Article

Creed

Ethics

4 July 2024

5 min read

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.

Explainer

Atheism

Belief

Creed

Epistimology

12 June 2024

7 min read

The difference between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How we decide what is true rests on where we start from.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man and woman speaker on a stage greet and embrace each other.

Friends reunited.

UnHerd.

If you want a deep dive into some of the big questions of our time, and a fascinating clash of minds, just listen to the recent conversation between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In case you haven’t heard the story, as a young devoutly Muslim Somali-Dutch woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali turned her back on Islam to become a poster-child of the New Atheist movement, often mentioned in the same breath as the famous ‘four horsemen’ of the movement – Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. When she announced she had become a Christian (or, as she described herself, a ‘lapsed atheist’) in November 2023, it sent shock waves through atheist ranks. A public meeting with her old friend Richard Dawkins was therefore eagerly anticipated.

As the conversation began, Ali described a period in the recent past when she experienced severe and prolonged depression, which led her even to the point of contemplating suicide. No amount of scientific-based reasoning or psychological treatment was able to help, until she went to see a therapist who diagnosed her problem as not so much mental or physical but spiritual - it was what she called a ‘spiritual bankruptcy’. She recommended that Hirsi Ali might as well try prayer. And so began her conversion.

Of course, Dawkins was incredulous. He started out assuming that she had only had a conversion to a ‘political Christianity’, seeing the usefulness of her new faith as a bulwark against Islam, or as a comforting myth in tough times, because, surely, an intelligent person like her could not possibly believe all the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that vicars preach from the pulpit.

He was then somewhat taken aback by Ali’s confession that she did choose to believe the reality of the incarnation, that Jesus was the divine Son of God born of a virgin and that for a God who created the world, resurrecting his Son Jesus was no big deal. With a rueful shake of the head, Dawkins had to admit she was, to his great disappointment, a proper Christian.

Yet he was insistent he didn’t believe a word of it. The nub of the issue for Dawkins seemed to be his objection to the idea of ‘sin’. For him, all this is “obvious nonsense, theological bullshit… the idea that humanity is born in sin, and has to be cured of sin by Jesus being crucified… is a morally very unpleasant idea.”

Of course it’s unpleasant. Crucifixions generally were. It’s where we get our word excruciating from. And from the perspective of someone who has no sense whatsoever that they need saving, it is distasteful, embarrassing, not the kind of thing that you bring up in Oxford Senior Common Rooms, precisely because it is just that – unpleasant. I too find the notion that I am sinful, stubborn, deeply flawed, in desperate need of forgiveness and change unpleasant. I would much rather think I am fine as I am. Yet there are many things that are unpleasant but necessary - like surgery. Or changing dirty nappies. Or having to admit you are addicted to something.

And that is ultimately the difference between Dawkins and Ali. They are both as clever as each other; they have both read the same books; they both live similar lives; they know the same people. Yet Ayaan has been to a place where she knew she needed help, a help that no human being can provide, whereas Richard, it seems, has not.

It is like trying to measure the temperature of a summer’s day with a spanner. Spanners are useful, but not for measuring temperature.

Dawkins responded to Ali’s story by insisting that the vital question was whether Christianity was true, not whether it was consoling, pointing out that just because something is comforting does not mean it is true. True enough, but then it doesn’t mean it is not true either. The problem is, however, how we decide whether it is true. Dawkins seems to continue to think that science - test tubes, experiments and the rest - can tell one way or the other. Yet as the great Blaise Pascal put it:

If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being invisible and without limits he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is.

Science can’t really help us here. It is like trying to measure the temperature of a summer’s day with a spanner. Spanners are useful, but not for measuring temperature.

Whether Christianity makes sense or not cannot be determined by asking whether it is scientifically plausible or logically coherent – because that all depends on which scientific or logical scheme you are using to analyse it. It is all to do with the place from which you look at it, your ‘epistemic perspective’ to give it a fancy name. From the perspective of the strong, the super-confident, the sure-of-themselves, Christianity has never made much sense. When St Paul tried to explain it to the sophisticated first century pagans of Corinth – he concluded the same - it was ‘foolishness to the Greeks’.

Christianity makes no sense to someone who has not the slightest sense of their own need for something beyond themselves, someone who has not yet reached the end of their own resources, someone who has never experienced that frustrating tug in the other direction, that barrier which stands in the way when trying and failing to be a better version of themselves – that thing Christians call ‘sin’.

Why would you need a saviour if you don’t need saving? Would you even be able to recognise one when they came along? No amount of brilliant argument can convince the self-satisfied that a message centred on a man who is supposed to be God at the same, time, much less that same man hanging on a cross, is the most important news in the world. It is why Christianity continues to flourish in poorer than more affluent parts of the world, or at least in places where human need is closer to the surface.

She found the atheist paradigm that she used to believe, and that Dawkins still does, was no longer adequate for her.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described what he called ‘paradigm shifts’. They happen when a big scientific theory of the way things are gets stretched to breaking point, and people increasingly feel it no longer functions adequately as an explanation of the evidence at hand. It creaks at the seams, until an entirely new paradigm comes along that better explains the phenomena you are studying. The classic example was the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, which was not a small shift within an existing paradigm, but a wholesale change to a completely new way of looking at the world.

That is what Christians call conversion. This is what seems to have happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What marks her out from Dawkins is not that she has found a crutch to lean on, whereas he is mentally stronger, so doesn’t need one. It is that she found the atheist paradigm that she used to believe, and that Dawkins still does, was no longer adequate for her – it no longer could offer the kind of framework of mind and heart that could support her in moments of despair as well as in joy. It no longer made sense of her experience of life. It could no longer offer the kind of framework that can resist some of the great cultural challenges of the day. This was not the addition of a belief in God to an existing rationalist mindset. It was adopting a whole new starting point for looking at the world. When she first announced her conversion she wrote: “I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” This is a classic paradigm shift.

Of course, Dawkins can’t see this. He is still in the old paradigm, one that still makes perfect sense to him. It’s just that he thinks it must make sense to everyone. It is surely the one that all right-thinking people should take.

As the conversation continued, Ayaan Hirsi Ali often seemed like someone trying to describe the smell of coffee to someone without a sense of smell. Dawkins in turn was like a colourblind person deriding someone for trying to describe the difference between turquoise and pink, because of course, anyone with any sense knows there is no real difference between them.

No amount of proof or evidence will ever convince either that the other is wrong. They are using different methods to discover the truth, one more analytical and scientific, the other more personal and instinctive. The question is: which one gets you to the heart of things? It’s decision every one of us has to make.