressing dilemma: An aspiring murderer, or mass murderer, has tied some people down to two separate branches of a trolley track. There is one person on branch A, and five on branch B. You find yourself next to a lever at the junction between the branches, with the trolley currently headed down branch B. If you pull the lever, the trolley will divert to branch A, killing the one person (saving a balance of four people). Should you pull it?

A utilitarian analysis yields a definitive answer, and claims it is obvious. No matter how we finesse the calculation of likely outcomes – go ahead and factor in the possibility that you will be wracked with guilt, even eternally damned, if you pull the lever! – the best, because least awful, outcome is the one with a single victim.

However, a fair number of people disagree. Many of us find the choice to be a tough one to make, and more than a few refuse to pull the lever. Some of them refuse to accept that moral responsibility can be foisted on us so as to force our hand in this way. Others don’t want to get blood on their hands by intentionally killing an innocent person, a strict religious injunction or personal commitment.

The problem for Utilitarianism here is that such a conversation arises at all. If Utilitarianism is a final and complete moral theory, then there seems to be no moral basis for this disagreement (i.e., for any of us to prefer a worse outcome over a significantly better one). If Utilitarianism is correct, the moral situation is as clear as day: given the choice between five deaths and one, we are obligated to act. Inconveniently for the theory, however, many people also resist Utilitarian efforts to discredit our hesitance to pull the lever as merely a cultural or psychological quirk. Indeed, many philosophers see Foot’s thought experiment as doing decisive damage; it reveals that Utilitarianism is not the complete, final accounting of morality which it is advertised as being, but only a partial account.

As is often the case in philosophy, this isn’t the end of the argument. Utilitarianism wasn’t killed off by Foot’s hypothetical. But it did highlight a moral difference between actions and omissions – between switching the lever or allowing the trolley to run its predetermined course. When Foot wrote her paper, enough people felt the pull of those considerations for the argument to be regarded as seriously problematic for Utilitarianism. As a sociological matter, the thought experiment did significant work in moving moral-philosophical discourse in Britain and the US away from the Utilitarian orthodoxy of Henry Sidgwick (the dominant figure in early and mid-20th century).

Today, however, we are at a moment in American public life where the acts/omissions difference seems to be in danger of collapse. This can be seen clearly in how people talk about Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. Despite what opinion-polls suggest, not many people worth taking seriously will argue that a cold-blooded murder (shooting someone in the back in an ambush) is morally permissible. No one worth taking seriously thinks that it is morally “acceptable” to murder someone in cold blood (shooting them in the back in an ambush). And tidy equivocation will not do. “Killing people with paperwork instead of a gun doesn’t make you any less of a murderer…” wrote Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian. There are real and significant differences between manslaughter and murder. And there are differences between shooting someone to death, and serving a for-profit bureaucracy which kills people by denying them access to essential medical care. A health insurance company does not murder people. It creates, and implements, rules which foreseeably cause huge numbers of people to live in more pain, and die much earlier, than would happen without the “efficiencies” driven by the commitment to maximize profits. Unlike an ambush killing, the misdeeds of the insurance industry are wrongs of omission, instances of denying people care (not letting them get a drug, treatment, or operation). The industry allows misery, sickness, and death by failing to act to protect people (its customers!) from injury and disease.

The impersonal nature, and massive scale, of this deeply unjust system drives many people to see the killing in equally impersonal, representational terms. One reason why there has been less shock at the murder than we might expect is because we have a sense that the CEO was not killed not as an individual person – a man named Brian, who was a father, with a personal history and life story – but rather as a CEO, in his role or office as the leader of that particular commercial enterprise. What strikes people as significant about the killing is its symbolism (presumably this is also what led the state of New York to indict the alleged shooter for terrorism rather than simple murder). From this symbolic view – where individuals disappear and what remains are the abstract roles, positions, and structures which they represent – the act versus omission distinction gets washed away. From that view, structural violence is just as real a source of social evils (unjust outcomes such as crippled and shortened lives) as acts of direct interpersonal violence is. For many people, at the moment, there seems little temptation to say that it is worse to murder a person than to participate in, facilitate, and personally enrich oneself through the for-profit killing-by-omission of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of persons. The systematic injustice of American health insurance (and the healthcare system more broadly) is an industry which wrings private wealth out of human suffering.

