Whistleblowing: what if your CEO is a Caesar?

What are the boundaries of legitimate protest?

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

On a conference stage, a seated speaker leans back and opines

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons .

If you discovered that the company you worked for was doing work that posed an existential risk to humanity, would you consider yourself entitled – or perhaps morally obliged – to blow the whistle?

This issue provoked a recent open letter from current and former employees at AI companies including Sam Altman’s OpenAI, asserting that the laws protecting whistleblowers are inadequate because they typically focus on illegal activity – and the AI companies concerned are doing nothing which is (yet) illegal. It called for companies to take a number of steps (including not entering into or enforcing agreements prohibiting the raising of risk-related concerns).

Some might say that if an employee takes the company’s money, that money should buy loyal silence, and that if the public interest demands a different approach, the remedy is the extension to risk-related concerns of existing whistleblower legislation. But unless and until that legislation is extended, should we applaud conscience-driven breaches of contract?

What about breaches of the criminal law for morally justifiable reasons – for instance to draw attention to the risks that the protestors say are associated with climate change?

The reality of modern corporate governance means that the CEO may be more practically Caesarean than a country’s government.

Christian debate about these issues has traditionally turned on two Bible texts. Paul, in writing to those in a Roman church, declares: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed….the authority… is the agent of God.’ And Jesus, in Matthew's gospel, advises us to ‘render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.’

Who are the ‘authorities’ spoken of by Paul? Who is the modern Caesar spoken of by Jesus? Presumably in each case – in a parliamentary democracy – it is the combined legislature and executive of the day. Perhaps, these days, we should translate ‘Caesar’ as ‘the social contract’. But does this mean that (if we take these injunctions seriously) we should regard ourselves as bound not to commit criminal offences (which are offences against the state), but should feel no corresponding inhibition about breaching private law obligations, such as those owed under contracts of employment? My instinct is to say that this is indeed what it means, but that is not self-evident. After all, much employment law is statutory – an emanation of Parliament, and the reality of modern corporate governance means that the CEO may be more practically Caesarean than a country’s government.

Rendering the right thing to Caesar in a theocracy such as Byzantium might mean something very different in a modern tyranny or a democracy.

Should Christians, though, feel constrained by these scriptural passages? Both Paul and Jesus seemed to think that there was little point in establishing lasting social, legal or governmental structures because the end times were just around the corner. Jesus thought that some of his audience would still be alive when the Son of Man returned to complete the messianic project without any help from any secular governor. Paul’s belief that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand was behind his advice that the unmarried (unless they really couldn’t stay celibate) should remain unmarried and get on with the urgent business of preparing for the imminent in-rush of the true Kingdom. Both Jesus and Paul were dramatically wrong about the chronology. Why, then, should we take seriously advice about the regulation of society that was based on their mistake? Should Paul’s advice to those Romans be read as pragmatism – intended by him to convince rulers that Christians wouldn’t make trouble, and that therefore the Christians should be left alone? He may have thought that a shabby compromise with secular powers didn’t matter much because it wouldn’t last long.

Even if these texts are in some meaningful sense authoritative, what do they mean for modern life? As ever, the devil (and potentially the angel) is in the detail, and Paul and Jesus left the church to work out the relevant details. There is no consensus. Rendering the right thing to Caesar in a theocracy such as Byzantium might mean something very different in a modern tyranny or a democracy. Only in a few situations is the correct answer obvious: no one would doubt that those martyred for refusing to worship the Caesar of the day had made the (or at least a) right choice. But as soon as we move away from such cases the waters get muddy. Would Paul have denounced Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the plot to kill Hitler? If so, would he have been right? It cannot be seriously argued that it is illegitimate to protest against the policies of the day, any more than it could be suggested that Paul requires us to cast our vote in favour of the currently ruling party.

What, then, are the boundaries of legitimate protest?

Suppose that AI really does pose a threat to the whole of humanity. Does ‘rendering to God’ not then demand, in a private law context, that the whistle be blown, even if it involves a breach of a contractual obligation? It seems at least arguable.

Is a breach of the criminal law – for instance in the case of climate change protestors – different? It may well be.

In England the law has evolved a nuanced approach to ethically motivated criminality. That approach was recently displayed in the sentencing of five Extinction Rebellion activists for criminal damage to the premises of a bank. The judge accepted that each defendant believed that the bank was culpably involved in funding fossil fuel extraction projects, and that such projects endangered the planet. He noted that Lord Hoffman had said: ‘People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history [for instance the suffragettes]. It is the mark of a civilized community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind. But there are conventions which are generally accepted by the law-breakers on one side and the law-enforcers on the other. The protestors behave with a sense of proportion and do not cause excessive damage or inconvenience. And they vouch the sincerity of their beliefs by accepting the penalties imposed by the law.’ In return, he went on, the state behaves with restraint, and the judiciary imposes sentences which take the conscientious motives into account.

This approach, said the sentencing judge, amounts to a ‘social compact between the courts and protestors.’

Perhaps, in the realm of the criminal law, that sort of social compact encodes the relevant moral and theological principles as well as anything can.

Events

Belief

Creed

Digital

Wisdom

26 September 2024

6 min read

The wisdom of living with the question not googling the quick answer

Are we trading wisdom for apparent certainty?

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A person sits on a window sill with one raise knee.

