Disclaimer: minor ai rewrites of some sentences (like 4) bc I wanted a second set of eyes; i’m quite bad at phrasing things
Everybody is aware of the recent dramas with Cornell and the sexual assault case. When I see people on social media reposting that post, talking about it, I was fine with it, because that’s how I found out about this as well. What I was not fine with, though, was when literally everybody reposts, but also that’s the extent of what they do.
Sure, I understand the point. There is activism in trying to spread the word. But I’m also starting to get suspicious of the actual intent behind the action as easy as reposting. (Apologize for my use of second person pronouns) If you really cared this much about sexual assault, why post this now, all of a sudden? Because everyone else is also doing so? Because of the sudden publicity? Or is it that it makes you feel as if you are now “in the moral right” and on the “activist, good-person” side of the situation (and perhaps everybody else who isn’t reposting is morally below you)?
Also, regardless of the topic (Lindsay Clancy, Israel and Palestine, artificial intelligence, etc) I’ve noticed several significant issues I want to address when it comes to how many of my peers appear to be responding to “political issues.” But if you are here only for my take on this idea of performative morality, skip these first two sections.
An empty container
For most political topics, most people have no real opinion on it and nor do they come up with their own reasoning for it. The prime example of this is the topic of artificial intelligence.
As a programmer who has been coding since before the explosion of vibe coding (but also as someone who chronically reads tech news), I understand the impact of artificial intelligence. Yes, I understand the environmental impacts very well, from the sound data centers (which isn’t an AI-specific issue) generate to the “water consumption” (which I reckon many people who use this as an argument don’t understand why or how water is even being used).
I understand the “productivity” and “cognitive” impacts (which honestly is a different debate in itself); I have a general understanding of how modern LLMs function, its capabilities (at least for programming), etc. The point is that most people don’t understand or know about this, yet still try to argue against AI (which is the term I will use to refer to generative AI technology, as that’s the main technology facing scrutiny). How? They regurgitate the facts they see online.
These “impacts” are almost always taken at face value with no further thought, analysis or scrutiny, put into it. AI can be run on your phone, and with Chinese models, AI is only going to get more efficient; the social media you are ranting on about how “AI sucks” is powered by data centers—so in a sense all of the pushback of data centers online is hypocritical. Even the water argument gets way more complicated once you start asking what kind of cooling is being used, whether/how the water is actually consumed, where the data center is located, etc. I could provide exact numbers and comparisons using the latest data but this is a blog post about reasoning and logic, not a paper.
If you are reading this and have no idea what I’m talking about, perhaps that’s a sign that you don’t know enough about the topic. I could go on and on about these impacts, but my point should be clear here. Other examples of people regurgitating information to back up their “opinion” include Israel and Palestine. For this one, I know that I don’t know enough about the topic to form a well-informed opinion, but I also know that my feed is pushing a very specific view of the situation. But let’s get back to AI.
Is AI stealing art? Maybe. But even granting that premise for the sake of argument, what follows from it? If the training has already happened, what remedies still make sense? If people increasingly cannot tell the difference, does that change how we evaluate the output? And before any of that: what exactly do we mean by “stealing” here, and how is machine training meaningfully different from a human learning from existing work?
Does it make us dumber? But even if there is the MIT study that paints AI use as a negative, how was the study conducted? Did the conclusion of that study mean that any use of AI leads to this specific result? Can people use it differently to avoid cognitive decline? Is it still a good tool to have?
What genuinely IS left are the moral and ethical parts of the debate (e.g. “Is its use morally justified?”), which require a lot more justification than just “look at this fact” and “compare bigger numbers.” I’m not a philosophy or logic teacher here so I’m not really sure how to word this.
Also, everything that I just said is common sense to me—or at least what I assumed is common knowledge about any debate. If you are reading this thinking, “Of course: there’s no debate here,” then I totally agree. We should analyze our sources. We should analyze the assumptions and premises of an argument or even the topic. I should not have felt the need to write ~600 words on this topic. And I think it should not need to be said that my gripes here do not only apply to artificial intelligence, but also to Israel and Palestine and many other political topics.
