Month: November 2025

Ingredients of a Good Society

Leave 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 17th 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.

/////////////////////

Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash

The Bounded and Boundless

Leave 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 14th 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 5th 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 5th and 14th 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 18th 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!

//////////////////

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

Leave 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 18th 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 20th 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 19th 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!

////////////////////

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.

The Rights of Persons

Leave a comment

November 9, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Illinois’ incumbent Senator Judge Stephen Douglas. From mid-August to mid-September, the two candidates held a series of seven debates. The main focus of those debates was whether slavery should be expanded into the new territories to the west. In the first debate, a crowd of more than 10,000 stood for more than two hours in the hot, dry weather (Source).

Lincoln aimed for the loyalties of those in the audience who were in the middle between two strong positions. There were the outright abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper. Prominent proponents of slavery were South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who thought that slavery had helped the negro achieve “a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually” (Source). Lincoln cautioned that he did not espouse “political and social equality between the white and black races,” and that he did not want to “interfere with the institution of Slavery in the states where it exists.”

Lincoln argued that negroes were entitled to “all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The crowd cheered his sentiment. Lincoln granted that the two races, black and white, might not be equal in “moral or intellectual endowment,” but that a negro had an equal right to “eat the bread … which his own hand earns.” The crowd enthusiastically agreed.

This week I want to look at two axes, personhood and rights. We can categorize persons into two categories, natural and artificial. We can categorize rights as natural, or human, and political.

Let me start with personhood. What distinguishes an artificial and a natural person? We might say that the first category are those entities created by law. They have agency like human beings. At first glance, religious doctrine might easily separate natural and artificial persons. Natural persons have souls. Artificial persons do not. But wait, does God have a soul? God is soul so of course, He does. So is God a natural person? But God was not born of a woman. Ah, but Jesus was. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas was the first to try to resolve the contradictions between Aristotelian logic and the Christian faith. No wonder the Supreme Court does not want to directly handle the topic of personhood.

Let’s turn to a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the three persons of the Trinity? Are they natural or artificial persons? The doctrine was not fully formalized and decreed until the First Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. (Source). So we might expand our criteria for artificial persons to include those created by law, or decree. Since men have dominated our political and religious institutions for many centuries, we can say that artificial persons are those created by men. Natural persons are those created, or birthed by a woman.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the history of the personhood of corporations, a status granted not by Congress or the Constitution, but by the Supreme Court’s acceptance of a lie (Source). In an 1819 case Dartmouth College v Woodward, the Supreme Court decided that the New Hampshire legislature could not amend a colonial charter made before the United States came into existence. Dartmouth was a private corporation and enjoyed the protections of the contracts clause in the Constitution (Source). In the early 1820s, Google Ngram viewer shows that the use of the word “corporation” spiked as investors rushed to take advantage of this court interpretation (Source).

A corporation cannot vote, run for office, or get married. They do not enjoy a Second Amendment right, nor are they protected against self-incrimination by the Fifth Amendment (Source). However, the courts have granted them many other rights specified in the Bill of Rights. These include the First, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments (Source). These are political rights, not human rights.

In a 2014 article published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Brandon Garrett, a Professor of Law at the U. of Virginia School of Law, noted that the court has not offered any theory as to why corporations have some Constitutional rights like human beings but not others (Source, pg. 4). The court has indicated that some rights are exclusively personal, but has not wanted to address the question of what distinguishes a person. If some rights are personal, then the court has implicitly decided that some political rights are natural while others are not. What are some of the differences between the two sets of rights and where do they intersect?

Lincoln argued that people of all races had some basic rights in common. One of these was the right to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We can trace that to John Locke, who argued that God himself had commanded that Adam till the land for his survival (Genesis 3:23). In Two Treatises, he wrote “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it” (Source, p. 7)

Do corporations have a right to the fruits of their own labor? No, those fruits, or profits, belong to the shareholders of the corporation. Both slaves and corporations are owned, bought and sold as capital. Eighteenth and 19th century advocates of slavery argued that wage earners were little different than slaves and enjoyed less security than slaves. They deliberately muddied the difference between buying a worker’s labor and buying the worker himself.

A worker can alienate, or separate himself from his labor. A key principle of natural rights like those declared in the Declaration of Independence is that people cannot separate themselves from those rights. They are integral to a human being. Political rights given to human beings may be derived from those natural rights. If a person has a natural right to liberty, then they have a right to free speech as long as that speech does not cause immediate harm to others.

Artificial persons have no integral natural rights. They may enjoy certain political rights but those political rights can never be derived from natural rights. A corporation may enjoy certain liberties under contract law, but contract law is constructed by governing bodies. With a nod to their own self-preservation, artificial persons must be more politically active than human beings. Corporations are keenly aware that any rights they do enjoy have no philosophical or ethical foundations. They must act in their own self-interest, lobby and cajole to gain and protect their rights.

