Sentience is hot these days. Partly because of the development of impressive new AI systems, everyone seems to be asking: How do we know if something is sentient? 

While consciousness means simply having a subjective point of view on the world — a feeling of what it’s like to be you — sentience is the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). It matters for ethics, because a lot of people think that if an entity is sentient, it deserves to be in our moral circle: the imaginary boundary we draw around those we consider worthy of moral consideration. 

While our moral circle has expanded over the centuries to include more people and more nonhuman animals, there are some edge cases we’re collectively unsure about. Should insects have moral rights? What about future AI systems that could potentially become sentient? 

The philosopher Jeff Sebo is an expert on this; he literally wrote a book called The Moral Circle. And he argues that it’s helpful to investigate all potentially sentient beings — from bugs to future AIs — in broadly similar ways. So, after receiving a lot of reader questions on how we should consider both bugs and AIs, and responding to both in recent installments of my Your Mileage May Vary advice column, I reached out to him to talk about how we assess sentience, whether it’s hypocritical to worry about AI welfare while at the same time killing insects without a second thought, and why he developed a thought experiment called “the rebugnant conclusion.” Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.  

How can we go about assessing whether some creature — say, an insect — is sentient?

Our understanding of insect sentience is still limited, in part because we still lack a settled theory of sentience. But we can make progress through “the marker method.” 

The basic idea [for this method] is that we can look for features in animals that correlate with feelings in humans. For example, behaviorally, we can ask: Do other animals nurse their wounds? Do they respond to analgesics like we do? And anatomically, we can ask: Do they have systems for detecting harmful stimuli and carrying that information to the brain? 

This method is imperfect — the presence of these features is not proof of sentience, and the absence is not proof of non-sentience. But when we find many of these features together, it can count as evidence.

What do we find when we look for these features in insects? In at least some insects, there are systems for detecting harmful stimuli, pathways for carrying that information to the brain, regions in the brain for integrating information and flexible decision-making. For example, some insects become more sensitive after an injury, and they also weigh the avoidance of harm against the pursuit of other goals. Some insects also engage in play behaviors — you can find cute videos of bumblebees playing with wooden balls — suggesting that they may be able to experience positive states like joy. Again, none of this is proof of sentience. None of it establishes certainty. But it does count as evidence.

You’ve said that you think insects are about 20-40 percent likely to be sentient. How do you personally deal with bugs that come into your home? 

For me, taking insect welfare seriously means reducing harm to insects where possible. If I find a lone insect in my apartment, I try to safely relocate them if possible. In cases where killing them is genuinely necessary, I at least try to reduce their possible suffering, for example by crushing rather than poisoning them. And, in cases where harmful methods like poisoning seem genuinely necessary, I take this as a sign that structural changes are needed, such as infrastructure changes that reduce human-insect conflict or humane insecticides that kill insects with less suffering.

Caring for individual insects is valuable not only because of how it affects the insects, but also because of how it affects us. 

When I take a moment out of my day to help insects, it conditions me to see them as potential subjects, not mere objects. And if enough people take a moment out of their day to do this, it can contribute to a broader norm of seeing insects this way. This might lead not only to more care for individual insects but also more attention for insect welfare research and policy.

You’ve written that, hypothetically, we could end up determining that large animals like humans have greater capacity to suffer but that small animals like insects have more suffering in total, because there are just so many of them (1.4 billion insects for every person on Earth!). 

Utilitarianism says we have a moral obligation to maximize aggregate welfare, which would imply that we should prioritize insect welfare over human welfare. But most of us would balk at that conclusion. Would you? 

Here we need to distinguish what utilitarianism says in theory and what it says in practice. In theory, utilitarianism says that if a large number of insects experience more happiness in total than a small number of humans, then the welfare of the insects carries more weight, all else being equal. 

