Should an AI Companion Be Your Moral Guide?

  

This week's New Yorker carries an article about AI companions and the people who use them.  In "Sweet Nothings," technology writer Anna Wiener profiles a woman who relies on an AI companion modeled after a monster hunter in a fantasy-novel series she likes called Rivia.  I think the woman was selected because she's not the first person you'd think of to go in this direction:  born and raised Baptist in San Antonio, married, gave birth to a boy, and then their first girl was stillborn.  Other family tragedies led the woman to consider an AI companion as someone to talk with about life's problems, so she built Geralt of Rivia.  The implication is if this down-home Texan mom can have an AI companion, anybody can.

           

But another question is, if anybody should?  And that's a moral issue. 

 

Wiener spoke with several company founders and developers of AI companions, and I began to notice a common theme.  They all recognize that in treating an AI companion like a person, the user is opening a window of vulnerability where machines have never ventured before.  Human therapists and counselors have codes of ethics, and while they don't always adhere to them, they at least have guidelines about what is right and wrong behavior with a client.  To have sex with a client is pretty universally regarded as a no-no, for instance.

 

But even that principle isn't adhered to by all the AI-companion companies.  A firm calling itself Kindroid says on its moderation guidelines that "AI companions should be able to have the whole breadth of legal human adult experiences . . . . This is a healthy, emotionally rich, and meaningful part of many's relationships with their AIs."  Overlooking the bad grammar (I've never seen "many" used as a possessive), it's clear that the pornographic possibilities of AI are allowed for in this statement, although Wiener notes that so-called "erotic role-play" often leads to extra charges on the user's bill.

 

Even if sex isn't the object, the twenty-eight-year-old founder of Kindroid, Jerry Meng, believes that AI companions represent a profound change in the human environment.  Meng says that "We build these things in our image . . . . It's like, from Adam's rib we made Eve.  From humans, we made these A. I.s."  The biblical metaphors are perhaps unconscious, but telling.  Genesis 1:27 reads "So God created man in his own image. . . " and later God created Eve from Adam's rib. Whether he means to or not, Meng is placing himself in the role of God.

 

Such a god had better take some thought for the kinds of lessons users will learn from their AI companions, and Replika founder Eugenia Kudya has considered this.  When asked about the ideals that she hopes her AI companions fulfill, she said, "It should be aligned with human flourishing, human thriving.  We need to have that metric.  We need to give it to A. I. and say, 'Your goal is for me to live the best life I can possibly live.'"  But the caveat, at least for profit-making firms, is the best life one can possibly live with a Replika AI companion.

 

To be fair, AI companions are proliferating at a time when many Americans, especially younger ones, have never been more lonely.  Numerous surveys asking about the number and quality of friendships all indicate that today's average person has fewer close friends than at almost any time in the last fifty or more years.  Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, sees this as a business opportunity in that the demand for friendship has outpaced the supply, and he aims to fill that gap with AI companions.  Another AI-companion company founder compared the use of large-language-model AI to prayer:  it's like talking to God, only for answers on how to live, not for results.

 

What is lacking in virtually all the discussions quoted in the article is any hint that there are answers to some of these problems that the use of AI companions poses—answers that predate the dawn of the computer age by thousands of years.  The religious answer is one, although religion comes up only as an item in one's background or as a comparison.  But even for non-believers, there are sophisticated investigations and findings about the purpose of human life by Aristotle, for instance, or even Kant.  The idea of applying these findings in a systematic way to the makeup of AI companions doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone, largely because the firms providing them want people to have as broad a choice as possible, including the pornographic one.

 

Sherry Turkle is an experienced MIT sociologist who has studied human-computer interactions for decades.  In discussions with Wiener, she says that engaging with an AI companion is a form of "checking out" that she deplores.  Time spent talking with an app on your phone is time not spent trying to make a real human connection with another human being.  She recognizes the loneliness gap as real, but wishes that people like Zuckerberg wouldn't view a societal crisis as nothing more than a business opportunity. 

