Speech Control

January 18, 2026January 17, 2026Leave a comment

January 18, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

This week, as I was waiting in a checkout line at the store, a couple a few lines away pushed a grocery cart with a toddler sitting inside. The toddler screamed uncontrollably, and the sound killed several of my brain cells, I was sure. I glanced their way, wanting to see if the child was hurt. She wanted her mother’s keys. When the mother relented and gave her toddler the keys, the child immediately grew quiet. What I thought was the uncontrollable anguish and rage of a toddler was a controlled performance designed to achieve a specific goal.

This week I want to take a look at the topic of control. Human beings are engineers by nature. We domesticate animals to serve our needs. We cultivate crops to produce a more pleasing taste and higher yields. We control the actions of other people to serve our wants. In his book The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, Jonathan Turley examines the history of speech control from ancient Greece to the present. America was the first country to stipulate a right to free speech in the First Amendment to its Constitution. In 1798, several years after the Constitution’s ratification, the passage of the Sedition Act tossed aside the First Amendment. The act prohibited newspapers from publishing anything critical of the administration of President John Adams, the successor to George Washington (Source).

The Constitution had recognized the danger of regional factions but not the formation of political parties. Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were the leaders of the Federalists, advocating a strong central government. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison represented the Democratic-Republicans, an opposition party that supported state and local control. For Adams, it was especially inconvenient that his Vice-President, Thomas Jefferson, actively opposed many of his policies. The Sedition Act was an attempt to quell criticism from media outlets owned by people who were sympathetic to the ideas of the Democratic-Republicans.

Three decades earlier, when the American colonies were under British rule, John Adams had been an outspoken rebel against the British monarch, the Parliament and the colonial governors. Now that Adams was the leader of the new nation, he regarded any criticism of his policies as outright sedition. When we are in control, challenges to our rule come from those who are out of control. When we are not in control, we may regard the actions of those who are in control as uncontrollable. This duality of control makes the formation of at least two political parties inevitable. That is the second topic I want to look at this week, inevitability.

Whenever there is a disaster, an investigation often uncovers a chain of events that gives us the impression that the disaster was inevitable. No one can predict the likelihood of a severe hurricane like Katrina, but the consequences of Katrina seem inevitable in retrospect. In 1968, the Army Corp of Engineers built the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet through residential neighborhoods, particularly the lower ninth ward where 15,000 African Americans lived (Source). The outlet made it easier for ships to transition from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico but put many people at risk. In those decades following WW2, urban planners often constructed highways and other thoroughfares through poorer neighborhoods with little political power.

It is inevitable that rulers want only consensus from those they rule. A political leader fancies himself as the captain of a large ship. Any criticism of the captain’s direction is a threat of mutiny and must be suppressed for the safety of all, the captain reasons. Any crew members who are not willing to take orders from the captain are dismissed or thrown overboard. Disagreements are not tolerated. That is the policy of the current administration.

For several decades, the governors of the Federal Reserve have demonstrated an independence that is unique among federal agencies. The governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate but often express views that are contrary to those of the President and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Federal Reserve conducted monetary policy that was compliant with the President’s wishes. The result was soaring inflation. Lesson learned. Congress has given the Fed a dual mandate to promote two policies that are at odds with each other, full employment and moderate inflation. Helping the President’s reelection chances or popularity is not one of those goals. To accomplish those goals, the Fed must conduct unpopular policies like higher interest rates. More demand for labor tends to create inflation. Higher inflation creates less demand for labor. Balancing these two objectives is a difficult task. Some governors give a priority to employment and favor what is called a dovish monetary policy. Others prefer a hawkish monetary policy that chokes off any signs of inflation even if that lowers employment. Again we see a conflict of two perspectives.

Multiple perspectives are inevitable. Suppressing speech aims to suppress the voices of those who are not in control of policy at a particular moment. We are aware that China, Russia and N. Korea control their media and actively prosecute dissidents. That’s bad. When college campuses block controversial speakers, that is also a form of speech suppression on a reduced scale. Advocates for such policies claim that suppressing harmful speech is itself a form of free speech.

Turley reminds us of John Stuart Mill, the 19^th century author of On Liberty who argued against this very practice in his time (p. 260). Mill advocated a harm principle that limited government action to protecting us from harm by others while allowing us to exercise our rights (p. 256). In a complex society, we are connected to and affected by the actions of others. A controversial speaker appearing on campus may cause me some anxiety. That level of harm does not meet Mill’s threshold to justify me organizing a campaign to pressure the administration to ban the speaker from appearing on campus.

Governments invoke their own expansive definition of harm to prohibit free speech. They are acting in the cause of public safety, promoting social harmony, and reducing conflict and controversy that might upset some people. China has a centuries long history of civil war. They justify one party rule and media control as a way to avoid another civil war. Just the possibility of harm becomes a basis for speech suppression. That reminds me of the 2002 film Minority Report where police act on the advice of psychics to interrupt and prosecute crimes before they are committed.

Given our nature as engineers who want to control our environment, it is inevitable that leaders want to control unwanted speech while allowing and promoting favorable speech. Few of us, however, want to live in a leashed society where information is fed to us like dog food. We cherish our autonomy and do not want to be treated like pets. We do not want to be caged by government police because we expressed an unfavorable opinion. The desire to control and the resistance to control will continue to create conflict in human societies for centuries to come. That much is inevitable.

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Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Keywords: free speech

Blurb: Few of us want to live in a leashed society where information is fed to us like dog food.

Me and Not Me

January 11, 2026January 10, 2026Leave a comment

January 11, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

An infant rests in the crook of his mother’s arm and gazes at her face. The infant may have been separated physically at birth from his mother, but the infant knows no boundaries of self. Fast forward a number of decades. When a parent dies, a child learns that the property of the dead parent forms a new self, a legal entity, that can be party to a contract. This new agent, called an estate, is even given an identification number (Source). This week I want to explore the space between self and non-self. What do we mean by self? I will leave a discussion of Atman, and other mystical variations, for another day.

At first glance, the idea of self seems rather binary. There’s Me and everything else which is not Me, the rest of the universe. But our lives are lived by degrees. We may not feel like the same person we were ten years ago, but our identity remains the same. A person may excuse their behavior by saying they weren’t themselves when they did such and such. Is Me the identity that began on the day of my birth? Does that Me end on the day of my death? That identity is objective. It was recognized by others even when I was lying in my crib and unaware of my identity. I could be lying in a coma in a hospital oblivious of my identity but that identity would persist.

Or is Me the person that experiences change, that acquires and loses abilities and characteristics? That is the subjective perspective. Perhaps Me includes both of these aspects, the objective identity and the subjective experience. As we reach our teenage years we experience an awareness of our presentation to those around us. Integrating this subjective awareness of the objective aspect of ourselves can be emotionally painful.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle built a metaphysics of a unified self experiencing change. He was a nature guy, a philosopher who speculated that things and people in the world behaved the way they did because they wanted to realize their nature. This sense of purpose, called teleology, was the central foundation of Aristotle’s thinking. He thought there was a universal form, an essence that directed a person toward a purpose. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, had thought the essence lived somewhere in the heavens. Aristotle taught that it was within us. Of course, I wouldn’t trust Aristotle to diagnose a problem with my car but they didn’t have cars back in ancient Greece when Aristotle lived.

If I fast forward in my time machine to the late 19^th century, I would get a more mechanistic view from the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He thought that if there was any unity of self, it was a fragile union, a lull in an internal battle between the id and superego. The id was our primitive drive for pleasure. The superego was a collection of societal and parental norms that we had internalized. Negotiating the conflict was the ego, who was like a person walking an ill behaved dog (the id) that constantly yanks on the leash (the superego). Aristotle thought that we expanded our sense of self outward to family, friends and our local community. Freud imagined that we internalized our family and society, that we struggled to incorporate their ideals, commands and prohibitions. Somewhere in the space between these very different views of the self we can develop our own sense of what the self is.

