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Vox
4 days ago
- Health
- Vox
Can't commit to vegetarianism but want animals to suffer less? You've got options.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It's based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I've had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a 'bland' diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table. I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don't want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this? Dear Would-Be Vegetarian, You're not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they're vegetarian or vegan. What's more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren't even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face. So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you're really wrestling with this. I'll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory. There's a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it's fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, 'always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.' From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you're treating the animal as a means to an end. Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands. Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it's 'always treat others as ends in themselves' or 'always maximize happiness.' A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it's incredibly soothing to think 'If I just do X, then I'll know for sure that I'm being a good person!' But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really? Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging. I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan's Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn't have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn't really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals). 'The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),' Anderson writes, 'has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.' In other words, Anderson doesn't think there's some universal rule like 'eating animals is inherently morally wrong.' It's our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn't believe there's a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That's because moral evaluation isn't just about animals' intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we've made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild. It also matters whether they're fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, 'We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.' Anderson's point is not that animals' intelligence and sentience don't matter. It's that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive. With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a 'purist' diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a 'reducetarian' diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously. The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others. For one thing, if you're eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America's meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They're also often mutilated without pain relief: Think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they're in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish. A pasture-raised label doesn't mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn't guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they'll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end. It's a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it's better than farmed. The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you'll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label 'Certified Humane,' that's genuinely higher-welfare — but don't mistake it for 'American Humane Certified,' which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like 'cage-free' or 'free-range.' They're better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they're not as meaningful as you might think. Here's a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin. Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That's both because of how miserable chickens' lives are on factory farms and because, as Vox's Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow. That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don't want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too. Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers). But assuming you're going to eat meat, it's a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, 'I'll reduce how much meat I eat,' but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you'd intended. So it's probably better to commit to something like 'weekday vegetarian' or 'vegan before six' — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions. At the end of the day, remember that there's a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don't think you need to feel bad about that. That's because you won't be shirking your values: You'll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you're doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do. Bonus: What I'm reading The blogger Bentham's Bulldog recently published a piece titled ' How to cause less suffering while eating animals .' It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn't: 'offsetting' your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities . I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it's worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet. This Aeon essay answers a question I've often wondered about: Why haven't other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don't they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I'm grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer. I can't stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified 'helpful assistant' character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, 'Gee, that really tickles my circuits!'). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.
Vox
28-07-2025
- General
- Vox
How to make the hardest choices of your life