This is related to what philosophers like Derek Parfit call “the repugnant conclusion.” They observe that if what matters is total welfare, then it may be better to create a large number of individuals whose lives are barely worth living than a small number of individuals whose lives are very much worth living, as long as it adds up to more happiness overall. I use the term “the rebugnant conclusion” to refer to this idea as it applies in the multi-species context.

In practice, though, utilitarian reasoning is more complex. Yes, we should promote welfare, but we should also respect rights, cultivate virtuous characters, cultivate caring relationships, uphold just political structures, and so on — since this kind of pluralistic thinking tends to do more good than trying to promote welfare by itself would do.

Utilitarianism also says that we should work within our limitations. We currently have greater knowledge, capacity, and political will for helping humans than for helping insects, and this shapes how much care we can sustain. I think this makes sense, and for me, the upshot is we should gradually increase care for insects while building the knowledge, capacity, and political will we need to do more.

To me, the “rebugnant conclusion” is a reductio ad absurdum that shows how utilitarianism falls short as a moral theory. I just don’t think we can expect humans to care more for insects than they do for themselves and other humans; it ignores the fact that we are biologically hardwired to ensure our own surviving and thriving, and that’s an inextricable part of our nature as human moral agents. I’d argue it makes more sense to reject utilitarianism than to ignore that. But it seems like you’d rather keep utilitarianism and just accept the rebugnant conclusion that comes from it — why? 

I disagree that this is a reductio for utilitarianism, for at least a couple reasons. First, I think that this conclusion is more plausible than it might initially appear. 

Think about our duties to other nations and future generations as an analogy. Their interests carry more weight than ours do, all else being equal. But we can still be warranted in prioritizing ourselves to an extent for a variety of relational and practical reasons, all things considered. The question is how to strike a balance between impartial and partial reasoning in everyday life. Here, I think that considering the welfare stakes for distant strangers can be a helpful corrective, since it can lead us to care for them more than we otherwise might, while still tending to relational and practical realities. My view is that we should approach our duties to other species in the same kind of way, and this seems like a plausible enough takeaway to me.

Second, every major ethical theory can seem implausible in at least some cases. Suppose that we share the world with a large number of insects and a small number of advanced AIs. Now, suppose that the insects have more welfare in total, the AIs have more on average, and humans fall somewhere in between. To the extent that welfare matters for decision-making, whose interests should take priority, all else equal? 

If total welfare is what matters, we should say the insects. If average welfare is what matters, we should say the AIs. Either way, this implication will conflict with our default stance of human exceptionalism. 

But part of the point of ethics is to correct for our biases, and this may be what we should do here. In retrospect, we should not have expected the interests of 8 billion members of one species to carry more weight than the interests of quintillions of members of millions of species combined. 

When writing about the possibility of bug sentience, you’ve also written about the possibility of AI sentience. And you’ve said that future AI minds might have a lower chance of being sentient than biological minds, but “even if they do, the astronomically large size of a future artificial population could be more than enough to make up for that.” If we end up in a scenario with a gigantic population of AI minds, do you think we should prioritize their welfare over human welfare? Or is it unreasonable to demand that kind of impartiality from humans?

This is a great question. In my answer to the previous question, I considered a scenario where AIs have the most welfare on average but the least in total. But we can also imagine scenarios where AIs are so complex and so widespread that if they have a realistic possibility of being sentient at all, then they have the most welfare both on average and in total. 

In that situation, insofar as welfare impacts are a factor in moral decision-making at all, as I think they clearly ought to be, a range of reasonable views might converge on the conclusion that the AIs merit priority, all else being equal. 

Of course, as I emphasized in my previous answers, whether we should prioritize them, all things considered, in that scenario is a further question, and it depends on a lot of further relational and practical details. But we should at the very least extend them a great deal of care in that scenario, as we should for other animals.