The other axis I want to explore is care. Adam Smith was an 18^th century philosopher and economist who noted that we care the most about those who are closest to us. We would be more upset by the loss of our own fingertip than we would if a million people in China died in an earthquake. It’s as though caring behaved like gravity, a caring force that grows weaker as the distance between two people increases. Smith wrote a century before Charles Darwin but we can understand how this mechanics of caring helps guarantee our survival. Charities recognize this force in their outreach to the public, and try to bring us closer to the plight of those in far off countries.

We care about ourselves a great deal and this helps our survival. People who are at risk for suicide may have a diminished sense of self-care. Some of us have a grandiose sense of our importance to others, lack empathy for others and seek admiration to reinforce our sense of our own importance (Source). This condition is called narcissistic personality disorder, and yes, it has its own billing code (Source).

Let’s return to that pastoral scene of mother and child. A woman experiences many hormonal changes after childbirth that can make it difficult to take care of herself while coping with the demands of a newborn (Source). Increases in the hormone chemical oxytocin help increase a sense of bonding with the infant (Source). A woman’s sense of self expands to integrate and accommodate the infant’s needs as well as her own, similar to the expansionist model of self Aristotle taught. In his philosophy, the self is directed outwards. His emphasis was on unity of self seeking to fulfill a purpose. He understood that a woman’s nature was to act as care giver and keeper of the household (Source).

Freud, on the other hand, focused on the conflict within the self. The self is not a given as in Aristotle’s metaphysics. It is built from the surrounding society, our family, friends and community. It is built through managing our instinctual urges. Given all that, it is no wonder that a parent, particularly a mother, would have a prominent role in a Freudian diagnosis. In his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes that the dominant explanation for schizophrenia until the 1970s was schizophrenogenic mothering. Yes, ladies, if your kid is a schizophrenic, it’s because you were a terrible mother. A history of such pseudoscientific quackery fosters public distrust in science, yet our modern society is ever more dependent on scientific expertise.

Does caring diminish with distance, as Adam Smith noted? Maybe so. People around the world responded when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for none minutes. Chauvin didn’t care when Floyd protested that he couldn’t breathe. The video and accounts of that incident shrunk the emotional distance between George Floyd and the public. Viewers cared. Around the world, they protested the brutal disregard of life shown in the video. Many believed that Chauvin was an example of a systemic prejudice against minorities. He was the mushroom that pokes its head out of the ground, an indication of a widespread fungal network below ground.

The spread of broadcast, cable, internet and social media has accelerated the expansion of each individual self. We become outraged at the sight of a flagrant violation of basic human rights. Internet networks have evolved to promote rage bait, content that is designed to elicit anger and outrage (Source). We see elements of both visions of the self, those of Aristotle and Freud. We are a bridge between an ancient idea that humans have a natural purpose and a more modern notion that we are a disjointed assemblage of impulses and influences. There is both unification and fragmentation. We are drawn to new experiences yet shrink from the conflict of so many different points of view. To simplify our lives, we contract and consolidate our media feed so that we consume only certain points of view. This Balkanization resists any unified vision, any common agreement of principle, of ethics, of acceptable behavior. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

Moral Responsibility

January 4, 2026January 3, 2026Leave a comment

January 4, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

If I am late for my bus because of a brief delay leaving home, will I miss the bus and be late for work? That depends on many factors. The bus might be a few minutes behind schedule. The driver could have been late to start his run because he forgot something at the terminal. Road construction or an accident might have delayed the bus before it got to my stop. Let’s say that the bus is on time. I miss my bus, I’m late to work and my boss is displeased, but I am not to blame if I live in a deterministic world. The things that didn’t happen are as much to blame for my being late as the things that did happen. The boss cares only that I navigate the public transit system so that I arrive on time. I am responsible for a certain outcome, being on time for work. We are using different philosophies to assess my lateness.

Last week I took a walk in the idea space that lies between libertarian free will and fatalism. This week I want to explore the domain of moral responsibility and see how the two connect. Libertarians postulate a self, a soul, some kind of animating force in each of us that makes choices in a free and rational manner. The choice is not necessarily when the outcome occurs. Take the case of drunk driver. At the time he hit a pedestrian or bicyclist, his senses and judgment were impaired. If he freely chose to drink and to the point of intoxication, then he is morally responsible. If someone spiked his drink or gave him a drug without him knowing it, then he is probably not responsible.

On the opposite end of that idea space is fatalism, the idea that all that occurs is destined by fate, some uberforce that is the agent of that destiny. John Calvin (1509 – 1564) preached that God knew whether a person was saved before they were even born. Calvin is classified as a theological determinist. To me that feels like fatalism, that people are not responsible for their actions, but Calvin insisted that choices did matter and that people were morally responsible for their actions. If God is omniscient, omnitemporal and omnipresent, then all of reality is a replay.

In a 2014 blog post, James N. Anderson uses the term divine determinism and explores several varieties of determinism and how Calvinism differs from fatalism. A fatalist would argue that something will happen regardless of what we do. Calvin argues that we are the means through which something occurs. God knows the future and allows it to happen although he could change it if he wanted to. Perhaps he did change it. We will never know. I think Calvin might liken God to an author who determines the path of his characters toward the ending of a novel. The characters in the novel are the means through which the author arrives at the ending. If we are characters in a divine novel, I think our moral responsibility is limited.

The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche rejected both free will and moral responsibility. The first was invented and the second was a form of self-hatred. He was a determinist who believed that instincts, upbringing and physiology were the root cause of our actions. In a 1930 New York Times op-ed, Albert Einstein expressed a belief in a strict causal determinism. In the opening line, he wrote “Everything that men do or think concerns the satisfaction of the needs they feel or the escape from pain” (Source). In his 2023 book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argued the case against the concept of free will, echoing Nietzsche and Einstein but with much more neurological evidence (Source). He analyzes free will from a neurological perspective, at the level of electrical signals crossing the axon-dendrite junction of nerve cells. This reductionist view seemed too mechanistic to me but the book contains many surprising research findings.

I will review the two varieties of determinism, hard and soft. Sapolsky included these at the start of his book. The first is that the world is deterministic and there is no free will. Sapolsky calls this hard incompatibilism, as in incompatible with free will. In last week’s post, I referred to this as hard determinism. Sapolsky advocates this position. A second type of determinism is compatible with free will, what I called soft determinism. Most philosophers and legal scholars are of this type, according to Sapolsky.

Sapolsky also discusses the intersection of free will and moral responsibility. The most popular position holds that there is free will and moral responsibility. Some claim that there is no free will and therefore, no moral responsibility. Sapolsky favors this position and distinguished moral responsibility from legal responsibility. There is a practical use of punishment as a deterrent to future unwanted behavior. Another intersection also claims no free will but people can be held morally responsible for their actions. The last position is an outlier and admits free will but not moral responsibility.

Does finding a solution to any problem depend on knowing the cause of the problem? We may intuit a solution without pinning down a cause. In his book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist quoted the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss “I have had my results for a long time; but I do not know yet how I am to arrive at them.” In The Matter With Things and a previous book The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist examined the roles that each side of our brain plays as we navigate the world (Source). If each side of our brain perceives and engages with the world differently, where does moral responsibility lie?

The right brain understands events and facts within context and experience, a practical wisdom similar to Aristotle’s phronesis. The left brain does not. It extracts those events and facts from their context in order to form a model, a theory of the world. It is the right brain that applies those theories to the different contexts we encounter each day. The left side processes text; the right side comprehends the meaning and context of the text. While there are similar patterns in perception and decision making among individuals, the synergy between the two sides of our brain is creative and unique to each individual. Choices flow from perception. McGilchrist rejects biological determinism.