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It's based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I'm soon to be a part of the legal profession. I went to law school to advocate for marginalized populations who seldom have their voices heard — people who are steamrolled by unethical landlords, employers, corporations, etc. I will clerk after law school, and then I'll encounter my first major fork in the road: whether I pursue employment in a corporate firm or nonprofit/government. Corporate firms, ultimately, serve profitable clients, sometimes to the detriment of marginalized populations. Corporate firms also pay significantly better. Nonprofit or government work serves the populations I want to work for and alongside, but often pays under the area median income. I'll be 32 by the time I reach this fork, and I don't know what to do. I'm extremely fortunate in that I won't have law school debt — I was on a full ride. Still, I'm not 'flush.' I want to buy a house one day, have some kids with my partner, feel financially secure enough to do so. I also want to have a morally congruent career and not enable (what I consider) systems of oppression. What do I do? Dear Fork in the Road, Your question reminds me of another would-be lawyer: a very bright American woman named Ruth Chang. When she was graduating from college, she felt torn between two careers: Should she become a philosopher or should she become a lawyer? She loved the learning that life in a philosophy department would provide. But she'd grown up in an immigrant family, and she worried about ending up unemployed. Lawyering seemed like the financially safe bet. She got out some notepaper, drew a line down the middle, and tried to make a pro/con list that would reveal which was the better option. But the pro/con list was powerless to help her, because there was no better option. Each option was better in some ways and worse in others, but neither was better overall. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! So Chang did what many of us do when facing a hard choice: She chose the safe bet. She became a lawyer. Soon enough, she realized that lawyering was a poor fit for her personality, so she made a U-turn and became — surprise, surprise — a philosopher. And guess what she ended up devoting several years to studying? Hard choices! Choices like hers. Choices like yours. The kind where the pro/con list doesn't really help, because neither option is better on balance than the other. Here's what Chang came to understand about hard choices: It's a misconception to think they're hard because of our own ignorance. We shouldn't think, 'There is a superior option, I just can't know what it is, so the best move is always to go with the safer option.' Instead, Chang says, hard choices are genuinely hard because no best option exists. But that doesn't mean they're both equally good options. If two options are equally good, then you could decide by just flipping a coin, because it really doesn't matter which you choose. But can you imagine ever choosing your career based on a coin toss? Or flipping a coin to choose whether to live in the city or the country, or whether to marry your current partner or that ex you've been pining for? Of course not! We intuitively sense that that would be absurd, because we're not simply choosing between equivalent options. So what's really going on? In a hard choice, Chang argues, we're choosing between options that are 'on a par' with each other. She explains: When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose. But one alternative isn't better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That's why the choice is hard. To concretize this, think of the difference between lemon sorbet and apple pie. Both taste extremely delicious — they're in the same league of deliciousness. The kind of deliciousness they deliver, however, is different. It matters which one you choose, because each will give you a very different experience: The lemon sorbet is delicious in a tart and refreshing way, the apple pie in a sweet and comforting way. Now let's consider your dilemma, which isn't really about whether to do nonprofit work or to become a corporate lawyer, but about the values underneath: advocating for marginalized populations on the one hand, and feeling financially secure enough to raise a family on the other. Both of these values are in the same league as each other, because each delivers something of fundamental value to a human life: living in line with moral commitments or feeling a sense of safety and belonging. That means that no matter how long you spend on a pro/con list, the external world isn't going to supply reasons that tip the scales. Chang continues: When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us — the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake — are silent as to what to do. It's here in the space of hard choices that we get to exercise our normative power: the power to create reasons for yourself. By that, Chang means that you have to put your own agency into the choice. You have to say, 'This is what I stand for. I'm the kind of person who's for X, even if that means I can't fulfill Y!' And then, through making that hard choice, you become that person. So ask yourself: Who do you want to be? Do you want to be the kind of person who serves profitable clients, possibly to the detriment of marginalized people, in order to be able to provide generously for a family? Or do you want to advocate for those who most need an advocate, even if it means you can't afford to own property or send your kids to the best schools? What is more important to you? Or, to ask this question in a different way: What kind of person would you want your future children to see you as? What legacy do you want to leave? Only you can make this choice and, by making it, choose who you are to be. I know this sounds hard — and it is! But it's good-hard. In fact, it's one of the most awesome things about the human condition. Because if there was always a best alternative to be found in every choice you faced, you would be rationally compelled to choose that alternative. You would be like a marionette on the fingers of the universe, forced to move this way, not that. But instead, you're free — we're free — and that is a beautiful thing. Because we get the precious opportunity to make hard choices, Chang writes, 'It is not facts beyond our agency that determine whether we should lead this kind of life rather than that, but us.' Bonus: What I'm reading Chang's paper ' Hard Choices ' is a pleasure to read — but if you want an easier entry-point into her philosophy, check out her TED talk or the two cartoons that she says summarize her research interests. I cannot stop thinking about the cartoon showing a person pulling their own marionette strings. In the AI world, when researchers think about how to teach an AI model to be good, they've too often resorted to the idea of inculcating a single ethical theory into the model. So I'm relieved to see that some researchers in the field are finally taking value pluralism seriously. This new paper acknowledges that it's important to adopt an approach that 'does not impose any singular vision of human flourishing but rather seeks to prevent sociotechnical systems from collapsing the diversity of human values into oversimplified metrics.' It even cites our friend Ruth Chang! We love to see it. Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska has a witty poem, ' A Word on Statistics ,' that asks how many of us, out of every hundred people, exhibit certain qualities. For example: 'those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest.' It's a clever meditation on all the different kinds of people we could choose to become.