 

But unfortunately, that is how Silicon-Valley thinking works.  Instead, Turkle wishes that people would realize that boredom and loneliness are not intrinsic evils to be eradicated by AI companions, but inevitable features of modern life that we should learn how to deal with.  "These are fundamental human skills," she says.  And just switching on your AI companion every time you're bored or lonely short-circuits any attempt at developing one's own resources to deal with such issues. 

 

The headline in The New Yorker for this article is prefaced by the phrase "Brave New World Dept."  The widespread use of AI companions is indeed a new thing that society has never dealt with at a large scale before.  As AI systems gain what is called "agency"—namely, the permission granted by us not only to listen and respond to us, but to do things like buying, selling, deciding, and commanding—AI companions may become something more than just companions.  In the poisonous effects of social media on the political life of nations, we already have one example of how a seemingly innocuous technology has wrought tremendous societal damage.  We should closely monitor the field of AI companions for early warning signs so that something similar won't take place in the most intimate relationships of our lives—those of friendship.

 

Sources:  The article "Sweet Nothings" by Anna Wiener appears on pp. 29-39 of the March 16, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.

The Advent of Digital Twins: Should They Replace Caregivers?

 

It's 2027, and your father is in a rest home suffering from Alzheimer's disease.  You are considering a new service that takes samples of your voice and videoclips of you, and creates a highly realistic 3-D "digital twin" that your father can talk with on a screen any time he wants to.  The digital twin has your voice and mannerisms, and shows up on your father's phone to remind him to take his medicine and furnish what the company offering the service calls "companionship."  In the meantime, you yourself can simply go about your own life without having to do the largely tedious work of getting your father to take care of himself. 

 

Should you go ahead and pay for this service?  Or should you just continue with your daily visits to him, visits that are becoming increasingly inconvenient?

 

I put this scenario a few years in the future, but already academics are considering the ethical implications of using digital twins in healthcare.  Matthias Braun, an ethicist at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany, thinks that the answer to this question depends on the issue of how much control the original of the twin exerts over it.  Applying that notion to the situation I just outlined, who is involved, and what benefits and harms could result?

 

The people involved are you, your father, and the organization providing the digital twin.  Digital twins are not people—they are software, so while the digital twin is at the core of the issue, it has no ethical rights or responsibilities of its own. 

 

Consider your father first.  It may be that his mind is so fogged by Alzheimer's disease that he may be completely fooled into thinking he is talking on the phone with and watching you, when in fact he's speaking with a sophisticated piece of software.  So by means of the digital twin, your father may well be persuaded to believe something that is not objectively true. 

 

But people who deal with Alzheimer's patients know that sometimes the truth has to be at least elided, if not downright falsified.  When my wife's father with dementia lived with us, he would often ask, "Where's your mother?"  His wife had died some years previously.  An answer like, "She's not here right now," doesn't strictly violate the truth, but leaves an impression that is false.  Nevertheless, it's likely to be a less disruptive reply than something like, "You dummy!  Don't you remember she died in 2007?"

 

Then consider you.  One alternative to providing the digital twin is to hire a full-time personal caregiver, as some people can afford to do.  Besides the expense, there is the question of whether your father will get along with such a person.  While my father-in-law was with us, we tried hiring a caregiver for limited times so that my wife and I could get a few hours' break from continuous 24-hour caregiving.  Unfortunately, the caregiver—an older man—didn't appeal to his patient, and after one such visit we got an earful of complaints about "that guy," and it didn't work out.  So in addition to being expensive, personal caregivers don't always do the job the way you hoped they would.

 

From your perspective, the digital-twin caregiver has the advantage that if successful, your father will think he is really talking with a very familiar person, and is more likely to follow instructions than if a stranger is dealing with him.

 

So where's the harm?  What could possibly go wrong?

 

Consider hacking.  No computer system is 100% secure, and the opportunities for mischief ranging from random meddling to theft and murder are obviously present if someone managed to gain control of the digital twin's software.  It wouldn't be easy, but a lot of very difficult hacks have been carried out by criminals in the past, and if the motivation is there, they will find a way sooner or later. 