So much of what we experience is a web of complex causes. Outcomes may depend on our frame of reference. Here’s an example. In normal time, a photo finish in a horse race might look like a tie. Before the introduction of high speed cameras, human judges decided the winner. Sometimes there were arguments over the winner and some races were declared a “dead heat,” or tie. In 1937, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in Hollywood featured a slit camera pointed at the finish line and was able to describe the finish in fractions of a second (Source). The causes of the horse’s win are too numerous to count. In reviewing film of the race, some might point to a hesitation or a slip as the losing horse rounded the final curve. Was it the condition of the track or the horse’s competitive spirit or its mood? A complete identification of a multi-causal event is improbable, if not impossible.

Instituting a standard of legal responsibility must incorporate complex causality and our decision making in the face of that complexity. In our legal system, instances of injustice are more frequent than we would like to admit. Governments decide legal responsibility but individuals and private institutions decide moral responsibility. Advocacy groups lobby lawmakers to make their sense of moral responsibility the legal standard for everyone. If someone is to blame, some government body should impose a punishment as a deterrent. If there is praise, that behavior should be rewarded.

Philosophers, ethicists and legal scholars might express a coherent philosophy of free will, determinism or fatalism, but we often utilize versions of all three philosophies in our daily lives. Many of us inhabit the space between two pure concepts. There are degrees of free will and moral responsibility that we adapt to varying circumstances. We offer excuses to evade the blame for an incident, but hold others responsible if they have had an impact on our well being, particularly if that impact is negative.

The 19^th century poet Walt Whitman embraced the complexity of our contradictions, beliefs and experiences when he wrote in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Do you believe that we have free will? Is there justice in holding people morally accountable for their actions? I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by David Vives on Unsplash

Machine or Magic?

December 28, 2025December 27, 2025Leave a comment

December 28, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

A man gets into an elevator. There are buttons on the control panel but no labels. The man pushes one of them, feels the elevator car move upward, then stop. The doors open and he walks out of the elevator onto a floor that is not labeled. How can the man know if his pushing the button caused him to reach his desired floor?

Another story. An alien walks into a cellular phone store checking on reports of intelligent life on Earth. Are the phones transmitting signals from intelligent life or are they creating the pictures themselves? How would the alien decide?

This week I want to explore the distinction between free will and determinism. Like so many of the axes I have looked at, there isn’t a clear separation between the two concepts. There are degrees of autonomy and capacity, and implications for moral responsibility. If our sense of choice is an illusion, are we responsible for our actions? Since this is a holiday week, this post will be shorter than usual. This week, I will take a brief look at this first axis of free will and determinism. Next week, I will consider a second axis, moral responsibility, and how the two interact.

The Britannica article on free will identifies several types (Source). I will call them “hard” and “soft” free will. The hard version of free will is the libertarian variety that holds that our present choices are random and not bound by the choices we made in the past. The “soft” version of free will is compatibilism, an attempt to reconcile determinism and free will. Yes, our choices are guided by earlier actions and events we still have the choice whether to be bound by those earlier actions or events.

Economics students learn about the sunk costs fallacy, the mistake of basing a decision on the amount of time, effort and money we have already invested that cannot be recovered (Source). We have an instinctive aversion to loss but we can choose to ignore that instinct and base our choice not on past events but on future costs and benefits. Let’s say a college student has invested two years in college to get a four year degree and the prospect of a better paying job. They receive a job offer that does offer them more pay and has some stability. If they decide to stay in school because they don’t want to waste two years of effort and tuition, then they are being ruled by past events. If they decide to stay in school because they think that they will get an even better job and higher earnings with a four year degree, then they are basing their decision on future prospects, and not falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy.

There is a hard and soft side to determinism as well. The soft variety is the compatibilism I discussed above. Hard determinism holds that the future is fixed because of past causes and the laws of nature. Planning and decision making are still effective because they will guide future outcomes. Fatalism is distinct from hard determinism. Fatalism believes that outcomes are fixed by destiny. Determinism focuses on causes, not outcomes.

What is the problem that these philosophical speculations of free will and determinism are trying to solve? Moral responsibility. If outcomes are destined, as fatalism claims, then how can we be held responsible for our actions? A society cannot function unless there is individual responsibility, so fatalism is both unpopular and impractical.

At the opposite end from fatalism is libertarian free will, or “hard” free will. If present actions are not determined in the least by past choices, then we are all responsible for an outcome based on the choice we made regardless of circumstance. A drunk motorist who kills another person is guilty of murder. His state of inebriation doesn’t matter because past behavior supposedly does not influence present choices, or the inability to make a rational choice. We instinctively understand this point of view to be flawed.

Understanding moral responsibility has been the task of philosophers since Aristotle wrote his book Nicomachean Ethics 2500 years ago. Assigning moral responsibility has been the task of governments and legal scholars since the days of Ur, 5800 years ago. Let’s take the situation with two neighbors, neither of whom is inebriated. There is a history of dispute and acrimony between the two over some persistent situation. Maybe it is a dog that makes too much noise at night when left out in the backyard. One day there is a heated argument between the two neighbors. Let’s say that there is a third neighbor who witnesses the argument. One person leaves, saying they are coming back to kill the other. When they return with a club, the other neighbor interprets that club as a gun, shoots and kills his neighbor, believing they are doing so in self-defense. If past actions have no influence on present choices, then the person who shot can be guilty of murder. The law, however, considers past actions as a context for present action. Did the person who shot have reasonable cause to think the other person had a gun? Well, yes, and the witnessing neighbor corroborates that interpretation. Even if the gun was only a club, the person had sworn they were coming back to kill. The possession of the club or gun indicates that this was no idle threat.

Is the aggressive neighbor with the club responsible for his own death? Should the neighbor who shot him bear any legal consequences for his choices? Perhaps the difficulty in assigning responsibility comes from an incomplete understanding of how we make choices. Next week, I will tackle that subject. Have a great holiday season and I hope you see you next week.

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Photo by Олександр К on Unsplash

Permissiveness and Stability

December 21, 2025December 20, 2025Leave a comment

December 21, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, the main character Raskolnikov is a former law student who wants to test a theory he has developed. He believes that there are two types of people, the ordinary folks who must obey the law and the extraordinary people who can break the rules if their actions advance some cause. This week I want to explore permissions, the people who grant themselves permission to do anything they want and the consequences for those around them.

This week the NY Times published excerpts from a Vanity Fair article about chiefs of staff to various presidents (Source). The excerpts were from eleven interviews that the current chief of staff, Susan Wiles, gave to Vanity Fair. In one of those interviews, she said that President Trump reminded her of her own father, the famous sportscaster Pat Summerall. Each of them act or acted as though there were no restraints on their behavior, that there was nothing they couldn’t do. According to Ms. Wiles, her father was an alcoholic and absent father. President Trump does not drink but has that same large personality, someone who knows few bounds.

The other avenue I want to explore is stability and instability. People who grant themselves extraordinary permissions create instability in their immediate circle. Alcoholics are a typical example of self-licensing, masters of rationalization. Powerful people like Napoleon believed that he was chosen by destiny and was exempt from the rules that others must live by. Adolph Hitler believed that he was an instrument of a historical providence to restore greatness to the German people. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he survived World War I because he was chosen to create change. Both of these leaders created an extraordinary amount of instability and destruction. If they were chosen by destiny, it was a cruel destiny for mankind.

On the other hand, there are people who break the rules without any grand ideological justifications. President John Kennedy’s impulsive sexual behavior was more like this type. This is a reasoning that excuses certain behaviors but does not give a person license to do anything they want. President Bill Clinton initially rationalized his affair with Monica Lewinsky as not fitting the ordinary understanding of sexual relations (Source). While neither man’s actions had a catastrophic disruptive effect on society, their impulsiveness was destabilizing for their families and their personal life. In Clinton’s case, his affair led to an impeachment in the House.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov believed that he could commit murder. Neither Kennedy nor Clinton did. Some might put President Trump in the same camp with Raskolnikov. In his 2016 campaign, he boasted “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” (Source). However, this seems more like the braggadocio of a wrestler than an earnest belief that he could commit murder without consequence.