However, even if you know the reasoning behind some arguments (or is regurgitating this reasoning from a TikTok), I still want to flag something potentially dangerous here.
A flavorless beverage
What I am going to talk about is the concept of morality itself. Why? Because we have to discuss that before we can talk about any sort of reasoning or arguments or logic (which I am sure there are many other people who are way better at talking about than I am). The idea of morality you come with is the implicit assumption under every single argument you make. Bear with me here because this may seem absolutely absurd at first.
A lot of people throw around the words “morality” and assume it’s all “common sense.” I’m sure you have heard of the Trolley Problem, or at least the red and blue button, so I’m not going into that. One of the things I wished everybody was educated on, though, was some of Nietzsche’s ideas, the main one being the idea of being unafraid to question EVERYTHING, down to the first principle.
For example, why is murder bad? Because it’s the loss of a human life. But then why value human lives? Because that’s what/who morality serves? Why must morality exist or serve humans? Why humans? What makes us intrinsically have any worth? “Of course it’s bad: you’re ruining a life!” Then why does life matter? “Well it’s another person’s life so regardless of what you think of it you shouldn’t touch it anyway.” Then why does “not touching other people’s lives” matter?
If you’re experienced in Lincoln-Douglas debate, you would argue something along the lines of “it decreases social utility” or “it violates the agency of another moral actor.” Or for those who don’t, you will run into either “human lives matter” or “well murder is just bad,” which are based on Christian beliefs (God created all humans, giving them intrinsic value. also, 10 commandments). But even with all of that, I can push with “why.”
If you care to go down this specific rabbit hole
Nietzsche’s basic problem was this: if you take God out of the picture, what gives morality its objective foundation? If our old source of meaning and values disappears and nothing replaces it, you can end up at nihilism: the idea that nothing has inherent meaning. From there, there are two very different ways you could react:
- Nothing matters so I can do whatever I want.
- Nothing has inherent meaning, so I am free to create meaning for myself.
And of course he argues that that kind of meaning comes from self-development and making a better self, etc., and just striving for higher moral standards. Anyway the point is, now that we’ve gone through this exercise, we both understand that morality—as GPT puts it—“rests on deeper premises about what has value, and those premises themselves can be questioned.” And so, we have moral frameworks.
Again, for those familiar with Lincoln-Douglas debate (or, at the very least, the Trolley Problem), two of the most common ways of approaching morality are deontological and utilitarian frameworks. These are fancy words for saying either “morality is dependent on the action itself or principles behind the action (or your intention or your values)” OR “morality is dependent on the consequences of what your action does.”
My point here is that when you are coming up with reasons for a moral (or any) argument, you should be aware of where your assumptions are coming from. You should be aware of the rigor of logic that you are using and you should be making sure that you are able to justify your reasoning, assuming we’re operating on logic here. Never again “it’s just so wrong.”
But these two meta-critical points about debate and how arguments typically go on the internet isn’t why I originally wanted to write this blog post. We’re talking about the Cornell (5)7.
Before I continue, one clarification. This is a blog post about reasoning, not an exhaustive treatment of every philosophical, political, or historical example I mention. I am going to generalize and simplify when the omitted nuance does not change the point I am making. Obviously, not every person behaves the same way, historical events have more than one cause, and entire philosophical traditions cannot be reduced to a paragraph. If an omitted qualification actually changes the argument, then absolutely challenge it. But pointing out an exception that does not change the argument, however, is not a refutation.
Likewise, critically examining the justification behind a moral claim is not the same thing as endorsing its opposite. Asking why something is wrong does not mean I secretly believe it is right. My point throughout this post is simply that we should understand why we believe what we believe, what assumptions those beliefs depend on, and why we choose to act on them.
(and yes that disclaimer I got GPT to rewrite cuz I lwk don’t want to deal with sugarcoating)
Performative morality
This is what I mean by “performative morality”: everybody else is reposting, so you repost too, partly because you don’t want to look like you aren’t supporting Jane Doe.