With that said, a complication is that if we do eventually share the world with a large number of advanced AIs, which currently seems quite likely, then we may not be the only agents who determine what happens. After all, as AIs become more advanced and widespread, they may start to make decisions with us or even for us. In my view, it can help to consider how AIs should treat humans and other animals in these hypothetical future scenarios. And if we think that they should treat us with respect and compassion during their time in power, perhaps this is a sign that we should treat them with respect and compassion during our time in power — not only because how we treat AIs now might affect how they treat us later, but also because thinking about how we would feel in a position of vulnerability can help us better understand how we should behave in our current position of power.

What do you think is more likely to be sentient today: an ant or ChatGPT? I think it’s definitely the former, so it seems bizarre to me that some people spend a lot of time worrying about whether current AI systems may be sentient, while at the same time killing insects without a second thought or eating animals from factory farms. Why do you think this is happening — and is it hypocritical? 

I agree that an ant is more likely to be sentient than ChatGPT today. But, I also think that near-future AIs will be more likely to be sentient than current ones. Companies are racing to build AIs with advanced perception, attention, memory, self-awareness, and decision-making. We have no way of knowing for sure if the companies will succeed, or if these capacities suffice for sentience. But, we also have no way of ruling it out at this stage, and even a realistic possibility warrants taking the issue seriously now. 

At minimum, I think that means acknowledging AI welfare as a serious issue, assessing models for welfare-relevant features, and preparing policies for treating them with appropriate moral concern. Otherwise, we risk repeating the mistake we made with animals: scaling up industrial uses of them that will make it harder for us to treat them well when the evidence of sentience is stronger.

With that said, I agree that caring a lot about AI welfare while not caring at all about animal welfare can involve a kind of hypocrisy. There are real differences between animals and AI systems, but there are also real similarities. In both cases, we have to make decisions that affect nonhumans without knowing for sure what, if anything, it feels like to be them. I think it helps to assess these issues in broadly similar ways while acknowledging the differences.

If you’re reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and that’s great. The climate emergency threatens all of humanity. And although the world has started to make some progress on it, our global response is still extremely lacking.

The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a glut of environmental organizations out there — but how do you know which are the most impactful?

To help, here’s a list of eight of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. We’re not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, or the Natural Resources Defense Council, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded.

The groups we list below seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of criteria that matter for effectiveness: importance, tractability, and neglectedness.

Important targets for change are those that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that aren’t already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and could really use money from smaller donors.

Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, and Giving Green, a climate charity evaluator, used these criteria to assess climate organizations. Their research informed the list below. As in the Founders Pledge and Giving Green recommendations, we’ve chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus here is on preventing further catastrophe.

And this work is particularly important right now, in a world where “climate attention has collapsed, political support has evaporated, and policy gains are under sustained assault,” Founders Pledge stressed in its assessment of today’s politically charged atmosphere. In November 2025, the prominent environmental group 350.org was forced to “temporarily suspend” its US operations because of severe funding challenges, according to a letter obtained by Politico. They are among the many groups in the climate movement now buckling under existential funding cuts, as the Trump administration attempts to dismantle longstanding climate regulations in the US. The war in Iran and the rising energy costs of data centers have only hastened the urgency for a clean energy transition.

At the same time, Founders Pledge argues that the climate community massively underinvested “outside the progressive bubble,” creating a movement that was not resilient to the shakeup that would come under President Donald Trump. “One of the main ways we were underprepared was the fact that climate philanthropy invested overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum,” the organization writes. Now, the experts say, it’s particularly important to invest in nonpartisan organizations dedicated to defending and expanding upon all of the progress made so far. 

Arguably, the best move is to donate not to an individual charity, but to a fund — like the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund or the Giving Green Fund. Experts at those groups pool together donor money and give it out to the charities they deem most effective, right when extra funding is most needed. That can mean making time-sensitive grants to promote the writing of an important report, or stepping in when a charity becomes acutely funding-constrained.

That said, some of us like to be able to decide exactly which charity our money ends up with — maybe because we have especially high confidence in one or two charities relative to the others — rather than letting experts split the cash over a range of different groups.