Vox
07-07-2025
- Health
- Vox
The spiritual life calls out to me. But is it self-indulgent?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I graduate college soon, and like everyone around me, I'm working hard to find a job. But unlike those around me, I have a sense for how inactivity enlivens me — I get lots of joy from silence, reflection, and complete agency over my mind. I've quit most social media, and I got into meditation a while ago and never looked back. This awareness makes me tilt towards a life that optimizes for this. But I also have very altruistic leanings, which could become serious scruples if I don't do good in the world. Should I be trying to balance the pursuit of two seemingly opposed life goals — pursuing true happiness through inactivity and contemplation (as hypothesized by thinkers like Aristotle and Byung-Chul Han) and striving to do good in the world through robust goal-oriented action? The first is indifferent to which ends (if any) one's life contributes to, as long as it is blanketed in leisurely contemplation and true inactivity. The second invites and rewards behaviors that are constantly opposed to prolonged inactivity (working efficiently, constantly learning, etc). So I really don't know how to handle this. Dear Contemplative and Caring, Matthieu Ricard is known as the 'world's happiest man.' When he lay down in an MRI scanner so scientists could look at his brain, they saw that the regions associated with happiness were exploding with activity, while those associated with negative emotions were nearly silent. The scientists were stunned. How did his brain get that way? The answer: 60,000 hours of meditation. See, Ricard grew up in France, earned a PhD in genetics, and then, at age 26, abandoned a bright scientific career in favor of going to Tibet. He became a Buddhist monk and spent nearly three decades training his mind in love and compassion. The result was that one stupendously joyous brain. But what if he'd instead spent 60,000 hours bringing joy to other people? Philosopher Peter Singer once put this question to Ricard, basically asking if it was self-indulgent to spend so much time in a hermitage when there are problems in the world that urgently need fixing. Ricard gave a complex answer, and I think looking at all three components of it will be helpful to you. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! For one thing, Ricard pointed out that there are many different values in life. Helping other people is absolutely a wonderful value. But there are others, too: art, for instance. He noted that we don't go around scolding Yo-Yo Ma for the thousands of hours he spent perfecting the cello; instead, we appreciate the beauty of his music. Spiritual growth through contemplation or meditation is like that, Ricard suggested. It's another value intrinsically worth pursuing. Ricard also emphasized, though, that helping others is something he values very deeply. Just like you, he prizes both contemplation and altruism. But he doesn't necessarily see a conflict between them. Instead, he's convinced that contemplative training actually helps you act altruistically in the world. If you don't have a calm and steady mind, it's hard to be present at someone's bedside and comfort them while they're dying. If you haven't learned to relinquish your grip on the self, it's hard to lead a nonprofit without falling prey to a clash of egos. Still, Ricard admitted that he is not without regret about his lifestyle. His regret, he said, was 'not to have put compassion into action' for so many years. In his 50s, he decided to address this by setting up a foundation doing humanitarian work in Tibet, Nepal, and India. But the fact that he'd neglected to concretely help humanity for half a century seemed to weigh on him. What can we learn from Ricard's example? For someone like you, who values both contemplation and altruism, it's important to realize that each one can actually bolster the other. We've already seen Ricard make the point that contemplation can improve altruistic action. But another famous Buddhist talked about how action in the wider world can improve contemplation, too. That Buddhist was Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen teacher and peace activist who in the 1950s developed Engaged Buddhism, which urges followers to actively work on the social, political, and environmental issues of the day. Asked about the idea that people need to choose between engaging in social change or working on spiritual growth, the teacher said: I think that view is rather dualistic. The [meditation] practice should address suffering: the suffering within yourself and the suffering around you. They are linked to each other. When you go to the mountain and practice alone, you don't have the chance to recognize the anger, jealousy, and despair that's in you. That's why it's good that you encounter people — so you know these emotions. So that you can recognize them and try to look into their nature. If you don't know the roots of these afflictions, you cannot see the path leading to their cessation. That's why suffering is very important for our practice. I would add that contact with the world improves contemplation not only because it teaches us about suffering, but also because it gives us access to joyful insights. For example, Thich Nhat Hanh taught that one of the most important spiritual