The prevalence of this repost culture can also trivialize the underlying harm. Just one micro-rant before I move onto my main point: for the Cornell case, I see posts saying “repost if you are against rape.” I hope people understand how 1. this isn’t helping at all 2. it’s engagement bait, especially when the caption says “and I can see if you skip.” By presenting it as such, I argue that you are minimizing the issue or at least using it for your own interests. Now, onto real issues.
Let’s talk about this action of reposting. Why do this? To spread the word: you are brave enough to associate your public account with this “controversy” (nobody is arguing “rape is good,” by the way). But that can’t be the end of your activism. “If you truly cared about the topic, you would…” Nah, you thought I was going to say that?
Because what I do find helpful are posts that either talk about the general issues of SA at colleges (using the Cornell case to bring attention to the general manner) and posts that try to describe how to take action. Because everybody knows rape is bad. If you want to help, at least make it easy for everyone else (including yourself) to do something about it.
But I’m not advocating for a world where I have to spend every cent I earn on projects against sexual abuse or projects supporting sexual abuse victims, because that’s a completely unreasonable ask. Yes I’m against rape but no, that doesn’t mean I have to spend everything I have to help with these efforts because in a way, even that is performative. And if you want to prove a moral obligation to do that (“spend everything”), please direct message me (Instagram: thatxliner) because I would love to hear the argument.
I’m just going to say this, though: we, as teenagers (at least that’s who I am and thus the majority of my peers at the time of this writing) are generally poor and powerless so the best thing we can do is really just “try to” support or get the attention of someone who can support these efforts. One of the reasons protesting in the Civil Rights Movement worked was that it created actual financial pressures (bus revenues dropped with lower use; sit-ins prevented the restaurant from serving potential customers). This is why strikes work. This is why unions work. Money talks!
I’m just saying if you are planning to post something about activism, maybe make that mean something beyond just a post. Or at the very least examine the reasons why you’re doing this in the first place. Is it to look good in front of other people?
And you could say I’m hypocritical in this, which doesn’t actually matter as I discuss in the next section.
Another issue is that performative morality reduces complex issues to “thus obviously we need to do X,” removing nuance.
Sure, one could argue that for an “inherently, obviously good cause” there “shouldn’t be the need to debate.” But that’s where the issue lies. Versions of this same logic have historically been used within the church to discourage questioning or challenges to accepted doctrine. The moment you stop permitting questioning and start accepting what you have as absolute moral truth with no other alternative CONSIDERED is the moment critical thinking stops. Like what I said in the second section of this blog post, morality itself is an assumption you may need to challenge. I just don’t like how people seem to be repeating statements as absolute truth—and shun you down if you ever try to critically examine the reasoning—all the time.
I don’t want a world where moral signaling replaces actual thought or action.
Finally (slightly unrelated), I think we all know—or at least can theorize—about the (hopefully smaller) population that looks at this situation and think “oh great: hopefully this means less people are applying to Cornell and thus my chances increase.” Like come on bro.
Cancel culture and mob mentality
(I was going to write a whole section on cancel culture but I’m pretty sure everyone knows about that already.)
But please just let us be hypocrites
Because that’s how we learn and don’t stay labeled. By labeling someone as a “hypocrite” you are essentially saying that because someone did a bad thing in the past, they cannot now advocate against the bad thing they did.
What you are doing here is essentially trying to trap the person in their evil past. The greatest thing about humans is that we can change and this means that we have the potential to change for the better. Maybe somebody did say something inconsistent, but at least the last thing they are now saying is CORRECT. We should be congratulating people for changing for the better.
Also, can we just be honest?
Let’s say you really do not like AI, but you don’t have a reason for that opinion. Just admit that you don’t have a good reason for it.
It’s perfectly normal to have unfounded opinions; not everything needs to be completely justified. Of course, prejudice is bad, but the issue arises when you hold on to that opinion as if it’s an established fact, or some rigorously derived thesis. And that is what you do when you push that idea onto other people (“argh you AI user!” or “why are you using ai???”).
Conclusion
Inspect why you are doing what you are doing, where your morality comes from—question EVERYTHING—and never simply just follow the crowd. If these sound like obvious statements that should not need to be said (and thus somehow this blog post is pointless), then I agree with you. I should never had needed to write this in the first place.