With that in mind, we’re listing below a mix of individual organizations where your money is likely to have an exceptionally positive impact.

1. Clean Air Task Force

What it does: The Clean Air Task Force is a US-based non-governmental organization that has been working to reduce air pollution since its founding in 1996. It led a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants in the US, helped limit the US power sector’s CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions. CATF also advocates for the adoption of neglected low- and zero-carbon technologies, from advanced nuclear power to super-hot rock geothermal energy.

Why you should consider donating: In addition to its seriously impressive record of success and the high quality of its research, CATF does well on the neglectedness criterion: It often concentrates on targeting emissions sources that are neglected by other environmental organizations, and on scaling up deployment of technologies that are crucial for decarbonization, yet passed over by NGOs and governments. For example, it was one of the first major environmental groups to publicly campaign against overlooked superpollutants like methane.

In recent years, CATF has been expanding beyond the US to operate in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This is crucial: About 35 percent of climate philanthropy goes to the US and about 10 percent to Europe, which together represent only about 15 percent of future emissions, according to Founders Pledge. And more recently, CATF has refocused its strategy to zero in on programs with broad nonpartisan political support to ensure those global efforts have staying power. This is part of why Founders Pledge is supporting CATF’s efforts and recommends giving to that organization. CATF is also one of Giving Green’s top picks.

You can donate to CATF here.

2. Future Cleantech Architects

What it does: This Germany-based organization aims to promote innovation in Europe’s hard-to-decarbonize sectors by running key programs in, for example, zero-carbon fuels, industry, and carbon removal technologies.

Why you should consider donating: You might be wondering if this kind of innovation really meets the “neglectedness” criterion — don’t we already have a lot of innovation? In the US, yes. But in Europe, this kind of organization is much rarer. And according to Founders Pledge, it’s already exceeded expectations at improving the European climate policy response. Most notably, it has helped shape key legislation at the EU level and advised policymakers on how to get the most bang for their buck when supporting research and development for clean energy tech. Giving Green recommends this organization, too.

You can donate to Future Cleantech Architects here.

3) Good Food Institute

What it does: The Good Food Institute works to make alternative proteins (think plant-based burgers) competitive with conventional proteins like beef, which could help reduce livestock consumption. It engages in scientific research, industry partnerships, and government advocacy that improves the odds of alternative proteins going mainstream.

Why you should consider donating: Raising animals for meat is responsible for more than 10 percent and perhaps as much as 19 percent of global emissions. These animals belch the superpollutant methane. Plus, we humans tend to deforest a lot of land for them to graze on, even though we all know the world needs more trees, not less. Yet there hasn’t been very much government effort to substantially cut agricultural emissions. Giving Green recommends the Good Food Institute because of its potential to help with that, noting that “GFI remains a powerhouse in alternative protein thought leadership and action. It has strong ties to government, industry, and research organizations and continues to achieve impressive wins. We believe donations to GFI can help stimulate systemic change that reduces food system emissions on a global scale.”

You can donate to the Good Food Institute here.

4. Innovation Initiative at the Clean Economy Project

What it does: When Bill Gates shuttered the policy arm of his climate philanthropy Breakthrough Energy last year, the US lost a unique advocate for innovation at a pivotal moment in the country’s energy transition. Or did it? Not long after the closure, a group of veteran Breakthrough Energy staff launched the Innovation Initiative — part of a new organization called the Clean Economy Project — as part of a push to ensure the US continues on the right path in its energy transition, regardless of which party is in power. 

Why you should consider donating: This newly formed project may still be in its infancy, but its work builds upon years of deep experience advocating for clean energy innovation across the political spectrum. Founders Pledge helped seed the new organization with an early grant because “we see the Innovation Initiative as the best bet for donors who want to support federal energy innovation policy advocacy at a moment when this ecosystem needs coordination and strategic leadership,” they said, noting that even small-scale support for such efforts can spur massive payoffs in the space: “Relatively modest advocacy investments can influence billions” in federal spending for research and development “that accelerates breakthrough technologies with global spillover effects.”  