In finance, business and politics, we distinguish between agent and principal. If an LLM were trained only on the writing of one person, would it be an agent of that person or an extension of that person? If that LLM were to make public threats on social media against a government official, could the FBI arrest the person as a threat? Probably not. We still treat AI as a tool, not as a person. Could that change?

Earlier I said that natural persons were created or birthed by a woman. Some claim that God creates human beings. Women are the vessel of that creative spark, the conduit between the eternal world of God and the temporary world here on earth. Based on that belief, anti-abortionists blur the distinctions between a zygote, the single cell formed from the union of sperm and egg, and a human being living separately outside the body of its mother. In their view, the zygote is a person.

People often bestow a sense of person on their pets. They may feel a greater closeness, a sense of intimacy, with their pets than they do with their own family members. Some animal rights activists do advocate for pet personhood, a recognition that animals have rights to more than a protection from inhumane treatment.

People often treat their claims and beliefs as fact, especially if they are surrounded by others who hold the same beliefs. In an article published this week in Nature Machine Intelligence, Mirac Suzgun et al (2025) found that AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have difficulty separating beliefs from facts. An AI reading the phrase “I believe that the world is 6000 years old” may inform young Johnny of that fact when he uses an AI to help him with his homework. We call such statements from an AI a “hallucination” but when a human being makes the same statement, we call it a “belief.” Why? We treat a computer as a machine. We treat a human being, no matter how deluded, as a person.

If an LLM can confuse opinion and facts just like a human being, is an LLM a person? We might scoff at the idea but many people scoff at the idea that corporations are treated as persons under the Constitution and the law. If an AI model demonstrates thoughtful intent, a key characteristic of a human being, is that model a person? If an LLM were to learn and copy all the flaws and virtues of humanity, to show mercy as well as aggression, is it a person?

If an LLM with access to weapons controls hurt other people or disabled other LLMs to protect itself, it it a person? This was the subject of a 1968 Star Trek episode, The Ultimate Computer (Source).Dr. Daystrom has built a supercomputer, called the M-5, to automate the functions on a starship. Dr. Daystrom has become so intimate with the reasoning of the computer he built that he thinks of it as his son. When the M-5 starts acting strangely during war game exercises, it becomes a real threat to human beings. Dr. Daystrom tries to prevent the members of the Starship Enterprise from destroying his creation, defending the computer as though it were part of his own flesh and blood.

Will we become so attached to our AI companions that we defend their rights as we defend our own? An AI synthesizes human thoughts and ideas, but a person is more than thoughts and ideas. A person who is brain dead but kept alive by extraordinary means is still regarded as a natural person because biological processes continue until the time of death.

I keep coming back to the question of what are the distinguishing characteristics of a person. A natural person must pass many more tests than an artificial person. Therefore, a natural person should have many more political rights than an artificial person like a corporation. I hope that AI introduces so many conflicts in legal reasoning that the courts eventually revisit their jurisprudence and decide that artificial persons do not have First Amendment rights.

//////////////////////////

Image by ChatGPT

Suzgun, M., Gur, T., Bianchi, F. et al. Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact. Nat Mach Intell (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01113-8

Freedom and Tolerance

Leave a comment

November 2, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In 1776, the 13 American colonies declared independence from Britain. The entire first half of that Declaration was very much a proclamation of freedom. The second half was a declaration of grievances against the King of England. Many colonists had grown intolerant of the king’s ‘usurpations,’ an unlawful taking under the cloak of authority (Source). The word is unfamiliar to modern readers, but the protection against the taking of private property is enshrined in the Fifth’s Amendment’s final clause, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” (Source). The 56 signers to the Declaration of Independence argued most over this second half of the declaration, for it was their justification for rebellion. They hoped to win the sympathies of European countries, particularly the French in the long feud between England and France.

This week I want to focus on two ideas as axes of analysis, freedom and tolerance. The two seem to have an inverse relationship. As the colonists felt more empowered to claim their freedom, they became less tolerant of the crown’s impositions. It’s not clear to me which is the more powerful force, the intolerance or the thirst for more freedom. The colonists had to pay taxes to support the soldiers and administration that kept them in line. Only in Connecticut and Rhode Island did the colonists elect their governors (Source). Colonial governors appointed by the king often overruled the wishes of popularly elected assemblies. The colonists wanted more autonomy.

In his book Leviathan, the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) wrote that we exchange some freedom for security in what would otherwise be a raw state of nature, an “every man for himself” kind of world. The book, published in 1651, justified a monarchy to preserve the peace between members of a civil society. More than a century later, the colonists asked themselves how much freedom they had to give up for that security. They had reached the end of their tolerance.