In a 2023 BestColleges survey, half of students felt that using AI on assignments was cheating or plagiarism, yet 20% reported that they still used it (Source). Some students copy and paste an AI response into their essay and submit the essay as their own. They might rationalize their behavior to themselves, saying that they don’t have the time because they are working to support themselves or their family. Some might believe that society in general or the job market in particular forces them to go to college. Some are going to college in the hopes of improving their earning capability so that they can better provide for their families. Like white lies, cheating is permissible if it is done for the good of others.

Does a student’s plagiarism disrupt the stability of a college or university? I don’t think so. However, the response by administrators and faculty indicates that they think this is a disruptive act. Evaluation is a key component of a college’s mission. Plagiarism undermines evaluation. What if a musical student in a composition class submitted a work by Bach as their own? Why stop there? Why not throw in some standards from the Great American Songbook? How about stealing a few pieces from the jazz repertoire? In this extreme example, the student’s grades might indicate that they are brilliant and talented, but they have not developed the necessary skills. Their grades are supposed to be a fairly accurate reflection of those skills.

In the early 1970s, hand calculators became more affordable for students. This new technology disrupted the long standing practice of using slide rules and developing native mental skills. Some schools banned their use on tests, but allowed them on other assignments. Educators worried that students would not get a good grasp of mathematical principles if they used a calculator. Instead of mastering math, students only had to know which button to push on the calculator. In the following decades, norms and expectations changed (Source). Will the same happen with the use of AI?

Permission can be an exchangeable commodity. Stores throughout the country play music licensed as a public performance right from ASCAP or BMI. TV and radio stations buy licenses that permit them to broadcast over the area in a specific region. Companies license the use of a product or idea by paying a patent fee. All of us sign software licenses when we download an app. The buying and selling of permissions creates a stable economic environment where people can invest money to develop a product or idea and have assurance of some protection of their product.

Lori Loughlin was an actress on the TV comedy Full House. She and her husband paid $500,000 to a college admissions fixer to designate her children as recruited athletes using fraudulent credentials. College admission is a form of permission that the Loughlins purchased. Few were sympathetic to their use of power and status to bypass academic integrity, an unfair bargain. A prostitute grants certain permissions in exchange for money, a fair bargain. Some of think such exchanges destabilize our society, promoting immoral behavior and posing health risks. Others think that the criminalization of prostitution, not the act itself, is the destabilizing force.

Self-help books often present a structured self-permission designed to achieve some greater fulfillment in our lives. This might involve a change of direction in our personal lives, or a change in career. Some normalize a sense of guilt, sad or frustrated feelings. Their message is you are not alone. It is OK to experience these feelings. Some people are missing a rationalization for their feelings. Self-help helps confer legitimacy on feelings of confusion, doubt, guilt and sadness. It seems to me that these kinds of programs help stabilize a society. They are inward-directed rather than coercing behaviors from other people. They are aimed at self-improvement, not at some call to fulfill a person’s historical destiny.

Rationalization, a component of self-permission, is self-persuasion. We play the salesperson and provide a justification for our actions. We play the willing customer who wants to buy our justification to free us from responsibility, to absolve us of guilt. The justifications are not new so we must have heard them before. This exchange of justification helps smooth over any intra-personal conflict but our actions often destabilize those around us who must cope with the behavior.

During the 1960s, the Boomers expanded the bounds of acceptable sexual and social behavior, setting new norms that persist to this day. Did this expansion of permission undermine families? The divorce rate rose dramatically during the 1970s, peaked in 1980 and has declined since then (Source). Fewer adults are getting married so this is a factor in that decline. A couple that might have felt pressure to marry in the 1950s could live together for a time in the 1990s. If the couple split, it would not show up in the divorce rate. Archie Bunker, the main character on the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, had few inhibitions when sharing his criticisms of society’s growing permissiveness.

Does greater permissiveness lead to a greater flourishing in society? That depends on your point of view. Conservatives like Archie would argue that behavior boundaries protect societal structures like the family. Liberals argue that the strict boundaries of the 1950s, for instance, only hid a lot of unreported personal misery. No society can flourish if the individuals in that society are caged. What do you think? I hope everyone enjoys the Christmas season and I will see you next week.

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Freedom and Captivity

December 14, 2025December 13, 2025Leave a comment

December 14, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In 1847, abolitionist supporters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania invited William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to speak at the Dauphin County Court House. Forty miles to the south was Gettysburg, a small rural town of 2,400 people. In 16 years, it would become the site of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War as the Union Army turned away the advance of the Confederate Army into the north (Source).

Garrison (1805-1879) was the publisher of The Liberator, the foremost journal championing the banishment of slavery in the United States. Douglass (1818 – 1895) had been born into slavery and did not learn to read until he was a teenager. After escaping to freedom at the age of 20, he became a gifted speaker for the abolitionist cause (Source). Several anti-abolitionists were in the audience and gathered outside the court house. Garrison spoke for an hour, urging the assembly to honor the freedom and rights of all men promised by the Declaration of Independence. As soon as Douglass rose to speak, agitators pelted him with rotten eggs and yelled racial slurs. A security detail escorted both men from the court house. The Harrisburg police stood idly by as an angry mob threatened both men (Source).

This week I want to explore the axis of freedom and captivity. Douglass was one of perhaps 100,000 slaves that fled to northern states and Canada before the Civil War. In the same year as the Harrisburg event, more than 300,000 Irish emigrants crossed the Irish Channel to Liverpool in search of food. They were taking advantage of England’s poor laws which guaranteed them a couple of rice meals a day. The record breaking cold of the 1846-47 winter and the potato blight had killed the potato crop which served as both their primary food source and their money in an agrarian barter economy. A million more Irish emigrants fled to Canada, New York City and Boston. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger is a good account of the famine.

Between those two poles of freedom and captivity are constraints and liberties. There are constraints of money, food and shelter, the basic needs of our survival. Sometimes those constraints reach extreme levels like the Irish experienced during the Great Famine. There are lesser constraints which make us feel as though we are trapped. We may feel captive to the indifference or incompetence of others, or frustrated by circumstances and rules that rob us of our capacity or autonomy.

We are accustomed to the temporary incapacity that an illness can bring. Some of us must endure autoimmune or degenerative diseases which permanently diminish our capacities. Alcoholics and drug addicts have inadvertently conditioned their bodies to crave a substance that keeps them trapped. They are both prisoner and warden, trapped in the walls of their physical need but holding the key of sobriety that will free them from their cell.

President Roosevelt cited four natural freedoms. Two of them are freedoms to do something, to speak freely and worship as we choose. The other two are freedoms from something, from want and fear. Liberties are freedoms of various degrees. To a teenager, freedom might be a car or some spending money. We may not be aware of a freedom until we lose it. There is a saying that good health is wasted on the young. Later in life, people realize that good health is a freedom that they took for granted.

In an ideal world, liberty and constraint should not be a zero sum game. Yet we often gain greater liberty at someone else’s constraint and sometimes without us being aware of it. Redlining was a euphemism for an official government policy adopted by the Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s. The agency drew up maps of urban areas which classified neighborhoods into four groups and was designed to keep racial groups separate. Areas where blacks and immigrants lived were marked as red, leading banks to deny mortgages or offer undesirable loan terms. People who lived in the more desirable green and blue neighborhoods did not want to be downgraded to yellow, indicating a declining area, because it affected their property values (Source). A constraint on some folks helped enhance the property values for other folks.

Another avenue I want to explore is trust. I think we tend to trust those who promise a freedom either from something or to something. We trust religious leaders who promise eternal salvation. For many of us, that is a freedom to and a freedom from. A journey to eternity and a relief from the burdens of this world. We trust healers of every sort because they promise us a freedom, a new capability or knowledge. They may promise a relief from the captivity of some emotional or physical pain. Now some of us may be very distrustful of most healers, but they proliferate because a sufficient number of people trust their message, their promise.