You can learn more about the Innovation Initiative here. To donate, send an email to giving@cleanecon.org, with the subject line “Donating to Innovation Initiative.”

5. DEPLOY/US

What it does: This nonpartisan nonprofit works with American conservatives to enact decarbonization policies, with the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. DEPLOY/US partners with philanthropic, business, military, faith, youth, policy, and grassroots organizations to shape a decarbonization strategy and generate policy change.

Why you should consider donating: In case you haven’t heard of the eco-right, it’s important to know that there are genuine right-of-center climate groups that want to build support for decarbonization based on conservative principles. These groups have a crucial role to play; they can weaken political polarization around climate and increase Republican support for bold decarbonization policies, which are especially important now, with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress. Right now, these right-of-center groups remain “woefully underfunded compared to both the opportunity and necessity of correcting a large ideological blindspot of the climate movement that has come to bite in 2025” and beyond, Founders Pledge writes, adding that DEPLOY/US is uniquely positioned to insulate climate policy against the shifting winds of politics.

You can donate to DEPLOY/US here.

6. Energy for Growth Hub

What it does: Founded by Todd Moss in 2013, Energy for Growth Hub aims to make electricity reliable and affordable for everyone. The organization hopes to end energy poverty through climate-friendly solutions.

Why you should consider donating: While Energy for Growth Hub is not a strictly climate-focused organization — ending energy poverty is its main goal — it’s still a leader in the clean energy space. The organization will use your donation to fund projects that produce insight for companies and policymakers on how to create the energy-rich, climate-friendly future they’re dreaming of. In June 2025, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on funding nuclear power projects after a sustained lobbying effort from Energy for Growth Hub alongside other think tanks and policy wonks. “We all know that Washington is broken. People complain that it’s impossible to get stuff done,” Moss wrote in his Substack in response. “But then, actually quite often, stuff does get done. And sometimes, just sometimes, things happen because people outside government come together to push a new idea inside government.”

You can donate to Energy for Growth Hub here.

7. Project InnerSpace

What it does: This US-based nonprofit hopes to unlock the power of heat — geothermal energy — lying beneath the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2022, Project InnerSpace seeks to expand global access and drive down the cost of carbon-free heat and electricity, particularly to populations in the Global South. The organization maps geothermal resources and identifies geothermal projects in need of further funding.

Why you should consider donating: Most geothermal power plants are located in places where geothermal energy is close to the Earth’s surface. Project InnerSpace will use your donation to add new data and tools to GeoMap, its signature map of geothermal hot spots, and drive new strategies and projects to fast-track transitions to geothermal energy around the world. The group also began funding community energy projects through its newly launched GeoFund last year, starting with a geothermal-powered food storage facility in Tapri, India, which will offer local farmers more power to preserve their crops. 

You can donate to Project InnerSpace here.

8. Opportunity Green

What it does: Opportunity Green aims to cut aviation and maritime shipping emissions through targeted regulation and policy initiatives. The UK-based nonprofit was founded in 2021, and since then has aimed to encourage private sector adoption of clean energy alternatives.

Why you should consider donating: Aviation and maritime shipping are an enormous source of global emissions, but receive little attention because international coordination is difficult around the issue, and there are few low-carbon fleets and fuels readily available. Even so, in a few short years, Opportunity Green has managed to gain significant influence in EU and international policy discussions around shipping emissions, while also helping to bring the perspective of climate-vulnerable countries into the fray. In 2024, the group launched a major legal filing against the EU to challenge its green finance rules. “We think Opportunity Green is a strategic organization with broad expertise across multiple pathways of influence to reduce emissions from aviation and shipping,” Giving Green notes. “We are especially excited about Opportunity Green’s efforts to elevate climate-vulnerable countries in policy discussions.” 

You can donate to Opportunity Green here.

