Month: December 2025

Machine or Magic?

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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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Permissiveness and Stability

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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

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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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The Rusting of Trust

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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 19th 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 19th 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 18th 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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