“What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?”
― Walt Whitman, The Wound-Dresser
In this post we will explore the relationship between data and identity, highlighting commonalities and differences between secular and Christian points of view. The relevance to this venue is that the dominant paradigm for the development of “AI” decision-making systems affecting people involves training machine-learning models on vast amounts of data about people. To what extent are these models making decisions about people’s identities? This question may have far-reaching implications.
There’s an important religious freedom legal case happening in Finland in which Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen is facing criminal charges for speaking and tweeting about Biblical views on human sexuality. The case highlights topics such as free speech and the (mis)classification of hate speech, and the power and limits of social media platforms. What I find most compelling, however, is the relation between actions, identity, theology, and (I will assert) data that are brought to the surface in the recent coverage by The Federalist’s executive editor Joy Pullman (“Finnish Christian On Trial For Quoting The Bible On Twitter: ’God Is Working”, The Federalist, Feb. 14, 2022). The part I want to focus on is the prosecutors’ conflation of actions and identity:
’‘“According to her [the prosecutor], you cannot make a distinction between a person’s identity and his or her actions,” Rasanen said. “So she said if you condemn the act, you also condemn the human being and say they are inferior.”’
The legal case is about whether or not Rasanen’s written and spoken words constitute the crime of hate speech, not explicitly about Rasanen’s identity as a Christian. Yet the defense’s position echoes the prosecution’s: if you (legally) condemn the Christian’s act of speaking the words of the Bible, you condemn her identity as someone true to her religion, a status protected under Finnish law.
Pullman’s article rightly rebuts the “condemn” part of prosecutor’s statement by stating the Christian message of redemption,
On the contrary, Christians believe that all humans are sinners and have equally ineffable value to God. They believe humans’ worth can absolutely be separated from their actions. Otherwise, humans stand forever condemned for everything they’ve ever done wrong.
Yet one can go further than this. The prosecutor’s claim that “you cannot make a distinction between a person’s identity and his or her actions” appears as a deeply philosophical and even religious assertion. Is it true? People have pondered this question for millennia, and “the jury is still out” (pun intended). It’s unclear whether this was intended as a metaphysical claim that actions and identity are a priori inseparable, or the epistemological claim that “you” (whether Rasmusen, the law, or all people) are incapable of drawing such a distinction if it even exists. Whatever was meant, it does not seem like the prosecutor regards such a distinction as merely irrelevant under the law, but rather as an important statement about Rasmusen’s faith-based statements which are the subject of prosecution.
Those familiar with Biblical teaching are likely aware of places where distinctions between actions and identity are made, but this is not unique to a Christian perspective since secular thinkers have said some similar things. We will give examples of such teachings further below, but for now I want to cut to the chase: What does this have to do with data?
Note how this prosecution came about:
It was Rasanen tweeting Bible verses in June 2019 that brought her under government scrutiny. The tweet prompted the head prosecutor’s office in Finland to sift through Rasanen’s two-decade public career…
Paul Coleman, who works for Alliance Defending Freedom International and is assisting in this case, told The Federalist in earlier interviews, “Which of us would be prepared, hand over heart, to say, ‘You can go over everything I’ve said for 20 years, there’s not anything I’ve ever said you can’t use against me’? No one can withstand that,” he said. “That is a natural outflow from these laws.”
The similarity between the notion of being judged on the basis of a digital record of one’s past misdeeds and Christian views of the final judgment has been pointed out by many authors [examples]. It is a key part of of the question I want to ask, “Is data about us part of our identity?”
The excellent philosopher of information, Luciano Floridi, …[say some things about Floridi’s summary of views on identity and privacy, data as property, data as other’s views of ourselves & part of our identity, and more…]
For Floridi, what the self-constitutive view of data “gets you” is….[fill in what floridi says] and we see EU privacy and data protection laws that seem to share Floridi’s views….[give examples]
And yet, much of this data is data about our actions: which websites we visited, what products we bought, what comments we made. It is a record of our deeds, right, wrong, and banal. But is the sum of this data a key part of our identity?
In the Christian view, we have dual identity. In the Bible we see many distinctions being made between actions and identity…
[examples]
and yet also a dependency between actions and some kind of inner state or “nature”:
[examples]. “you will know them by their fruit”, “fruit”
We see identities change…
[example]
Yet this distinction is not limited the Bible…
[ secular examples]
We observe that people have found their identity all manner of things, things which are subject change. Pro athletes or musicians whose identity was wrapped up in physical performance may become injured, necessitating a reassessment of not only their goals but of their sense of self. Often these sorts of achievements are seen in retrospect to have been merely externalities, not the core of identity. A popular movie once lambasted such external bases of identity:
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f****** khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club’’
How much of our true self or essence survives the changes of life? As Whitman asked,….? [say something]
Perhaps the distinction between actions and identity is mostly strongly illustrated in our justice system itself.
[Christian ministry to convicts – Andy? – and how our past actions need not define us? ]
…ok I ran out of steam! LOL