In the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan launched a Just Say No campaign, a companion to her husband President Reagan’s War on Drugs. Many Just Say No clubs opened but the overly simplistic message evoked scorn in some of the young people the campaign targeted. Today, organizations like the Center for Humane Technology expose the public to the manipulative design of social media algorithms (Source). The American Psychological Association has issued more caution than warning (Source). This month, Australia banned social media use by teenagers under the age of 16 (Source). The social media company Reddit quickly sued, claiming that the ban is an infringement on free speech (Source).

Do teens trust these warnings? Do their parents? If a 20-year old working at a coffee shop cannot remember my order for more than five seconds, is that because the consumption of social media from an early age has destroyed their ability to focus? Or is it just a boring job? Whose interpretation should I trust?

Each of walks around with our own custom designed measuring stick, our own scales that we build over a lifetime. We use those unique tools to evaluate what we see, what we read, what we experience. Many times we want to reach conclusions that are simple and definitive, but anything we measure is only distinct because of the scale we use. When 12 jurors try to reach a consensus in a murder trial using their different yardsticks of evidence and ethics, innocence and guilt, we understand the complexity of our different evaluation systems. Events occur within a context and each of us pays attention to different aspects of any context.

Some people are free of any doubts in their own judgment while others are trapped by their self-doubt, their lack of trust in their own judgment. For some, that distrust can be debilitating. Should I do that, we ask? Am I being too hasty? What if I am wrong? Am I not fully considering the repercussions of my preference? On and on, we weave a busy web of questions and doubts that keep us trapped. We may tell ourselves that those doubts keep us safe and perhaps they do sometimes.

Do we trust our judgment as we get older? The founders who wrote the Constitution believed so, that others could trust our judgment as we grew older. Article I stipulates a minimum age of 25 to represent a district in the House and 33 to represent a state in the Senate (Source). When it was drafted, James Madison, a primary architect of the Constitution, was only 36, barely old enough to run for President.

Politicians are particularly blind to their misjudgments. To run for office, they must overcome self-doubt. Some become masters of that ability. They work and live in circles of consensus nested within each other like Russian dolls and far removed from the common realities of the very people they represent. The party system preserves incumbency. Most members of Congress are re-elected and that gives representatives the false impression that they are in touch with their constituency.

In the decades since the 1950s, public trust in government has declined. In a 1958 National Elections Survey, 73% of Americans thought government did the right thing all or most of the time. Recent polls indicate only 17% of Americans feel the same way (Source). Election funding now relies less on public trust and more on donations from wealthy donors. In 2024, political action committees (PACs) accounted for 65% of election spending (Source). Some are of the traditional type, subject to donation and spending limits. Others are Super PACs, independent organizations that can spend unlimited amounts on advertising and election activities as long as they don’t coordinate those activities with a political candidate.

Since Johnson’s Great Society began in the mid-1960s, federal programs have benefitted millions of Americans but have created a society dependent on these programs. The programs and the politicians who promote them overpromise and underdeliver, leading many to question the sincerity of those in government. Because many American families are dependent on those programs they are susceptible to the promises of a political huckster.

The founders built checks and balances into the Constitution to restrain the representatives of the people. Instead, it is the public who is restrained by a political system that does not hold representatives accountable to their constituents. As the public loses trust in their political system, that creates an opening for a political group to assume power after campaigning on a promise of change. Their gain in power may come at a cost of more constraints on voters.

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Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

The Rusting of Trust

December 7, 2025December 6, 2025Leave a comment

December 7, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In Genesis 22 of the Old Testament, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham is about to make the sacrifice, an angel interrupts. Many commentators, among them the 19^th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, have discussed the ethics of Abraham’s actions (Source). This week I want to explore several aspects of asymmetrical relationships like that between God and Abraham, or between leaders and the people they govern. The first avenue is the question of honesty. God lied to Abraham as a test of his fealty. In making a sincere effort to comply with God’s request, Abraham was honest. In an asymmetric relationship, what are the ethics of those who hold more power in the relationship? Do public leaders owe any obligation of honesty to those they govern?

Related to the issue of honesty is the distinction between public and private. I want to explore the intersection of honesty and privacy. In our public relationships, when do we have an obligation to tell the truth? Is that obligation grounded in any ethics or does it simply reflect an imbalance in a power relationship? For instance, a witness in a criminal trial is subject to imprisonment and fines for lying under oath. It is the government who imposes that punishment because the government has more power in a relationship with each individual it governs. However, in such a case where a witness might implicate themselves in a crime, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides an escape clause. An individual can remain silent instead of lying.

The founders recognized that each of us has a private space, a private interest that must be balanced with the public interest. In a tribal society with strict rules of hierarchy and fealty, the Biblical tradition placed a higher value on obedience than to an individual’s self-interest. The Constitution was the product of Enlightenment thinking which placed greater emphasis on the individual.

Do we judge the actions of others by their intent or by the outcome of their action? Our system of justice considers the motivations of people in the commission of a crime and at sentencing for those who have been found guilty of a crime. Most of us do not hold the executioner responsible for the death of a prisoner legally condemned to death. They are simply acting in their official capacity as an agent of the government.

At the inauguration ceremony, a newly elected President takes an oath to “protect and defend the Constitution” (Source). Unlike a witness, a President’s oath does not include telling the truth. Believing that he was keeping the American people safe from further terrorist attack, former President George Bush ordered an invasion into Iraq that led to the death of many hundreds of thousands (Source). He acted on authorization from Congress (Source) but without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council (Source). Many leaders honestly believe they are protecting their community, or furthering the interests of the community when they act.

In 2006, a Gallup poll found that Americans were almost evenly split on whether the war was morally justified. A majority of 60% thought the war was not worth the cost. A slight majority held the Bush administration responsible for misleading the public about the presence of WMDs, the primary pretext for the war (Source). Are leaders responsible for the consequences of their actions if those decisions were based on an honest belief that they were necessary? In January 2003, Gallup polls found that a large majority of Americans thought that Iraq might be hiding nuclear weapons (Source).

Does an honest belief in something excuse any action, no matter how heinous the consequences? Early 19^th century Americans believed that God ordained the dominion of the continent by white Christian settlers, a policy called Manifest Destiny (Source). Did that belief justify the taking of many Indian tribal lands and the killing of many unarmed civilian Indians?

In a democracy, a duly elected leader is believed to be the voice of the people, which gives him legitimacy to act for the people as a whole. Many European monarchs based the legitimacy of their office on primogeniture, the belief that a ruler was divinely ordained by birth. Does either belief system convey more legitimacy? In the 18^th century, the 13 colonies declared their separation in the Declaration of Independence. The document challenged the legitimacy of the English monarch’s rule because of his actions, which were listed in the declaration (Source). As Jay Winik notes in his book The Great Upheaval the founders were at the forefront of an Enlightenment movement that overturned the belief in divinely ordained rulers (Source).

Do honestly held beliefs justify the actions of our leaders? The Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was an apocalyptic battle between two political ideologies, democracy and communism. In 1954, President Eisenhower introduced an idea labeled the Domino Theory (Source). This was a belief that, if one country fell to communist rule, its neighbors would soon follow, as though a political ideology were contagious. Based on that belief, President Johnson ordered an escalation of the war in Vietnam, a small country with no geopolitical effect on the United States. That escalation led to the deaths of more than 58,000 American soldiers and many hundreds of thousands of civilians (Source).

While newspapers champion the truth, they feed on controversy, on opposing beliefs and opinions. If we all have the same opinion on an issue, its not newsworthy. In pursuit of controversy, they may give attention to those with marginal opinions or colorful characters. In 2015, many newspapers treated Donald Trump as a rich eccentric who attracted an audience. When he declared his candidacy, the press gave him a lot of airtime because his interviews boosted their ratings. Trump espoused marginal conspiracy theories but did he really believe that Barack Obama had not been born in the U.S. or that all immigrants were criminals? Rather than delegitimizing the beliefs underlying the conspiracy theories, the media helped promote them. Beliefs are contagious, after all.