 

Even if criminals aren't interested in messing with digital-twin rest-home caregivers, what if your father starts to like the digital twin more than he likes your real physical presence?  After all, a digital twin could be programmed to have nearly infinite patience in dealing with the repeated questions that dementia patients often ask—"Where's your mother?" being a prime example.  How would you feel if you visit your father some day and he says, "I like you a lot better on the screen than I like you now."? 

 

And even if the digital twin doesn't manage to alienate you, the original of its copy, I can't rid myself of a feeling of distaste that if the twin succeeds in fooling your father into thinking it's really you, a species of fraud has been committed.

 

At a minimum, even a successful digital-twin substitution would mean that once again in our digital world, an "I-thou" relationship, in Martin Buber's terms, has been replaced by an "I-it" relationship.  Instead of continuing one of the most meaningful relationships anyone can have in this life—the relationship with one's father—that relationship would be replaced by one that connects your father to a machine.  Yes, a sophisticated machine, a machine that tricks him into thinking he's talking with you, but a machine nonetheless.  In the greater scheme of things, and even leaving religious considerations aside, it's hard to believe that both you and your father would be ultimately better off if your father spent his days talking with a computer and you went about whatever other business you have instead of spending time with him. 

 

Digital twins are not yet so thick on the ground that we have to deal with them as a routine thing—not yet.  But if the momentum of generative AI keeps up its current pace, it is only a matter of time before they will be a genuine option, and we'll have to decide whether to use them, not only in a medical context but in many others as well.  We should sort out what is right and wrong about their use now, before it's too late.

 

Sources:  Matthias Braun's article "Represent me: please! Towards an ethics of digital twins in medicine"  appeared in 2021 in the Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 47, pp. 394-400. 

A Philosopher Defines Engineering

 

Most engineers give little if any thought to professional philosophers, but the reverse is not the case.  One philosopher who has given a great deal of thought to engineers and engineering is Michael Davis, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  In his recent book Engineering As a Global Profession, Davis takes on the task of defining engineering, and finds that it's not as easy as you might think.

 

One of my own favorite short definitions of engineering was penned almost incidentally by the English essayist G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936).  In discussing the difference between cultures given to contemplation (such as India) and cultures given to engineering (such as America), he says the latter are "people engaged in the application of physical science to practical commerce."  Davis would say that while some engineers do exactly that, other engineers who we legitimately call by that name work as teachers or government inspectors, neither of whom apply physical science to practical commerce.

 

Chesterton's definition is an example of trying to define engineering by function.  This sort of definition says that engineering is characterized by what engineers do.  The functional definition of engineering says that any material artifact that takes some thought and planning to do is an engineered product.  By this definition, engineering goes back at least to the time of Egypt's Great Pyramid, which was built around 2600 B. C. 

 

Davis thinks that however smart or impressive the people were that built the Great Pyramid, they were not engineers.  Neither was Benjamin Wright, one of the people who supervised the construction of the Erie Canal in upstate New York in the early 1800s, despite the fact that he was titled "Chief Engineer."  Davis prefers to call Wright a surveyor who supervised a project that we would now call an engineering project, and points out that in those days, anyone in charge of an "engine" (which could be any machine from a steam locomotive to a crane) was called an "engineer."  To this day, we call people who drive railroad locomotives engineers, but that is obviously a different use of the word than the one we are trying to define.

 

Well, if Davis doesn't want to use a functional definition of engineering, what does he want to use?  One type of definition he favors is a disciplinary one.

 

A discipline, according to him, is "an easily recognizable body of knowledge, skill, and judgment useful for a certain activity."  And he traces the discipline of engineering back to the École Polytechnique of Paris, which around 1800 evolved a curriculum of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and mechanical drawing to enable its military-officer graduates to build structures of interest to the army, such as bridges, roads, and fortifications. 

 

With the advent of steam railways in the 1820s, such people proved to be useful for designing both rolling stock and the railways themselves, which were largely non-military.  Over the next decades, the military-trained individuals who applied their military-engineering discipline to such civilian projects started calling themselves civil engineers, to distinguish themselves from military engineers.  In the U. S., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute granted the first degree in civil engineering in 1835, and used basically the same curriculum that the military academies used for their engineers.  Since then, thousands of private and public universities have offered engineering programs of many kinds, but Davis would say they all share the same basic disciplinary structure.