In much of the work I’ve been involved in, whether writing, coaching, hillwalking, local politics, or international development, I’ve learned to ask questions I don’t have answers to, and sometimes neither do the people I’m with. We sit with the question, decide whether it’s the right one, try to discern what else emerges in our peripheral vision as we focus on it. It takes effort to come to something like an answer, and in doing so, we peel off layers of unknowing. It has taken practice, and it can be slow work. But in searching for good questions, I see they can be an entry point into not just information but wisdom too. And there are many places that are hungry for wisdom.

I longed for better questions and more curiosity when I was a district councillor. Curiosity that made space for residents to share their stories and opinions, curiosity about different political positions and what might happen if we work across divides, about what might be possible if we could get past the way things had always been and imagine what they could become. But the desire to save face, to be seen to be in control, was strong, and I felt it often got in the way of real conversation. To be committed to the process more than the product takes courage, I think. The courage of uncertainty, of saying, “I don’t know”, of putting humility and honesty before status. Sitting with questions can be difficult, perhaps even feeling like a luxury, but they show us ourselves and the world a bit more clearly, offering a pathway to relationship, to collaboration, to humanity, to wisdom.

I have been thinking about the temptation to trade the wisdom of questions for the apparent certainty of instant answers, even wrong answers. It is a temptation that, in our age of one-click everything and the importance of image, is only quickening. It is a temptation that I have been thinking about, wondering if it started with that old temptation in the Garden of Eden. Staring at a painting of Adam and Eve in the Prado gallery a while back, I wondered whether that original temptation set us on a path of instant information but also of depleted wisdom.

As I peered into the painting, a thought sparked: what if God told Adam and Eve they could eat fruit from any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he wanted us to stay ignorant or innocent (something that Philip Pullman explores in his Northern Lights books) but because he knew it was too easy for us to eat from that tree. He wanted us to live, and to search for knowing and wisdom ourselves. Eating the fruit would bypass experience, there’d be no need to develop muscles of thinking and discernment. And he wanted us to be wise, to keep creating and tending the world with him. When those first pulled-from-the-earth humans ate the fruit, it was like us still-dependent-on-the-earth humans asking Artificial Intelligence to write us an essay: we might get what we want, but we’ve bypassed the experience of thinking, creating, discerning what’s ours to say.

This analogy creaks when pulled too far, but it lingers all the same. There’s a quote I’ve long appreciated, from the biologist E.O.Wilson:

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Picking the fruit, becoming reliant on AI, gives us information but perhaps not the ability to think, and not the wisdom to make good choices. God wants us to be wise. The Bible’s Book of James says we can ask for wisdom. It is not withheld from us; it is not hidden. It’s everywhere, waiting to be called on.

There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil.

It’s so easy to find answers now — Google solves problems and democratises access to information, unless of course you’re in a part of the world that has no digital access. In rural mid Devon and in rural Zambia, both places I’ve worked deeply with communities, you can’t simply access an online meeting or find the answer to a question you might have. Sometimes this feels a life-giving challenge: it increases the need for relationship, for trust, for community conversation. Other times is hinders progress: it means people can’t access jobs, or basic health knowledge, or government decisions that affect them. Google has changed who can access the world, how we interact with it, how we think and learn. Historically, people memorised poetry and scripture and news. The printing press changed that; words were pulled from minds and printed on paper. Our online existence has accelerated that: I don’t need to stretch my memory if I don’t want — I can find and store what I need digitally. We’ve outsourced our memory, and I wonder whether we’re also outsourcing our capacity to think and discern.

In doing so, we risk disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our places. No longer do we need to rely on each other for knowing and wisdom — we can trust faceless digital forces that profit from us doing so. We risk too our unique ability to think creatively, to discern good sources, to think deeply and with nuance about a topic. If AI learns from everything that has been, it can synthesise and perhaps even extrapolate from that and project forward, but it can’t creatively imagine. It can’t reflect and speak wisdom.

There is an ease and convenience to Google, to AI. There was an ease and convenience to picking the fruit to gain knowledge. But we are not called to ease and convenience. I think we are called to love, to care for our neighbours, and these things are necessarily inconvenient. Digital access to information is a tool, a resource, a gift that benefits many of us in many ways. But it could easily blunt our humanity, becoming a temptation that bypasses the work of truly living. There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil. With information available at the tug of a fruit — a click, a download, a request to an artificial intelligence — I am curious how our ability to sit with questions will change, whether we’ll feel beauty or fear in not having all the answers, whether we’ll lose our ability to discern, and to “have faith in what we do not see.”

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery.

Jesus calls us to questions, to relationship, to love, not to answers that might be easily won but little interrogated. He knew that questions, not answers, were often the best response to questions. Questions to sit with, to hold up as a mirror, to walk as a path to wisdom. He asked a lot of them. Who do you say I am? How many loaves do you have? Do you love me? What do you want? Why are you afraid? The Bible records Jesus asking questions, and sometimes offering answers too. But the point often seems to be the question itself, giving endless chances for people to question their assumptions, and their judgements, and to deepen their faith and make it personal. In doing so, Jesus offered a path to deeper and more meaningful knowledge of God, the world, others, and ourselves. And by asking questions he gave dignity to people, listening deeply to them, loving them, calling them into themselves.

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery. And we have companions as we do this: Jesus, early Christian mystics, prayer, the Psalms, each other – these are all places I turn to dig deeper into the knowing that comes through unknowing. To live with questions and within mystery, to listen deeply to each other, to speak the language of soul rather than certainty, might be difficult and countercultural. But in an age where the future is becoming less certain despite the whole world seemingly at our fingertips, I think it is where our hope is. After all, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”