Mass media companies are part of private industry but many Americans regard them as public utilities. They think the network and cable channels have a public responsibility to expose corruption, state the facts without political spin and act as a watchdog on public institutions and other private companies. That is a tall order for a private company whose first responsibility is to its shareholders. Given such high expectations, it is understandable that a recent Gallup poll found that only 28% of Americans express any trust in mass media. In 1976, after the Watergate scandal, 72% of the public had a “great deal or fair amount” of trust in mass media (Source). Have public expectations exceeded the capacity of the private media industry? Is the media less objective today than it was fifty years ago?

Americans have even less trust in Congress with only 15% approving the job they are doing (Source). A lack of belief in an institution often leads to the demise of that institution. For the past decade, the influence and profits of mass media has declined. The industry has shrunk and consolidated. Private industry may respond to the changing beliefs of the public, but public institutions like Congress are resistant to public sentiment. The members of Congress may change, but only a civil war can abolish the institution itself.

Because government institutions are resistant to change, libertarians prefer a minimum of such institutions. At their founding, the legitimacy of political institutions is grounded in the public will or welfare. Their capacity to have an influence on individual lives, however, is based on the police power of the government. They no longer express the will of the people, but enforce the will of a small minority within the people. While professing to serve the public interest, they often serve the interests of its leaders. Members of Congress have little accountability outside of Congress until election time. Of the many who have served in the past few decades, only have a few have been convicted and served time (Source).

Company leaders, on the other hand, are held responsible by tax, accounting and fraud laws. That sense of accountability leads to greater public trust in private industry. An annual poll by Bentley University and Gallup finds that 65% of Americans believe that businesses have a positive impact on people’s lives (Source). When Americans have so little trust in our political institutions, their expectations diminish. They become callous to the ineffectiveness of Congress to enact any meaningful change in their lives.

Instead, they came to rely on a Presidential candidate who was a private businessman like Donald Trump, an outsider to the political arena. When he promised to lower grocery and oil prices, a majority of voters believed him. Now that voters see out false those claims were, they have become disillusioned. They have realized that Trump is almost as ineffective as Congress. Lots of hot air, no results.

Like belief, trust is private to each individual. Like belief, trust is contagious. The public trust is the sum of private trust. As trust decreases, everyone looks only to their advantage. Strategy, not ethics or convention, rules. The public will is subordinated to private ambition. How do we reinvigorate that trust?

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Photo by NADER AYMAN on Unsplash

Ingredients of a Good Society

November 30, 2025November 29, 2025Leave a comment

November 30, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

Seated around the table this Thanksgiving week were several generations, Boomers, GenX, Millennials and Zoomers. Here is a list of generational cohorts and the span of their birth years (Source). Some Boomers reminisced about rock groups and concerts they had been to in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The names might have been vaguely familiar to the late Millennials and Zoomers. The younger folks talked about video games and music groups that were barely familiar to the old timers there. One younger person had repetitive motion syndrome, like an arthritis in their thumb from overuse of a game controller. The Boomers at the table had the arthritis of old age, unable to bend a thumb into a 90 degree angle.

The multi-generational gathering prompted me to look at the world through the lens of age, from the young to the old. As we grow up, we borrow money for a car, a vacation, higher education or a house. The source of those funds is the savings of older workers and retired people. As we reach middle age, we become keenly aware of our future financial security. Our social contract is an intergenerational compact, a churning of money between the generations. Money helps support our sense of security and I thought security would be a good second avenue of exploration.

We don’t get to choose our birth parents, our country or time of birth. All of us are fragile at birth, but some of us are born into fragile circumstances. Our country may be at war or suffering political instability. Our community or home may be violent. Perhaps our parents are poor or homeless. One or both parents may have a mental illness or a drug addiction. We grow up in an environment of fear and anger, then absorb that into our personality, our soul. Or we may be born into a stable home and community where fear and anxiety is not the background music to our daily lives.

Professional athletes test the boundaries of their sense of security. They develop strength, stamina and skills by extending their comfort zone. By repeatedly taking chances, they learn to use their fear as a preparation for competition. When a top athlete starts fighting the fear instead of using it, they can’t compete at the highest levels. They are competing with their own fear instead of another athlete.

In his book Leviathan, the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) wrote that the instinct for survival was an essential characteristic of human temperament. Government was an artificial creature created by society as a means of security in an “every man for himself” world. For that security, we traded away some of our individual freedom, reaching a delicate compromise between security and freedom. In ancient Mesopotamian lore, the Leviathan was a sea serpent that attacked sailing ships (Source). I like to think that Hobbes chose that mythical creature to symbolize the danger inherent in a sovereign government. It is not a benign force in our lives, but the lesser evil.

This is in stark contrast to another 17^th century philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704), who saw government as the instantiation of a social contract. Government was a protector, a guarantor of natural rights. These two different perspectives of government shape the policy choices we favor. Libertarians think government should be a peacekeeper, a security broker between all the elements in society. It should be a keeper of the commons, the public institutions that connect us and guard both our internal and external security. It should facilitate the economic exchange between local regions, between people and companies as we provide for our daily needs. It should protect and enforce the sanctity of contract that supports that economic exchange.

Liberals favor a far more expansive role for government as the embodiment of the social contract. Even the word security has a broad meaning that encompasses far more than physical protection from harm. On his annual State of the Union speech on January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt articulated four freedoms, one of which was a freedom from want. As Roosevelt saw it, government had a responsibility to provide some economic and health security to its citizens. These two visions of the boundaries of a government’s responsibility underlie much of the Congressional combat we read about each day.

Hobbes was alive in 1648 when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and established state sovereignty within the Holy Roman Empire. To maintain its sovereignty, or self-governance within its territory, a state must manage the flow of people and goods across the borders of it territory. We do not choose our country of birth but we can choose to flee that country if political and economic circumstances threaten the security of ourselves or our family. Do immigrants have a natural right to live in a safe and flourishing environment wherever they choose? Immigrants can challenge a country’s management of its borders and in doing so, challenge its sovereignty and security.

A state cannot live by the same principles as people. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1785) wrote that people were autonomous individuals with an intrinsic worth and in pursuit of their own purposes. Even though we interact with people in limited roles during the course of our daily exchange, we should respect their autonomy and dignity and not regard people merely as tools. In international relations, a liberal perspective wants states to abide by that Kantian principle.

States are not people, living in a society where a government provides some security. States live in the dog eat dog world that Hobbes imagined, a state of anarchy where each state must be on guard against threats from other states. That is the realist perspective in international relations. To protect their autonomy, sovereignty and capacity, they must occasionally act in a ruthless manner. During war, states draft men in their late teens and twenties, taking disproportionately from some families and not others. Is that fair? The key to survival is surviving, not fairness.

If their parents cannot bring them enough food, then eagle chicks will kill their siblings to increase their share of food. Is that fair? No. Is it moral? No. Without morality, there can be no dignity. Kant simply posited an inherent dignity to each individual, a fait accompli. Even though they lived at different times, I imagine that Hobbes would have been dubious of such a claim. Dignity is not inherent but ensured by a government that makes and enforces rules. I imagine that Locke would have countered Hobbes by arguing that governing by cooperation works better than intimidation. That requires a consensus among the individuals of society who recognize the benefits of the tradeoff between security and freedom. The debate is a constant tug of war between different visions and principles.

Young states are vulnerable to threats from more established states. Their political, military and bureaucratic systems are not fully developed and tested. The newborn United States was mindful of the threats posed by older European powers like England, France and Spain as well as the native Indians. In a major revision to the 1776 Articles of Confederation that bound the 13 colonies into a United States, the Constitution, drafted in 1787, gave the office of the President a lot of power to counter those threats. Many Presidents, including President Trump, have tested the boundaries of that power. Rarely have the other two branches of government offered so little resistance. All of the generations sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table were worried about that.