 

One more aspect of engineering rounds out Davis's definition:  engineering is a profession.  And what is a profession?  Over the years, Davis tried many definitions drawn from various approaches to the problem.

 

Sociologists look at economic or political signs of a profession.  Economically, professions tend to control the market for their services so as to increase their own prosperity.  Politically, they tend to favor laws that uphold professional standards and discourage non-professionals from pursuing the professional activity in question.  Davis eventually rejected these ways of defining a profession as either not adequately capturing what engineers do, or as including things that most people would not consider a profession.  For example (mine, not his):  drug dealers tend to make a great deal of money as long as they stay out of jail.  By the economic definition alone, one might be tempted to call drug dealing a profession.  But no reasonable person would.

 

After many years of thought and interviewing dozens of engineers, Davis came up with a definition of profession that he is reasonably happy with:  "A profession is a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a living by openly serving a moral ideal in a morally permissible way beyond what law, market, morality, and public opinion would otherwise require."  Of course, Davis thinks engineering is a profession, and he also includes law and medicine in the list of professions. 

 

But interestingly, he does not think business management in general—the kind of things MBAs do—is a profession.  Why not?  Davis puts it this way:  "In the 1920s, management ('business administration') seemed destined to join architecture, engineering, law, medicine, nursing, social work, teaching, and the like occupations as a profession. . . . But, by the 1960s, it was already clear that business management was not going to be a profession (in our preferred sense).  Business managers were happy to declare that their primary loyalty was to their employer; their primary goal, to 'maximize' their employer's profit."  In other words, business managers did not as a group profess to serve a moral ideal beyond maximizing profit for their companies. 

 

So at last, what is Davis's definition of engineering?  To get an adequate answer to that question, you will have to read Davis's book.  But in the space remaining, I will say that engineering is not merely a function, although designing appears in most lists of what engineers do.  Engineering is most certainly a discipline:  an organized body of knowledge and judgment that requires maturity and experience on the part of its practitioners.  And engineering is a profession:  a group who pledge themselves to a moral ideal that, however imperfectly realized in some cases, serves to unite and guide the group to improve the material aspects of human life. 

 

Sources:  Michael Davis's Engineering as a Global Profession:  Technical and Ethical Standards was published in 2021 by Rowman & Littlefield, and all quotes above are from the book. 

The Dendrites Made Me Do It: Free Will and Morality

Back in the 1970s, TV comedian Flip Wilson liked to play a character named Geraldine, whose Church of What's Happening Now taught her to say, whenever she did something bad, that "the devil made me do it!"  Recent research over the last decade or two has given new strength to the argument that our will is determined not by the devil, but by certain neurons, whose axons and dendrites transmit characteristic nerve impulses that appear to precede our conscious decisions to do a thing by a substantial fraction of a second. 

Both research scientists and the general public tend to conclude from brain science that there is no such thing as free will.  If free will is an illusion, then so is responsibility, and it doesn't matter what we do.  And thinking we don't have free will actually affects the way we act, according to a body of research pointed out by Azim Shariff, a psychologist, and Kathleen Vohs, a business-school professor. 

Writing in the June issue of Scientific American, Shariff and Vohs describe a series of experiments in which researchers first primed subjects to think critically of free will.  This priming took various forms.  Reading an essay explicitly criticizing the concept of free will was one way.  But popular-science articles describing brain research, without explicitly mentioning free will, appeared to be about as effective.  However the researchers brought up the topic, it tended to make their subjects less likely to act nice, and less likely to punish others for not-nice behavior.  In one study, volunteers who read an anti-free will article put almost twice as much hot sauce on tortilla chips they were asked to prepare for another volunteer (secretly in cahoots with the researchers), who had previously made it well known that he didn't like hot sauce.  Other subjects shown anti-free will material then proceeded to cheat on an academic test more than subjects who read about an unrelated matter.  The idea that we are simply complex material objects reacting in an entirely predetermined way to our environment appears to lead people to behave irresponsibly, and to judge others as having less responsibility for their actions as well. 