I guess you could count this as a win for Utilitarianism. It delivers the clearest of moral answers in the grimmest of circumstances. And perhaps it accurately captures how many reflexively respond to the killing of the United CEO. In the context of the abomination that is American health insurance, maybe utilitarianism is the theory best suited for thinking about the right thing to do. (Should we take that as vindication for the theory, or a damning indictment of the industry and the system which enables it?) Still, it should worry us that on such a serious and prominent social issue as this, so many Americans no longer feel the pull of the act/omission distinction – the moral concept seems to be giving out on us….

I remain convinced, however, that there is a moral difference – sometimes a big difference or “all the difference in the world” – between doing something which has terrible consequences, and allowing terrible things to happen through not doing something. As a matter of personal responsibility – as a matter of what I have to live with – it matters to many of us whether we have to live with having done something, or live with having allowed something to happen. That difference shows up in how we think and feel about ourselves, in the sleepless nights we suffer after a wrongdoing or morally culpable oversight, where we doubt our decency, honesty, or bravery. This is not to say that there is anything necessarily better about an act or an omission. Both can do great damage, and both can be the cause of genuine remorse.

The difference matters enough to us that it is part of a cliché: it is better to regret something you have done than something you didn’t do. The Japanese have an idiom which captures it beautifully: “kiku ha ittoki no haji, kikanu ha isshō no haji” “聞くは一時の恥、聞かぬは一生の恥” (“to ask is embarrassing for a moment (one time), not to ask is shameful for life”). I don’t know if that’s an objective (timeless, universal) moral truth. It is vague enough that it is probably useful to say to someone, at some time. The point to consider here is that a theory which says there is no difference between asking and refraining from asking, and which insists that the only things to be mourned or cherished are the outcomes of asking or not asking, seems to deprive us of something we find useful.

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Is Speech Freer Without Fact-Checks?

Meta recently announced that it will end its practice of employing fact-checkers to moderate content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Instead, Meta sites will employ a system similar to the “community notes” feature on Twitter/X, where users can propose notes to provide more information about a post. In a short video posted to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg explained that he was motivated to make the change due to fact-checkers being too “politically biased,” and accused them of having “destroyed more trust than they created.” At the end of the day, he wanted his platforms to get back to their roots of upholding freedom of speech.

Many have expressed concerns about Zuckerberg’s decision, as well as his motivations for making it. The most prominent concern has been that without moderation from fact-checkers, significantly more false and hateful information will make its way around Meta’s platforms. Others have expressed the concern that Zuckerberg’s decision is itself politically motivated. There is evidence that fact-checked posts are more likely to be shared by conservatives who appeal to low-quality news sites, which has led some to believe that conservative voices are being disproportionately targeted. Zuckerberg’s recent behaviors – including donations to Trump and his removal of protections against certain kinds of hate speech – have led some to conclude that Zuckerberg is really motivated by a dislike of seeing fact-checks on views he and his friends hold.

Even if Zuckerberg truly is motivated by promoting freedom of speech, what is it about having a system of third-party fact-checkers that inhibits free speech? And will shifting responsibility to the community make speech on Meta platforms more free?

Let’s start with the first question: why might third-party fact-checkers inhibit freedom of speech? One might think that the problem is one of quantity: any instance of fact-checking is a form of censorship, perhaps, and thus without dedicated fact-checkers whose job it is to flag content there will simply be less censorship and thus speech will be more free.

If this is our concern, would a community notes system be an improvement? Perhaps. When looking at Twitter/X, for example, The Poynter Institute “found that fewer than 10 percent of Community Notes drafted by users ended up being published on offending posts,” and that these numbers “are even lower for sensitive topics like immigration and abortion.” Shifting to a community notes model where only a fraction of notes ever see the light of day may then decrease the number of posts that are flagged.