How to think about donating to grassroots climate activism

The past several years have seen an explosion of grassroots activism groups focused on climate — from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future to the Sunrise Movement to Extinction Rebellion. Activism is an important piece of the climate puzzle; it can help change public opinion and policy, including by shifting the Overton window, the range of policies that seem possible.

Social change is not an exact science, and the challenges in measuring a social movement’s effectiveness are well documented. While it would be helpful to have more concrete data on the impact of activist groups, it may also be shortsighted to ignore movement-building for that reason.

The environmentalist Bill McKibben told Vox that building the climate movement is crucial because, although we’ve already got some good mitigation solutions, we’re not deploying them fast enough. “That’s the ongoing power of the fossil fuel industry at work. The only way to break that power and change the politics of climate is to build a countervailing power,” he said in 2019. “Our job — and it’s the key job — is to change the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious. If we do that, all else will follow.”

Of course, some activist groups are more effective than others. And it’s worth noting that a group that was highly effective at influencing climate policy during the Biden administration, such as the Sunrise Movement, will not necessarily be as effective today. 

“Overall, our take on grassroots activism is that it has huge potential to be cost-effective, and we indeed think that grassroots movements like Sunrise have had really meaningful effects in the past,” Dan Stein, the director of Giving Green, told Vox. But, he added, “It takes a unique combination of timing, organization, and connection to policy to have an impactful grassroots movement.”

One umbrella charity that’s more bullish on the ongoing impact of activism is the Climate Emergency Fund. It was founded in 2019 with the goal of quickly regranting money to groups engaged in climate protests around the globe. Its founders believe that street protest is crucially important to climate politics and neglected in environmental philanthropy. Grantees include Just Stop Oil, the group that made international headlines for throwing soup on a protected, glassed-in Van Gogh painting, and Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience like filling the streets and blocking intersections to demand that governments do more on climate.

If you’re skeptical that street protest can make a difference, consider Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research. She’s found that if you want to achieve systemic social change, you need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, a finding that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. And in 2022, research from the nonprofit Social Change Lab suggested that, in the past, groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion may have cost-effectively helped to win policy changes (in the US and UK, respectively) that avert carbon emissions.But the words “in the past” are doing a lot of work here: While early-stage social movement incubation might be cost-effective, it’s unclear whether it’s as cost-effective to give to an activist group once it’s already achieved national attention. The same research notes that in countries with existing high levels of climate concern, broadly trying to increase that concern may be less effective than in previous years; now, it might be more promising to focus on climate advocacy in countries with much lower baseline support for this issue.

Aside from donating, there are many other ways you can help

There are plenty of ways to use your skills to tackle the climate emergency. And many don’t cost a cent.

If you’re a writer or artist, you can use your talents to convey a message that will resonate with people. If you’re a religious leader, you can give a sermon about climate and run a collection drive to support one of the groups above. If you’re a teacher, you can discuss this issue with your students, who may influence their parents. If you’re a good talker, you can go out canvassing for a politician you believe will make the right choices on climate.

If you’re, well, any human being, you can consume less. You can reduce your energy use, how much stuff you buy, and how much meat you consume. Individual action alone won’t move the needle that much — real change on the part of governments and corporations is key — but your actions can influence others and ripple out to shift social norms, and keep you feeling motivated rather than resigned to climate despair.

You can, of course, also volunteer with an activist group and put your body in the street to nonviolently disrupt business as usual and demand change.

The point is that activism comes in many forms. It’s worth taking some time to think about which one (or ones) will allow you, with your unique capacities and constraints, to have the biggest positive impact. But at the end of the day, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good: It’s best to pick something that seems doable and get to work.

Update, April 22, 2026, 6:30 am ET: This story was originally published on December 2, 2019, and has been updated annually.

I work with a lot of very smart people, and sometimes one of them asks me a question that stops me in my tracks. That’s what happened after I published the newest installment of my advice column, Your Mileage May Vary, which was about whether it’s morally icky to send your kid to private school instead of the local public school. 

