Why We Ultimately Cannot Help Legislating Morality

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

So says Jesus, in Matthew 11:15, and several other places in the New Testament gospel accounts. And when he says this, it just goes to show that there is a difference between knowledge and understanding, and between the capacity to sense over and against actually making sense of what is happening.

Thus we come, once more, to the question of legislating morality. I maintain that we cannot help it. To propose, debate, vote on, enact, enforce, or rule regarding laws is inescapably a moral exercise.

Or else what is morality again? Consult Oxford Languages, for instance, and this is what you will find:

mo·ral·i·ty – /məˈralədē/ – noun

principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
a particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society.
the extent to which an action is right or wrong.

Now take ChatGPT, for instance, a new search engine from a company called OpenAI, slated to upend the longstanding market dominance of Google in giving us answers to our random queries and reliable results for our various research interests.

Arguably the biggest problem to solve in relation to the application of generative artificial intelligence is that of what ethical boundaries, if any, to place on what users can and cannot ask or get responses for. That is, the more powerful the internet search tool, the greater the potential for it to be used for “evil.” But then we must define both what is good and evil to know what to prohibit or permit ChatGPT users to learn from it.

One thing at least is safe to say, and that is that I do not want the same folks in the U.S. government, who carry water for the Progressive agenda, running interference for lies and fibs and propaganda, to similarly leverage ChatGPT to pull off ever-more convincing deceptions. Yet that is the very real possibility, that the composite answers to our individual and private attempts at verification, confirmation, refutation, and rebuttal will be thwarted by extraordinarily persuasive deepfakes, both to incriminate those who are actually innocent, and to exonerate the truly guilty.

On the other hand, the opposite potential is also there, that putting legitimate ethical parameters in place will make ChatGPT an even more powerful codebreaker for use against deceptive sin and outright lies. We should hope this is the outcome, even as we conceive of what we will do if such does not occur.

Nevertheless, one thing is for certain, that the question of morality must be answered somehow, with some ethical standard or another. Consequently, how this answer is arrived at is every bit as powerful, or more, than the conclusions in their particulars, as such will either be used to make us freer or less free, abler to secure and enjoy our rights or less able.

Would that all those who are in a position to decide on a personal and institutional level how to answer this question would listen to the recent discussion Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray had, moderated by Peter Robinson, on the question of God’s existence, particularly for its far-reaching implications for the dreams we dream, and the conceptions we hold dear, or else object to and discard, in the West, which will either continue to make possible the accumulated blessings and conveniences we associate with our modern age, or else will see us spiraling down, harder and faster, back to the Dark Ages, only this time with smart phones in our pockets and self-driving cars in our stables.

That is to say, we are going to need to give ChatGPT the answer to the question of the existence and authority of God, and not the other way around.

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