insights is 'interbeing' — the notion that all things are mutually dependent on all other things. A great way to access that would be through a moment of wonder in a complex natural ecosystem, or through the experience of pregnancy, when cells from one individual integrate into the body of another seemingly separate self! At this point, you might have a question for these Buddhists: Okay, it's all well and good for you guys to talk about spiritual growth and social engagement going hand-in-hand, but you had the luxury of doing years of spiritual growth uninterrupted first! How am I supposed to train my mind while staying constantly engaged with a modern world that's designed to fragment my attention? Part of the answer, Buddhist teachers say, is to practice both 'on and off the cushion.' When we think about meditation, we often picture ourselves sitting on a cushion with our eyes closed. But it doesn't have to look that way. It can also be a state of mind with which we do whatever else it is we're doing: volunteering, commuting to work, drinking a cup of tea, washing the dishes. Thich Nhat Hanh was fond of saying, 'Washing the dishes is like bathing a baby Buddha. The profane is the sacred. Everyday mind is Buddha's mind.' But I think it's really hard to do that in any kind of consistent way unless you've already had concerted periods of practice. And that's the reason why retreats exist. Buddhist monks commonly do this — sometimes for three years, or for three months, depending on their tradition — but you don't have to be a monk or even a Buddhist to do it. Anyone can go on a retreat. I've found that even short, weekend-long retreats, where you're supported by the silent company of other practitioners and the guidance of teachers, can provide a helpful container for intensive meditation and catalyze your growth. It's a lot like language immersion: Sure, you can learn Italian by studying a few words on Duolingo alone each night, but you'll probably learn a whole lot faster if you spend a chunk of time living in a Tuscan villa. So here's what I'd suggest to you: Pursue a career that includes actively doing good in the world — but be intentional about building in substantial blocks of time for contemplation, too. That could mean a year (or two or three) of meditative training before you go on the job market, to give you a stable base to launch off from. But it could also mean scheduling regular retreats for yourself — anywhere from three days to three months — in between your work commitments. More broadly, though, I want you to remember that the ideas about the good life that you're thinking through didn't emerge in a vacuum. They're conditioned by history. As the 20th-century thinker Hannah Arendt points out, vita contemplativa (the contemplative life) has been deemed superior to vita activa (the life of activity) by most pre-modern Western thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to the medieval Christians. But why? Aristotle, whom you mentioned, put contemplation on a pedestal because he believed it was what free men did, whereas men who labored were coerced by the necessity to stay alive, and were thus living as if they were enslaved whether they were literally enslaved or not. In our modern world, Arendt notes, the hierarchy has been flipped upside down. Capitalist society valorizes the vita activa and downgrades the vita contemplativa. But this reversal still keeps the relationship between the two modes stable: It keeps them positioned in a hierarchical order. Arendt thinks that's silly. Rather than placing one above the other, she encourages us to consider the distinct values of both. I think she's right. Not only does contemplation need action to survive (even philosophers have to eat), but contemplation without action is impoverished. If Aristotle had had an open-minded encounter with enslaved people, maybe he would have been a better philosopher, one who challenged hierarchies rather than reinforcing them. It can be perfectly okay, and potentially very beneficial, to spend some stretch of time in pure contemplation like Aristotle — or like the Buddhist monk Ricard. But if you do it forever, chances are you'll end up with the same regret as the monk: the regret of not putting compassion into action. Bonus: What I'm reading Not only does modern life make it hard to think deeply and contemplatively — with the advent of AI, it also risks homogenizing our thoughts. The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka examines the growing body of evidence suggesting that chatbots are degrading our capacity for creative thought. This week, I learned that rich Europeans in the 18th century actually paid men to live in their gardens as…' ornamental hermits '? Apparently it was trendy to have an isolated man in a goat's hair robe wandering around in contemplative silence! Some scholars think the trend took off because philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had just argued that people living in a 'state of nature' are morally superior to those corrupted by modern society. Twentieth-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton was a great lover of stillness. His poem ' In Silence' is mainly an ode to the contemplative life. But he ends the poem with these cryptic lines: 'How can a man be still or listen to all things burning? How can he dare to sit with them when all their silence is on fire?'