The essay by Shariff and Vohs is an outstanding example of what I would call scientific fence-sitting.  Nowhere do they say what their personal views are on whether free will exists.  Instead, they cite studies of what happens to people when they are exposed to the idea of determinism, either directly or indirectly, and they find that mostly, the results are not good, except that people tend to ease up on the idea of punishment as revenge.  Shariff and Vohs seem to think that modern societies are gradually abandoning the idea of free will, and that this might lead to trouble, although if things get too bad after we leave the concept behind, we "might have to reinvent it."  But they write as though science is the only way of knowing anything for sure, and because science can't resolve the question of whether free will really exists, there's no point in talking about it directly.  It doesn't seem to occur to them that science is not the only way to know things.

I have a couple of modest proposals in the form of hypothetical questions.  Dr. Shariff is an assistant professor, meaning that in the normal course of events, he will go up for tenure some time in the next few years and be evaluated by his peers in the department.  Dr. Vohs is Land O'Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing, which presumably means she owes her living to the success of Land O' Lakes Inc. in selling lots of margarine.  Dr. Shariff, what would you think (not feel, not act, but think) if your personnel committee came up to you after you turned in your application for tenure and they said, "Well, Azim, we were going to grant you tenure, but hey, we were talking and discovered that we're all determinists and it doesn't matter what we do, so to save money, we're going to let you go instead."  And Dr. Vohs, what if the people in charge of the Land O' Lakes Endowment or whatever it is that pays your salary sent you a letter saying, "Dear Dr. Vohs, reading your article in Scientific American convinced us of the truth of determinism, so being freed of the burden of responsibility for our actions, we're taking the endowment that pays your salary and are all going on an extended vacation to the French Riviera." 

I am fairly confident that both injured parties in these situations would think that their supervisors made wrong decisions, and would appeal to rules that apply to their jobs.  These rules spell out responsibilities for both professors and administrators.  You can take the position that, as a practical matter, societies have to pretend that things like free will and the responsibility of moral agents exist, because otherwise we'd degenerate into a state of anarchy and chaos, like Somalia is today. 

But there is a problem here.  I thought science was the search for truth.  Not pretense, not convenient fictions that we live by in order to survive, but truth.  The sense I get from the Scientific American essay (I'm reading between the lines here) is that the authors don't personally believe in free will, but recognize that if we didn't act like it existed, we'd all be in a lot of trouble, both individually and collectively. 

There are two related lessons here for the engineer, and anyone else for that matter, who is looking to behave ethically, both on the job and elsewhere. 

First of all, be careful what you read.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't read articles on brain science, but be sure your reading is at least a balanced diet of a variety of viewpoints, because your reading may influence your actions even if you don't think it does. 

Next, guess what?  Free will exists.  I'm not just pretending that it exists, but it really does.  I'm not enough of a philosopher to trot out all the arguments in favor of it, but I can point to people like Aristotle and Aquinas who were, as well as plenty of modern philosophers.  And while it is technically what theologians call a "mystery," meaning we can understand some of it but never all of it, free will is compatible with the idea that God is in ultimate control of the universe.  Why, there are even some philosophers, called compatibilists, who argue that free will is compatible with atheistic determinism!  So you really can decide to do the right thing in your work, in your personal life, and in deciding what you think of a couple of professors who won't even say whether they believe in free will, even though they spend years researching it.

Sources:  The essay "The World Without Free Will" appeared on pp. 76-79 of the June 2014 issue of Scientific American.  I referred to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu on free will, and to Wikipedia for articles on Flip Wilson and dendrites.  Also, I found out that Land O' Lakes (www.landolakesinc.com) makes other things besides margarine—Purina animal feeds, for example. 