Compromise is at the heart of the Chinese notion of the interaction between yin and yang. Freedom and security are like that, ever searching for a balance. Too much of one results in too little of the other. Each lifetime contains about four generations with different priorities. They must reach a political compromise but can never reach a satisfactory compromise that satisfies those different priorities. I hope everyone had a good holiday and I will see you next week.

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Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash

The Bounded and Boundless

November 23, 2025November 22, 2025Leave a comment

November 23, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

I forget how old I was when I learned that there were numbers between the numbers, that 1.333 was between 1 and 2, for example. We lived on the east coast near the ocean. Learning that there were more decimals between 1 and 2 than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world astounded me. A brush with infinity. My dad worked for Lockheed Aircraft doing sheet metal fabrication and worked with decimals all day. “The prices in the grocery store are simple decimals,” he told me. “Take away the dollar sign and you have a decimal.” To me, it was a revelation, a connection between what we learned in school and the adult world outside school. Math was a skill, a mind tool.

This week I want to examine two axes. The first is an axis of countability, from discrete to continuous. The concept is familiar to students in computer science, math and statistics, but I want to use that axis to help me understand some philosophical and historical ideas. Discrete data is countable, like the number of students in a class. Continuous data is not countable, like a person’s height. At first, this might seem confusing, because we do measure height. Parents may mark their children’s increasing height on a door jamb, but those are marks we make of a continuous process of growth.

Like the marks of height on a door jamb, I want to contrast countable things as they appear in a continuous field of related data. For instance, we can count the number of days but time itself is continuous. We can always discover a smaller unit of time until we get to Planck time, the smallest unit of time current theory allows us to count (Source). We borrow money for a car. We can count that, but we can’t count the use of that car, the utility we will get from the car.

Most of us are familiar with the drawing of the Mandelbrot fractal that I included at the beginning of this essay. At first glance, the protuberances or spikes on the blob seem countable and the image seems defined, but as I zoom in, I see that the Mandelbrot fractal is replicated inside of each protuberance. I can keep zooming in and the fractal appears much like it did when I was zoomed out.

At the opposite ends of another axis are law and custom. Laws and regulations are defined rules. We can identify when a law was made, a regulation written. Customs, on the other hand, are behaviors and understandings that evolve over time. Marriage and funeral ceremonies help bind a community together. Trading goods and services helps us manage our daily needs. As a society becomes more organized, these customs become institutions. People write laws to codify the customs.

A law becomes law on a certain date using a specific number of words. It has definition like a whole number, but the meaning of that law is not so definite, like the real numbers that lie between the whole numbers. In a 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court struck down an old Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives by married couples and forbade medical personnel from providing information about birth control. The decision was based on a right to privacy not explicitly stated but contained within the “penumbra” of the guarantees of several amendments to the Constitution (Source).

Justices and scholars of different persuasions liked the result of the decision but not the reasoning. Former Justice Ginsburg thought the justification was too vague and that the court should not have restricted the right of privacy only to married coupled. She thought that the court should have based its decision on the equality principle in the 14^th Amendment (Source). In a 1992 case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v Casey, the majority of the Supreme Court held that the right to privacy had a better grounding in the 5^th Amendment’s Due Process clause (Source).

Conservative justices who favor textual analysis do not like penumbras. They favor a just the text approach as though the text of a law provided some definite boundaries that separated the judiciary from the legislature. Sometimes the text of the law gets in the way of a desired conclusion and a textual analysis simply ignores the text as Justice Scalia did in the 2008 Heller decision. His reasoning dismissed a third of the words in the Second Amendment and overturned two centuries of law and custom. A law and its interpretation often follow separate but related paths.

Textualist justices prefer a narrow interpretation of the word liberty in the 5^th and 14^th Amendments. Richard Epstein (2014, p. 323) disagrees, making a case for an interpretation of liberty to include a broad liberty of contract. What does that mean? We enter informal contracts when we buy and sell goods in the marketplace. We enter employment contracts when we begin working for an employer. We enter a contract when we get married. He advocates limits on government intruding on these liberties which are grounded in custom, in the very nature of being human.

Last week I wrote about many of the variables that economists must infer from the data. Many of these inferred variables are rates, like the natural rate of interest, or a potential rate of growth, or a natural rate of unemployment. In these cases, the word “natural” is used as Adam Smith and other people of the 18^th century used the word, as usual, common or average. If an unemployment rate averages 5% over ten years, that 5% becomes a benchmark. Economists focus on any deviations above and below that benchmark. The 5% is like a pencil line on a door jamb to mark a child’s growth. Each month personnel at the Bureau of Labor Statistics try to estimate unemployment but it is only an estimate, a mark within a continuous process. People leave jobs and start new jobs every minute of the day.

The economist John Maynard Keynes attributed the business cycle to an imbalance of “animal spirits.” While this sounds very much like Galen’s medical theory involving humors, Keynes recognized that investor sentiment is a continuous process. We can mark the day that the stock market dropped 10%, for example, but that is a discrete event that occurred within a field of investor sentiment. Because sentiment is continuous, it does not suddenly turn unless in reaction to an act of war or some other catastrophic event. When sentiment reaches a particular threshold, investors buy or sell. They react to the buy and sell decisions of other investors. The buying and selling are discrete events but the animal spirits that provoke those events is continuous.

What are discrete customs or cultural institutions? Rituals or holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving come to mind. A people or a culture define the beginning and end of a holiday period. If it is May 10, it is not Christmas. What is continuous is the preparations for Christmas. Shortly after Christmas, stores begin to plan for the following Christmas. First comes the analysis of what was sold and not sold, the excess inventory or items out of stock during the holiday season. Was there a problem with the displays, the layout of the store or the merchandise? Were customers not directed properly to popular items? Did the store managers misjudge the popularity of some items? Were there problems with the wholesale distributors? Once again, we see a discrete event like Christmas operating in a field of continuous activity.

We can count the letters of the alphabet like we can count whole numbers. We use ten symbols like 1, 2, 3 and so on, adding to them and rearranging them to count to infinity. We have 26 letters and we can do the same as we did with numbers, adding letters to form the names of columns in a spreadsheet or words in a book. The letters and numbers are symbols, formed by darkening some of the points of a page that has an uncountable number of points. Again, we see this phenomenon of the defined, like the number 1, as little more than a mark in a field of white that is not countable.

Historians study events, marking their beginnings and endings with other events. World War 2 began when Hitler invaded Poland and ended when he committed suicide as the Soviet army entered Berlin, the capital of Germany. Like a law, the interpretation of a war defies easy analysis because war emerges from a continuous stream of perceived injustices, human vanities and vices. This provides a deep pool of research material for historians as they try to unravel the causal threads before, during and after a war.

We define people, animals, plants and things with a set of facts that act as a boundary. Anatomically, a horse has four legs, and a long head, and long legs, and one hoof per leg, and so on. Like the drawing books we had as kids, these facts are the dots, the boundaries of the definition of a horse. But that doesn’t answer the question What makes a horse? Those are amorphous qualities that each of us might see differently. Gentleness, agreeableness, patience and pluckiness come to mind. A horse is its well defined physicality and its less defined qualities, as well as the feelings that a horse evokes in me.

I began this essay with a story from grade school. Finally I jumped off the philosophical cliff, concluding that everything that is bounded swims in a pool of the boundless. Everything that exists is an instantiation of a continuous process, an emergence from some sequence of circumstances. What do you think? Have a good turkey day and I hope to see you next week!

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Photo by Shino Nakamura on Unsplash

Epstein, R. A. (2014). The classical liberal constitution: The uncertain quest for limited government. Harvard University Press.