Vox
08-06-2025
- General
- Vox
First comes marriage. Then comes a flirtatious colleague.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: My husband and I have a good relationship. We're both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested. Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She's married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn't know what her relationship agreements are with her husband. I'm not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I'd like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don't want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don't have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don't actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying 'not now.' My husband admitted that he's hoping I will have a change of mind. I don't want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don't want to leave him I would feel the need to do something. Dear Monogamously Married, I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don't want. I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you'd do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes: Love is a passionate affirmation of its 'object.' That means that love is not an 'affect' but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its 'object.' In other words, love is not a feeling. It's work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they're actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self 'which can stand alone and bear solitude' will be up for the job. He continues: This passionate affirmation is not possible if one's own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate. So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: you just have to do whatever's best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite. In fact, Fromm cautions us against both 'masochistic love' and 'sadistic love.' In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in 'a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,' writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you're trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are 'pseudo-love.' Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! So although Fromm doesn't want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner's freedom, he's not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism. If you're not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It's just masochistic self-annihilation. I'm personally partial to Fromm's non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn't work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it's possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy? It sounds like you're intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you're committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other. But right now, you've got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you've expressed that you don't want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn't giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair! Notice, though, that that isn't a worry about non-monogamy per se — it's a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship. In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it's obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally. 'Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,' writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship. Since you feel that your husband isn't giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn't feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably. In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it's absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he's attracted to; he doesn't have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can't emerge from a situation where he's pushing things too far with someone else before you've agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn't, have him read Polysecure!). It's probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you're anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone. After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you're feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract? If the answer is 'yes' or 'maybe,' you can create a temporary relationship structure — or 'vessel,' as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn't, and go from there. If the answer is 'no' — if you're not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you'll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn't get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he'll have to respect you, and what's more important, you'll have to respect yourself. Bonus: What I'm reading This week's question prompted me to go back to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was influenced by Fromm. Maslow spoke of two kinds of love : Deficit-Love and Being-Love. The former is about trying to satiate your own needs, while the latter is about giving without expecting something in return. Maslow characterizes Being-Love as an almost spiritual experience, likening it to 'the perfect love of their God that some mystics have described.' In addition to Polysecure, which has become something of a poly bible in the past few years, I recommend reading What Love Is — and What It Could Be , written by the philosopher Carrie Jenkins. I appreciated Jenkins's functionalist take on romantic love: She explains that we've constructed the idea of romantic love a certain way in order to serve a certain function (structuring society into nuclear family units), but we can absolutely revise it if we want.
Vox
02-06-2025
- Vox
My students think it's fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they're onto something.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I am a university teaching assistant, leading discussion sections for large humanities lecture classes. This also means I grade a lot of student writing — and, inevitably, see a lot of AI writing too. Of course, many of us are working on developing assignments and pedagogies to make that less tempting. But as a TA, I only have limited ability to implement these policies. And in the meantime, AI-generated writing is so ubiquitous that to take course policy on it seriously, or even to escalate every suspected instance to the professor who runs the course, would be to make dozens of accusations, some of them false positives, for basically every assignment. I believe in the numinous, ineffable value of a humanities education, but I'm also not going to convince stressed 19-year-olds of that value by cracking down hard on something everyone does. How do I think about the ethics of enforcing the rules of an institution that they don't take seriously, or letting things slide in the name of building a classroom that feels less like an obstacle to circumvent? Dear Troubled Teacher, I know you said you believe in the 'ineffable value of a humanities education,' but if we want to actually get clear on your dilemma, that ineffable value must be effed! So: What is the real value of a humanities education? Looking at the modern university, one might think the humanities aren't so different from the STEM fields. Just as the engineering department or the math department justifies its existence by pointing to the products it creates — bridge designs, weather forecasts — humanities departments nowadays justify their existence by noting that their students create products, too: literary interpretations, cultural criticism, short films. But let's be real: It's the neoliberalization of the university that has forced the humanities into that weird contortion. That's never what they were supposed to be. Their real aim, as the philosopher Megan Fritts writes, is 'the formation of human persons.' In other words, while the purpose of other departments is ultimately to create a product, a humanities education is meant to be different, because the student herself is the product. She is what's getting created and recreated by the learning process. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! This vision of education — as a pursuit that's supposed to be personally transformative — is what Aristotle proposed back in Ancient Greece. He believed the real goal was not to impart knowledge, but to cultivate the virtues: honesty, justice, courage, and all the other character traits that make for a flourishing life. But because flourishing is devalued in our hypercapitalist society, you find yourself caught between that original vision and today's product-based, utilitarian vision. And students sense — rightly! — that generative AI proves the utilitarian vision for the humanities is a sham. As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, 'You're asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there?' It's a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You're in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. I know, I know: Lots of students will say, 'I don't have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!' It's totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don't fully see the value in it now. Your job is to be their Aristotle. For the Ancient Greek philosopher, the mother of all virtues was phronesis, or practical wisdom. And I'd argue there's nothing more useful you can do for your students than help them cultivate this virtue, which is made more, not less, relevant by the advent of AI. Practical wisdom goes beyond just knowing general rules — 'don't lie,' for example — and applying them mechanically like some sort of moral robot. It's about knowing how to make good judgments when faced with the complex, dynamic situations life throws at you. Sometimes that'll actually mean violating a classic rule (in certain cases, you should lie!). If you've honed your practical wisdom, you'll be able to discern the morally salient features of a particular situation and come up with a response that's well-attuned to that context. This is exactly the sort of deliberation that students will need to be good at as they step into the wider world. The breakneck pace of technological innovation means they're going to have to choose, again and again and again, how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to. The best training they can get now is training in how to wisely make this type of choice. Unfortunately, that's exactly what using generative AI in the classroom threatens to short-circuit, because it removes something incredibly valuable: friction. AI is removing cognitive friction from education. We need to add it back in. Encountering friction is how we give our cognitive muscles a workout. Taking it out of the picture makes things easier in the short term, but in the long term, it can lead to intellectual deskilling, where our cognitive muscles gradually become weaker for lack of use. 'Practical wisdom is built up by practice just like all the other virtues, so if you don't have the opportunity to reason and don't have practice in deliberating about certain things, you won't be able to deliberate well later,' philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor told me last year. 'We need a lot of cognitive exercise in order to develop practical wisdom and retain it. And there is reason to worry about cognitive automation depriving us of the opportunity to build and retain those cognitive muscles.' So, how do you help your students retain and build their phronesis? You add friction back in, by giving them as many opportunities as possible to practice deliberating and choosing. If I were designing the curriculum, I wouldn't do that by adopting a strict 'no AI' policy. Instead, I'd be honest with students about the real benefit of the humanities and about why mindless AI cheating would be cheating themselves out of that benefit. Then, I'd offer them two choices when it comes time to write an essay: They can either write it with help from AI, or without. Both are totally fine. But if they do get help from AI, they have to also write an in-class reflection piece, explaining why they chose to use a chatbot and how they think it changed their thinking and learning process. I'd make it shorter than the original assignment but longer than a paragraph, so it forces them to develop the very reasoning skills they were trying to avoid using. As a TA, you could suggest this to professors, but they may not go for it. Unfortunately, you've got limited agency here (unless you're willing to risk your job or walk away from it). All you can do in such a situation is exercise the agency you do have. So use every bit of it. Since you lead discussion sections, you're well-placed to prompt your students to work their cognitive muscles in conversation. You could even stage a debate about AI: Assign half of them to argue the case for using chatbots to write papers and half of them to argue the opposite. If a professor insists on a strict 'no AI' policy, and you encounter essays that seem clearly AI-written, you may have little choice but to report them. But if there's room for doubt about a given essay, you might err on the side of leniency if the student has engaged very thoughtfully in the discussion. At least then you know they've achieved the most important aim. None of this is easy. I feel for you and all other educators who are struggling in this confusing environment. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some educators are suffering from moral injury, a psychological condition that arises when you feel you've been forced to violate your own values. But maybe it can comfort you to remember that this is much bigger than you. Generative AI is an existential threat to a humanities education as currently constituted. Over the next few years, humanities departments will have to paradigm-shift or perish. If they want to survive, they'll need to get brutally honest about their true mission. For now, from your pre-paradigm-shift perch, all you can do is make the choices that are left for you to make. Bonus: What I'm reading This week I went back to Shannon Vallor's first book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting . If there's one book I could get everyone in the AI world to read, it would be this one. And I think it can be useful to everyone else, too, because we all need to cultivate what Vallor calls the 'technomoral virtues' — the traits that will allow us to adapt well to emerging technologies. New Yorker piece in April about AI and cognitive atrophy led me to a 2024 psychology paper titled 'The Unpleasantness of Thinking: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Mental Effort and Negative Affect.' The authors' conclusion: 'We suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.' Come again? Yes, sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and watch Netflix, but sometimes thinking about a challenging topic is so pleasurable! To me, it feels like running or weight lifting: Too much is exhausting, but the right amount is exhilarating. And what feels like 'the right amount' can go up or down depending on how much I practice. Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker recently published an essay in Noema provocatively titled ' AI Is Life .' She reminds us that evolution produced us and we produced AI. 'It is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life,' she writes. 'Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.' To be clear, she's not arguing that tech is alive; she's saying it's an outgrowth of human life, an extension of our own species.