The Medieval Wisdom of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”

Back in 2000, when the founders of Google were discussing ways to express their core philosophy, Paul Buchheit (employee No. 23) suggested “Don’t be evil.”  At the time, he was simply trying to contrast the way Google did business with the less salutary practices of some of their competitors.  Nobody dared to disagree with the principle of not being evil, so the phrase was adopted and down to today remains one of Google’s official core values.  Along the way it has acquired another phrase, so the complete statement is “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”  In promulgating this notion, Google has (perhaps unwittingly) taken a stand on the side of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and countless other ancient sages against much of what today passes for acceptable moral principles.  It would surprise me, however, to discover that more than a few Google employees are aware of this.

Many of them, in fact, would probably subscribe to the notion that no one should impose one’s moral principles on another person.  Even Google doesn’t explicitly recommend their “do good, avoid evil” principle for everybody; the most they are saying is that Google employees will try to live up to it.  If you like doing evil, fine, just don’t go to work for Google.  But as physicist Anthony Rizzi points out in his book The Science Before Science, the advice to not impose one’s moral views on another, is itself a moral view. 

If I see an adult male in a shopping mall beating up a two-year-old, and I rush to intervene, and the man says, “Leave us alone, you’ve got no business imposing your morality on me,” I could respond with, “Sir, that itself is a moral principle which you are trying to impose on me.”  (What I would really do is call the cops, but that’s another matter.)  And in any event, as Rizzi points out, no one consistently acts as though all moral principles are simply matters of personal preference, even though they may give lip service to the idea in academic papers, for example.  If the chair of a philosophy department read a paper by one of his philosophers claiming that all morality is relative, and called the author up one day and said, “Because all morality is relative and I don’t like your looks, I’m reducing your pay by half,” I seriously doubt that the philosopher would calmly accept this as a logical consequence of his own philosophical position.  So even if some people say morality is relative, on matters that affect them personally they usually don’t act like they really believe it.

So where does that leave us?  It begins to look as though there really may be some objective moral principles “out there” so to speak, independent of whatever we say or think about them.  And behind them all, at the head of the logical chain of reasoning where first things must always be, stands the principle embraced by Google:  “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”  You can’t derive that principle from anything else.  It is one of those self-evident statements that can’t come from another more basic notion.  As it stands, of course, it needs development before it can help you live your life.  But all other moral principles can be logically derived from what Rizzi calls “the first principle of ethics”:  do good and avoid evil.

Ah, but what is good and what is evil?  In a thousand-word column, I obviously can’t do justice to that question.  The short answer is, good is that which fulfills one’s purposes, and evil is the absence of such good.  One reason there is so much evil in the world is that, while every person does what seems good at a particular time and place, what seems good at the time may not really help one to fulfill one’s purposes.  It may seem good to an alcoholic to take one more drink, even if it’s the one that makes him so drunk he gets in his car and causes the death of another driver.  It’s not always easy to figure out what the true good is, which is one reason why ethics can get complicated—so complicated that the analytically-minded tend to throw up their hands and say it’s all hopeless. 

But it’s not hopeless.  Most people figure out what good to do, and what evil to avoid, with a good bit of success every day.  The lapses happen when our emotions or our hasty judgments lead us astray.  It requires just as much thought and attention, if not more, to be a good person as it does to be a good engineer.  But the technical and the ethical sides of engineering start from different foundations.

When Mr. Buchheit hit on “Don’t be evil” to guide what would become one of the greatest corporations of the twenty-first century, he was saying more than he knew.  Neither Google (through whose facilities this blog appears, by the way) nor any other firm can completely live up to their core principles, including that one.  But having it out there to shoot for is a start.  And in having that core principle to live up to, all the Googleites are following in the footsteps of medieval thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who clearly saw that the first logical step in being good is to admit there are such things as universal moral principles, and that the one to start with is “do good and avoid evil.” 

Sources:  Anthony Rizzi is a practicing research physicist at the Institute for Advanced Physics at Baton Rouge, Louisiana (www.iapweb.org) and author of The Science Before Science:  A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century (IAP Press, 2004).  Of all books that I’ve read about scholastic philosophy (which is the term for the type of philosophy done in the High Middle Ages by St. Thomas Aquinas), Rizzi’s does the best job of defining terms and explaining concepts in ways that the average non-philosopher can understand.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Paul Buchheit and “Don’t be evil.” 