We speak of the colonists as they shared a single sentiment but that was not the case. Americans have always been divided about important issues. Writing almost 40 years after the Declaration, John Adams (1856), our second President after George Washington, recalled that a third of the people favored independence, a third were more favorable to England and a third were neutral. Robert Calhoon (2000), a scholar of American Loyalists, estimated a smaller percentage, perhaps 15 – 20%, favored the crown.

We are less tolerant of encroachments on our own freedoms than on the freedoms of others. The generation that wrote and ratified the Constitution exemplified that principle. In 1787, thirty-nine delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution. As many as half of them had owned slaves during their lifetime, including Washington and Madison. Jefferson praised the sanctity of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration but owned almost 200 slaves which he listed in his Farm Book (Source). A case of ‘liberty for me, not for thee’?

People are less free when they are poor or in a minority with less opportunity. They may sometimes act with an air of intolerance, but their income constrains their freedom. They must navigate many social and economic obstacles that stretch their tolerance capacity. Joanna Burke (2014) recalls the thinking among 18th and 19th century physicians that laborers and colonized people felt less pain than those of more refined socio-economic status. Their bodies were hardened by deprivation and needed less care so that they were able to withstand the harsh working conditions of 19th century industrialization.

People with lots of money can afford to be less tolerant of inconveniences. They enjoy a lot of freedom; some test the tolerance of those around them. Leona Helmsley (1920 – 2007) was a rich real estate and hotel owner who was known as the “Queen of Mean” for her harsh treatment of employees. In 1987, she was convicted of tax fraud but served only 18 months of a four-year sentence (Source). In testimony, she was quoted as saying, “Only the little people pay taxes.” Others with enormous wealth and freedom cannot tolerate the misery that afflicts the less fortunate. Through his foundation, Bill Gates has donated many billions to improve the health of those living in poor countries.

In its 2008 decision District of Columbia v Heller, a divided Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment was an individual right to bear arms. The decision overruled more than a century of jurisprudence that the right to bear arms was circumscribed by an individual’s service in a state militia (Source). In extending a wider range of freedom to some individuals, the court ruled that the burden of tolerance is on the majority of individuals that do not own guns (Source).

Why do we tolerate some actions from one person but not from another person? We tolerate lies from a political candidate we favor but not from a candidate of the other party. Trump is a practiced liar, a smooth operator with little loyalty to any facts. Supporters are accustomed to his exaggerations and fabrications. They tolerate his lies. He has an army of lawyers who protect him from legal responsibility for his actions. His lawyers include the conservatives on the Supreme Court who gave him immunity for “official acts” in the 2024 opinion in Trump v United States (Source).

Donald Trump acknowledges few boundaries to his behavior. His entire goal may be to test the tolerance of the American people and the world. He is truly free. His supporters, many of them bent by the burden of uncomfortable socio-economic truths, cheer Donald Trump on because he has escaped. In Ken Kesey’s novel and movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we cheer on Chief Bromden, who tosses a piece of equipment through the window of a mental institution and escapes. To some, Trump is the hero who has escaped the bounds of convention. Unlike Icarus of Greek mythology, he has flown close to the sun and not fallen.

In the past sixty years, we have grown to tolerate a 70-fold increase in presidential campaign funding (Badarasan, 2024, p. 114). Why? Over several decades the Supreme Court has curtailed the freedom of the people and the state legislatures to institute guard rails around corporate spending on elections. The court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission ended the last restraints on campaign spending (Source). The Supreme Court has ruled that artificial persons like corporations enjoy the same freedom of speech as natural persons like ordinary people. Now, corporations and wealthy donors enjoy a greater degree of freedom while the broad public must tolerate the power and influence that comes with those freedoms.

The Boston Tea Party was a demonstration against the powerful East India Tea Company that was granted a monopoly on tea imports by the British crown (Source). 250 years later, we have come to tolerate what the Boston colonists could not abide. We have given up some of our freedoms to a new Leviathan, the few unelected elite on the Supreme Court.

//////////////////

Photo by alexandre alex on Unsplash

Adams, J. (1856). Letter to James Lloyd, January 1815. In C. F. Adams (Ed.), The works of John Adams, second president of the United States (Vol. 10, pp. 172–173). Little, Brown and Company.

Baradaran, M. (2024). The quiet coup: Neoliberalism and the looting of America. W. W. Norton & Company.

Bourke, J. (2014). The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford University Press.

Calhoon, R. (2000). “Loyalism and Neutrality,” in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene & J.R. Pole. Blackwell, p. 235.