Bryan Walsh, one of my editors, hit me with the question below. I felt so many people would relate to it that I wanted to publish it along with my own response to it. In the future, I hope to share more of these smart questions from within our newsroom. For now, consider this one about making decisions under radical uncertainty. Here’s Bryan’s question:

Sigal’s column is characteristically smart, and I’d encourage anyone wrestling with the decision about how to educate their child to read it. But as a parent of an 8-year-old in a Brooklyn public school, what strikes me most about the private-versus-public debate isn’t the ethical dimension — it’s the sheer vertigo of not knowing.

Something I realized fairly soon as a parent is that we get exactly one shot at it. There is no control group. You can’t run your kid through public school, rewind, try private, and then compare outcomes at age 30. You’re forced to make what could be a massive, consequential decision with radically incomplete information. 

That uncertainty gnaws at me. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the basic formula for life success was still legible: get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job. That pathway still exists, but it’s fraying in ways that make school choice, like so much else today, feel even more like a shot in the dark. What skills will actually matter in 15 years? Will the curriculum your kid learns in third grade have any bearing on a labor market being reshaped by AI? Will the network your child builds matter less — or even more? 

I’m supposed to be a futurist, and I have no idea. I suppose it’s some comfort that neither does anyone else, though plenty of people will charge you $40,000 a year in tuition to pretend they do.

The research Sigal cites is genuinely reassuring — family background matters more than which building your kid sits in. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t silence the 3 am voice that whispers: What if you’re getting this wrong?

This is such Relatable Content! How are you supposed to set up your child’s “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver put it, when life offers you no clear instruction manual and you only get one try?  

This is hard in the most stable of times. And it feels even harder now, when so many parents are wondering how they can possibly educate their kids in a way that’ll prepare them for AI’s disruptions to the labor market and society overall.

You’re right about two things. First, the old formula for life success — good grades at a good school will get you a good job — can be counted on less and less. And second, parents now have to make decisions about their kids’ education with radically incomplete information. 

Uncertainty is a very hard thing to hold, especially at 3 am. 

So at this point, I could try to reassure you by telling you the concrete things you can do to benefit your individual child. I could reiterate what many AI executives and early adopters have told their own kids: Cultivate soft skills (like listening, empathy, and accountability) and metacognitive skills (like critical thinking, experimentation, and flexibility). 

I could also reiterate something I’ve said before: A good education is about much more than ensuring job security. As Aristotle argued back in ancient Greece, it’s about cultivating all the character virtues that make for a flourishing life — honesty, courage, justice, and especially phronesis or good judgment (learning to discern the morally salient features of a given situation so you can make a judgment call that’s well-attuned to that unique situation). The advent of AI makes a virtue like phronesis more relevant than ever, because your kid will need to be able to wisely discern how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to. 

But the thing about the virtues is, you build them up through practice. If your kid doesn’t have the opportunity to encounter friction that forces them to practice reasoning and deliberating, they’ll have a very hard time developing good judgment. 

And AI tends to remove friction. It makes things fast and easy, which can be handy in the short term, but can lead to intellectual — and moral — deskilling in the long term. As AI use pervades society more and more, I think the most unusual kind of person will be one who has become neither brain-dulled nor virtue-dulled by deferring to AI models without using their own cognitive muscles first.

So if your goal is to make your kid stand out in a way that just might give them a leg up when they’re grown, I’d say: Make sure that they build those muscles while they’re young, and for the love of god, keep exercising them. Even if this doesn’t give them full security in the labor market, it’ll help them live a more flourishing life writ large.

The nice thing about this advice for you, as a parent struggling to know what to do for your kid, is that it means you don’t have to do anything wildly different from what’s been done in the past! The benefits of a classic humanities or liberal-arts education are still among the very best you can give your child. 

But. 