At the same time, however, the number of community members of sites like Facebook and Instagram outnumber third-party fact-checkers by many orders of magnitude. So even if a small percentage of community notes end up being published, the result may not be any fewer fact-checks.

Zuckerberg’s argument, however, is not so much with the concept of fact-checking itself, but that third-party fact-checkers are too politically biased, and are thus disproportionately censoring certain views. There has been significant pushback against this claim; regardless, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s true. If fact-checkers are biased, will the community be any better?

It’s not clear that it will. After all, the community itself may very well be biased by having a plurality of users falling on one side of the political spectrum. It’s also unclear whether conservative views will receive any fewer flags under a community notes system than a fact-checking system. A recent study in Nature, for example, found that professional fact-checkers and “politically balanced groups of laypeople” largely agreed on which sources of information were low quality, the lion’s share being those that amplified conservative views. If Zuckerberg is concerned that flagging conservative views disproportionately constitutes a form of censorship, then shifting fact-checking responsibilities to the community may not make things any better.

One might think instead that third-party fact-checking just really isn’t necessary anymore. An article in Politico, for instance, recently argued that the “disinformation panic” that started during Trump’s first presidency is “over.” Part of the evidence for this claim is that while the contentious and surprising nature of Trump’s first election win demanded an explanation – which many blamed on misinformation campaigns designed to mislead voters – the second Trump win was definitive and, at least in terms of drama around the manipulation of results, mundane. Per the Politico article: “no one was fooled into voting for Trump.”

There have also been increasingly frequent criticisms that programs dedicated to ameliorating the problems of misinformation and disinformation have largely failed to bear fruit. People spreading false information, the argument goes, is not so much a problem to be solved as it is a feature of humanity to be tolerated; especially so, given the politically fraught nature of labeling information about social issues as either true or false. This is not to say that we should abandon the project of identifying false and potentially harmful information online. Rather, employing third-party fact-checkers is an overcorrection of a non-problem, and thus unnecessarily restricts free speech.

Questions about the fecundity of the study of misinformation and disinformation are open, although there is good evidence that many interventions are, in fact, effective. As stated in the Politico article, there is also good reason to be worried about the quantity and egregiousness of false information being shared on social media in the second term of the Trump presidency given his infamous disinterest in the truth and his choice of appointees. Of course, it may very well turn out that Trump’s rhetoric is met with less opposition during his second term and that changing political winds result in more people agreeing on obvious falsehoods they see on social media. However, this is not an indication that disinformation is over, but instead underlines how those in power have a vested interest in attempting to control narratives around the extent to which disinformation is a problem.

We have seen little reason to think that the existence of fact-checking represents a limitation on free speech, nor have we seen much reason to think that shifting to a community notes model will make things any better. But perhaps shifting responsibility for fact-checking to the community will better promote free speech not by being any less restrictive, but by granting new abilities to its users. By creating a system in which everyone has a say in helping to determine whether some content is fact-checked or flagged, the process becomes democratic in a way that is presumably lacking when outsourcing those duties to third parties, and thus free speech flourishes.

There is a sense in which this shifting of responsibilities gives more freedom to the users, as they now possess an ability they didn’t have before. But a system with only minimal guardrails also risks stifling many more voices. For example, Zuckerberg’s recent changes that allow users to say that gay and trans people have “mental illness” remove restrictions on a certain kind of speech from a certain kind of person, but will undoubtedly result in a lot less speech from members of communities that Meta’s policies refuse to respect. Moderation of speech – be it in the form of fact-checking or policies around what kinds of content are permitted on a platform – can thus promote free speech rather than inhibit it.

It remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg’s version of community notes will be successful in identifying false and misleading information, and it’s perhaps only known to him what his true intentions are in making the change. However, if he really was motivated by making speech freer on his platforms, there’s good reason to think his efforts are misguided.