AI Is Legal; Crypto is Moral
Gillian Rose, Peter Thiel, and the Binding of Isaac
Peter Thiel says, “AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.” By this he likely means that AI will be used for surveillance, while crypto will be used to elude surveillance. AI centralizes power and authority, crypto is all about decentralization.
Gillian Rose claims that modernity can be defined by the splitting off of the legal from the moral, a distinction given to us by Kant. Legality is heteronomous—the law commands from without; morality is autonomous—it is the law I give myself. For Rose, this split is bad for us, allowing us to conceive of ourselves as moral while operating in a system or society that is depraved. Moreover, she claims that it corresponds to a methodological split between sociology and philosophy. The sociologists study how things work, but with no appreciation for agency and freedom; the philosophers value agency and freedom, but conceive of it in a static form, divorced from social realities.
Rose is a left-wing, Hegelian-Adornian critic of liberalism, who believes that Kantian morality has led to a society in which people pursue individual freedom while turning a blind eye to the conditions that unequally allow some to occupy a dominant position and others to be dominated.
Agree or disagree with Rose’s critique, her Kantian distinction between legality and morality maps onto the AI/Crypto distinction proposed by Thiel.
AI is legal; crypto is moral.
For Rose, only a world that is both legal and moral can be a good one, the future would have to be, as it were, both AI and crypto (a sentiment I barely understand).
In Jewish thought, much ado is made of the relationship between law and ethics. If the law is ethical, this can be understood in one of two ways. Either the law is ethical regardless of whether we like it or agree with it; or the law is ethical only if it can be justified by our moral arguments. A certain mode of Orthodoxy tends to argue for the absolute value of the law; Reform theology, by contrast, follows Protestantism, and makes the law subordinate to outside justification. Nowhere is this debate more tested than in readings of the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which God appears to be commanding an immoral law. To say no to God is to say that morality trumps legality. To say yes is to say that legality trumps morality. To resolve the anguish, faithful readers jump to the end of the story: God doesn’t command the immoral act. The law is ethical, the ethical is legal.
In the long-term utopian-dystopian vision, we will live in a world in which decisions are either imposed from without (heteronomy) or made through a consensus mechanism that honors individual choice (autonomy). In the former version, AI will have calculated all optimal actions and morality will be outsourced; there will be no more morality, just legality. In the latter version, which is perhaps that imagined by Paul (and secularized by Adam Smith, and even by Deleuze), we will simply know what to do, internally, and, by magic, our decisions will be blessed. Our immanent motivations will be wise.
One reason that law exists is to prevent us from doing that which we want to do, even when it is bad for us, or bad for others. But in the immanentist utopia, we won’t need law, because all of our choices will be good. In this scenario, morality will rule and law will falter.
I am skeptical about both scenarios being either realistic or good; but I don’t know if Rose can offer us an alternative to these apocalyptic visions. To bemoan the splitting of legality and morality is to require that either one becomes subordinate to the other—either AI or Crypto; either a God who commands the sacrifice of Isaac or an Abraham whose moral compass leads him to reject God’s command out of hand.
The middle position is one in which neither AI nor crypto has hegemony, where morality and legality are separate realms that sometimes overlap, but also challenge one another. Such a position leads to a world in which there is a “separation of powers.” Such a position hopes for laws that are moral and morals that are legal, but also affirms that legality exists because not everything we will is good and morality exists because not everything that is willed upon is good, either. Philosophy and sociology will always be in tension, and so will crypto and AI. More technological advances will bring more, not less, conflict between the modern discovery of moral autonomy and the ancient insight that we are often wrong—especially when we think we are right.