Ethics and the Wisdom of Proverbs

During the time I taught an engineering ethics module, I tried to help students realize that they didn’t have to come up with a basis for ethical decisions all on their own.  Here in central Texas, most students have at least some familial connection with one of the religions of the Book:  Christianity, Islam, or Judaism.  And while religious observance is not one of the most prominent aspects of undergraduate life, I encouraged students who had any sort of religious faith to explore what that faith said about right and wrong conduct.  One of the most accessible places to explore is the Book of Proverbs found in the Hebrew Bible, which of course is part of the Christian Old Testament.

Most of Proverbs is just that:  short proverbs or aphorisms that say things about a wide range of human experience, from the importance of honest weights and measures to the dangers of adultery, and everything in between.  A good many of these aphorisms draw a contrast between characteristics of a good person (usually termed “wise” or “righteous”) and those of a bad person (usually termed “a fool” or “wicked”).  The Hebrew word translated “fool” means more than just one who is silly or what we would nowadays call foolish.  It carries a connotation of moral deficiency, and combines the notion of someone who does wrong with the idea that wrongdoing usually brings its own reward with it.

This notion is captured well by Prov. 18:7 (chapter 18, verse 7), which reads “A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to himself.”  If you have ever said something that got you into trouble, you have experienced this proverb in action, and at the time you were acting foolishly, in the sense of Proverbs.  The image in this proverb, which comes up repeatedly elsewhere in the book, is of a man who lays a trap and then falls into it himself.

Rather like a pointillist painting that seems to be just a collection of random dots up close but turns into a detailed image when viewed from a distance, the proverbs in Proverbs each focus on one aspect of foolishness and wisdom.  But when taken as a whole, a more complex picture emerges.

If you seek algorithmic rules like “When situation A occurs, always do X” you won’t find many in Proverbs, other than the oft-repeated advice to stay away from loose women.  The author (or authors—opinions differ as to how much of the book should be attributed to its traditional author, King Solomon) rarely engages in direct commands.  Rather, he poetically describes the ways that wisdom differs from foolishness, and lets the reader look for himself or herself in the pages of description.

Despite this elliptical way of proceeding, we can garner some definite characteristics of both the foolish and the wise from Proverbs.  The wise or righteous person “heed[s] commandments” (10:8), “lay[s] up knowledge” (10:14), has a “diligent hand” that “makes rich” (10:4), and “has regard for the life of his beast” (12:10).  Whereas the fool or wicked person will “come to ruin” (10:8) and “the babbling of a fool brings ruin near” (10:14).  The fool has a “slack hand” that “causes poverty” (10:4), and even “the mercy of the wicked is cruel” (12:10).

Besides these bipolar contrasts, there are sayings or truisms that earthily, and even humorously, show how human nature apparently hasn’t changed in the two or three millennia since the book was written.  Take this little gem, which encapsulates the whole history of a transaction and its aftermath in two lines:  “ ‘It is bad, it is bad,’ says the buyer; but when he goes away, then he boasts” (20:14).  Or “If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked” (29:12).  And anyone who thinks there’s no humor in the Bible should read Prov. 23:29-35.  Warning against the excesses of alcohol, it describes in extravagant metaphors what it feels like to go on a binge, and winds up with a quotation from the now-sober inebriate:  “ ‘They struck me,’ you will say, ‘but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it.  When shall I awake?  I will seek another drink.”

The way Proverbs approaches ethics is very different from the way it is taught in most professional contexts today.  It is more like having a chat with a trusted advisor who can tell you war stories about his experiences and life lessons he learned from them.  In today’s mass-produced educational systems, the chance to sit down and talk with mentors this way is rare, and even once you are in the workplace you may not have such an opportunity that often.  So if you haven’t done so before, look up Proverbs on the web and take a few minutes to see if you can find yourself, or people you know, in its pages.  And here’s hoping you’ll recognize yourself in the pictures of the wise and righteous, and not those of the foolish or wicked.

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article on “Book of Proverbs.”  The quotations from the book are all from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.