Mainstream Science

November 16, 2025November 15, 2025Leave a comment

November 16, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

After conducting many animal dissections, William Harvey (1628) published his conclusions that the circulatory system was a closed circuit of blood pumped throughout the body by the heart. For centuries, physicians had clung to the centuries-old Galenic theory that the liver continued to produce new blood which the tissues absorbed. In Galen’s schema, disease was an imbalance of four humors. Bloodletting and purging were common therapies that physicians employed to restore the humoral balance.

Harvey’s findings had little effect on medical practice. Two hundred years later, physicians still used bloodletting as a therapy, often weakening the patient enough that they succumbed to their illness and died. Several years after he left office as the first President, George Washington developed a sore throat. Bloodletting and purging only worsened his condition and he died on December 14, 1799, two days after developing the sore throat (Source).

This week I want to explore two axes. On one end of the first axis is empirical and experimental knowledge, the stuff of science. On the other end of that same axis is knowledge based on intuition, logic and reason, the arena of metaphysics. On the second axis lie the concepts of what is accepted as mainstream and what is regarded as fringe. Sometimes, people on the fringe celebrate their uniqueness. Other times, they want to capture the mainstream, to convince others that their ideas and values are more widely held.

The separation between the empirical and the metaphysical is not so distinct. Personal experience is the least reliable evidence yet we trust it the most. Washington preferred bloodletting because it had worked for him before. Because many common ills like colds and sore throats are self-limiting, it is easy for us to give credence to a happenstance correlation between treatment and recovery. This is how we cling to superstitions.

If I wore a rabbit’s foot on a necklace for a week and got over my cold, then I might reason that the rabbit’s foot was the cause of my recovery. I might even theorize that the fur absorbed the bad humors from my chest. A baseball player who breaks out of a batting slump one day may wear the same set of socks for days afterward, convinced that it was the socks that helped him break the slump.

Washington’s personal experience seemed to confirm Galen’s theory of the humors and bloodletting was still a mainstream remedy among physicians in the 18^th century (Source). We tend to trust anecdotal evidence or our own experience before we trust experimental studies and impersonal statistics. In Washington’s time, bloodletting therapy was common sense. How scientific is common sense? It may have evolved from a common experience, or common superstition, prejudice or belief. Superstition, rumors and conspiracy theories appeal to all of these elements.

Sickness as an imbalance of humors progressed to an understanding that there were objective agents that caused diseases. Fifty-five years after Washington’s death, John Snow used statistical data gathering and analysis to establish the source of a cholera outbreak in London. The cause was not an imbalance of humors but the Broad Street water pump which was contaminated. Snow could not identify the contaminant but through sheer statistics alone did identify the source (Source). Seven years later, in 1861, Louis Pasteur published his germ theory of disease, which sparked a revolution in medical practice and investigation (Source). In the 1880s, Robert Koch showed that there were specific microbes that caused specific diseases (Source). By 1900, Galen’s theory of humors had passed from the mainstream to the fringe.

The cause of ulcers is a theory that went from the fringe to the mainstream in less than twenty years. Throughout the 20^th century, doctors thought peptic stomach ulcers were a lifestyle disease, caused by spicy food, smoking, drinking, stress, and acid. In the early 1980s, Robin Warren, an Australian pathologist, noticed bacteria in biopsies of stomach ulcers. Together with Barry Marshall, a clinician, they developed a hypothesis that the bacterium H. Pylori caused peptic ulcers. To demonstrate the truth of their hypothesis, Marshall drank a solution containing H. Pylori, developed gastritis, then took some antibiotics and was cured (Source). Had Warren and Marshall been from a prominent university or hospital in the U.S. or Europe, their idea might have won over the skeptics. Scientists may use rational methods but are prey to the same irrational biases as the rest of us. By 1994, the U.S. National Institute of Health confirmed the hypothesis and recommended antibiotic therapy. Two years later, the American College of Gastroenterology formally adopted the therapy and pharmaceutical companies began making an antibiotic package to treat peptic ulcers.

For two hundred years after Harvey proposed his model of blood circulation, physicians clung to Galen’s old theory because it explained the cause of disease. Harvey and subsequent researchers presented evidence to question Galen’s theory of humors, but did not propose a replacement theory of disease. Warren and Marshall offered both evidence and a replacement theory to explain the development of ulcers. In ten years, physicians began to accept their replacement theory. Merely discrediting a mainstream theory is not enough to get people and practitioners to abandon the theory. Offering a challenging replacement helps win acceptance.

Vaccine skeptics like Robert Kennedy offer a speculative correlation in a small number of the millions of vaccinated children as evidence to discredit the safety of vaccines. They offer no alternative theory, only a rejection of mainstream theory and a belief in the power of their own skepticism. Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) was an influential scientist in Soviet Russia. He rejected mainstream theories like Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection, believing that crops could be “trained” to produce higher yields. He convinced the Stalin regime to ban the teaching of mainstream theories of genetics. Farmers were forced to adopt Lysenko’s methods, which led to catastrophic crop failures and starvation in the 1940s and 1950s.

We believe that our beliefs and skepticism protect us. I may believe that I will go to heaven when I die or that there are angels living among us here on earth. For centuries, people of all races, cultures and continents have believed in gods. Michael Jordan’s Encyclopedia of Gods (1993) lists more than 2500 deities. There are fringe gods and mainstream gods. Gods become mainstream when a people impose their beliefs on others through force. Soldiers may call on their god to strengthen their hand as they go into battle. It is difficult to impose a scientific theory on a population. When it has been tried, as in the case of Lysenko, the results have been disastrous.

Until the latter part of the 19^th century, medicine had many metaphysical components. It was more an evolving philosophy than a science. The study of economics shares those shortcomings. It doesn’t speak of a balance of humors, but a balance of forces. Students are taught supply and demand as curves on a graph. Students learn which factors and events increase or decrease these two forces, causing the curves to shift left or shift right. Mathematical models employ variables that can only be inferred, like consumer utility and preferences. Later on students are introduced to other shadowy variables like the natural rate of interest, potential GDP, total factor productivity, inflation expectations, the non-accelerating rate of inflation (NAIRU) and many more.

We know people have expectations and preferences but we can’t measure them directly. One day consumers might wear a headband that measures brain activity. Something like a large Apple watch. It will be stylish, of course. When a person picks a product from the shelf, the band will measure a utility spike in their frontal cortex and a preference wave in the limbic area of their brain. Maybe one day. Until then, economists must guess and infer those variables.

Unlike the physical sciences, economics students do not engage in the gathering of data. Biology students learn about nerve conduction by actually triggering a leg movement in frogs. A physics student learns about the properties of gases in a lab. An economics student does not go out to stores to gather prices for the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price index. They do not survey employers to gather data on employee turnover, nor do they interview households to learn about their finances or employment situation. Economics students are primarily students in metaphysics, not science. Without any hands on learning, many economics students do not connect with the subject in a concrete manner.

The distinction between science and religion might be clear. The physical and metaphysical. What about economics and psychology? Each studies human behavior, which can’t be dissected. Human beings may change their behavior when observed. Human beings may report their behavior incorrectly to researchers or lie to protect their dignity. Any experiments must avoid deliberate cruelty. These disciplines lie in the space between the pure physical sciences and religion.

Categorization helps us identify shared characteristics and those that are different. We often find it convenient to put discrete labels on people, institutions, and theories. Often, I begin these examinations with some clear distinctions in mind. As I move along a particular axis of inquiry, I uncover complexities that I had not thought of previously. I learn a bit more about the world and myself as I follow these explorations. Hope to see you next week!

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Photo by Monika MG on Unsplash

Harvey, W. (1993). On the motion of the heart and blood in animals (R. Willis, Trans.). Prometheus Books. (Original work published 1628).

Jordan, M. (1993). Encyclopedia of Gods: Over 2,500 Deities of the World (hardcover ed.). Facts on File.

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