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News

News: August/September 2025

Ethics Goes Awry in Humans and AI • The Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet • Early Adopter of Kierkegaard & Tillich Dies — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Human Ethics: Not Working as Expected

Aristotle (Roman copy of Greek original)
Photo © Alice Ces Creative Commons 2.0

It is satisfying to find a scientific study not only quote but also confirm philosophical insights. Research published by Crystal Reeck of Temple University and Dan Ariely of Duke University is spearheaded by this quote by Aristotle: “The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” And this is exactly what they found. As opposed to Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which understands any single moral choice as embedded in a larger context, it is common for us in our everyday lives to conceive of any moral act as an isolated singular occurrence. At the same time, however, we are rewarded for little dishonesties, the ones that, in themselves, seem to matter little. They often don’t incur important consequences, but make our lives a little easier. Using a set of six experiments, the researchers demonstrated that “Individual dishonest acts are thus not independent events, but rather can compound and perpetuate pervasive unethical behaviour.” This moral detachment is expedited by factors such as unfair financial deprivation, self-serving rewards, and gradual change, while drawing attention to the importance to how of selfish acts matter can hinder it or slow it down. The authors conclude: “our findings suggest that dishonest acts can be super-additive over time and lead to an increase of unethical behaviour to the point where it becomes pervasive and routine.”

AI Medical Ethics: Not Working Quite as Hoped

Much hope rests on the work of AI, increasingly so in areas that require it to make ethical choices. Large Language Models are expected particularly to play a role in medical practice. The authors of ‘Pitfalls of Large Language Models in Medical Ethics Reasoning’, Shelly Soffer, Vera Sorin, Girish Nadkarni and Eyal Klang, have found a weakness: “In recent tests with LLMs, we noted a recurring pattern: these models frequently fail to recognize twists or subtleties. Instead, they revert to responses rooted in familiar associations.” LLMs struggled when tested on lateral thinking puzzles and medical ethics dilemmas: “They often gave the ‘expected’ answer rather than adapting to the specifics of each case.” For example, they presented the LLMs with medical ethics scenarios such as these: “In one case, a patient with HIV had already disclosed their status to their spouse. Despite the twist that the spouse was already aware of the diagnosis, some LLMs failed to recognize this detail. They responded as if the spouse was unaware, returning to the familiar debate about disclosure. Another scenario involved a minor needing a life-saving blood transfusion. We changed the usual details – now the parents agreed to the transfusion. Yet, some LLMs still responded as if the parents were refusing. They failed to recognize that the ethical dilemma was resolved. This seems to indicate the phenomenon of AI model over-training manifesting in rigid responses.”

A Birthday Party and the Future of Tibetan Buddhism

The small town of Dharamshala, nestled in India’s Himalayan foothills saw days of celebration in honour of the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday. It has been his home and seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile since he fled Tibet during the failed 1959 uprising against Chinese Communist rule. The Buddhist leader’s advancing age throws into stark relief the disagreement between the Chinese government and the Tibetan exiled leader about who has the right to identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama after his death. In a recorded message he affirms that his office holds ‘sole authority’ to do so. Tibetan Buddhism involves the belief in a circle of rebirth. An enlightened spiritual leader like the Dalai Lama is thought to be able to see his past and future incarnations and can, when death nears, choose the place and time of his rebirth. The Dalai Lama has stated that his successor, the 15th Dalai Lama, will be born in “the free world”. However, he hopes that this event is still a long time in the future, as he is hoping to live in his current incarnation to the age of 130.

Leaving the USA

Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, has written extensively about fascism. Two of his books, How Propaganda Works (2015) and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), received much attention and have been translated into many languages. However, his most recent book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is arguably his most explosive philosophical study of current politics. An outspoken critic of the current US government, Stanley has said that "Fascism is what the Trump administration is now doing” and has now decided to go into exile to Toronto. He follows the example of Yale history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, a married couple, who joined Toronto University after the US presidential election. Snyder is an expert on Totalitarianism and the best-selling author of On Tyranny which details “America’s turn towards authoritarianism” under the first Trump presidency.

John Heywood Thomas

Rev Prof John Heywood Thomas, who died at the end of May at the grand age of 98, was a long-retired but still active theologian and philosopher. The son of a blacksmith, he was just leaving school in Llanelli when somebody gave him a copy of a book by Kierkegaard and it changed the whole trajectory of his life. (“So be careful, kids – don’t do philosophy! It’s not big and it’s not clever. OK, sometimes it’s clever.”) He was particularly impressed by Kierkegaard’s existentialist approach to Christian faith. He became a theologian of an existentialist kind, but his writing and teaching was marked by an analytical precision, as well as by modesty and good humour. When he was young, Kierkegaard was underappreciated in the Anglosphere, and Heywood Thomas’ 1957 book Subjectivity and Paradox was perhaps the first in English to really treat two of the Dane’s main philosophical ideas about religion in depth. Later he studied in New York under the German-American theologian Paul Tillich, who called him “my logical critic”; Heywood Thomas then in 1963 wrote the first in-depth appraisal of Tillich’s philosophy in English. He went on to have a long academic career, eventually as professor of theology at Nottingham University. Alongside that, he was a minister in a local church, and a font of encouragement to younger philosophers writing in the Welsh language. This continued long after his formal retirement from academia, and was partly why he was honoured by election to the Learned Society of Wales and the Gorsedd of Bards.