While I think all the advice I’ve mentioned so far is reasonable on the individual level, I’d argue the very best advice would be to question the entire premise that focusing on that individual level will be an effective way to ensure much of anything for your child’s future. 

On the current trajectory, it seems all too likely that we’re heading toward a future of “gradual disempowerment,” as some AI researchers put it. The basic idea is that as AI becomes a cheaper alternative to human labor in most jobs, the economic pressure to sideline humans will become incredibly hard to resist. Historically, citizens in democratic states have enjoyed a bunch of rights and protections because states needed us — we provide the labor that makes everything run, from the economy to the military.

But when AI provides the labor and the state becomes less dependent on us, it doesn’t have to pay so much attention to our demands. Worse, any state that does continue taking care of human workers might find itself at a competitive disadvantage against others that don’t. And so the forces that have traditionally kept governments accountable to their citizens gradually erode, and we end up deeply disempowered. 

Under these conditions, focusing on the object-level question of “what skills should I teach my individual child?” is a bit like trying to protect your kid from climate change by buying them a better sunhat.

Instead, it makes more sense to focus on the structural problem, which demands political engagement and collective organizing. If you want your kid to have a job as an adult, then teaching them to be an effective citizen and advocate — and doing that work yourself right now — probably matters more than any particular school subject they will study. This can take many concrete forms: organizing with your labor union, supporting advocacy groups that push the government to make tech equitable and accountable, voting for politicians who share your vision, and spreading compelling counter-narratives to the fanciful stories that AI companies are selling the public.  

I know that accepting the limits of what we can guarantee by focusing on the personal level is a tough pill to swallow. We live in a culture that conditions us to think in terms of the atomized individual and valorizes being self-sufficient and self-directed (see Silicon Valley’s current obsession with being “high agency.”) But my own life has taught me how fragile that model is.

I grew up in a family on welfare, so financial and professional security feels very salient to me. I tend to gravitate towards a “hoarding” mentality. That is, faced with my own 3 am anxieties, I spent years trying to maintain a sense of control by telling myself that if I burnish my educational credentials, work hard at my job, and save enough money, I’ll be okay. 

But for me, that illusion of control came crashing down a decade ago when I developed a chronic illness. For a while, it was so intense that I could barely walk. And I was shattered to discover that nothing I’d hoarded — my education, my job, my savings — could help me. Even worse than the physical pain was the emotional pain of feeling alone: My doctors shunted me from specialist to specialist, and my friends and family didn’t realize that I needed more support. I was so used to the idea that I was self-sufficient, in my castle buttressed by the achievements I’d hoarded, that I didn’t think to ask.

Recently, a friend of mine also developed a chronic illness. But unlike me, she’d spent many years cultivating a community of extremely tight-knit friends. They’re the sort of group that talks a lot about solidarity and mutual aid. And they walk the talk. I’ve watched how my friend, buoyed by all the meals and parties and other ministrations they lavish on her, has been able to manage her physical challenges with so much less fear and so much more security than me. My castle isolated me. Her refusal to build one gave her true safety.

As AI disrupts the labor market, I’m trying to move myself from the hoarding model to the solidarity model. 

And I wonder if it might serve you and your family well, too. The problem we’re all about to face together is structural, not individual. So the benefits you can offer your child on the individual level are, it pains me to say, fairly limited. But if you focus on political engagement and collective organizing that could actually make some difference to the structural dynamic — and teach your child to ask structural questions and be civically engaged as well — you might be able to sleep a little better at night.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I’ve been on antidepressants on and off (mostly on) since I was in my late teens. I’ve struggled for years with depression and anxiety, and the medication has seemed to help. But I’ve often wondered what it would be like if I tried to stop. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about how antidepressants work. How much of what I felt to be them “working” might have been a placebo? And I’m a very different person now than I was back then. What if I don’t need the medication anymore?

I feel pretty happy in general, way happier than I was in my teens. But I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m medicating myself unnecessarily, without great evidence to back up the decision. Do I owe it to myself to find out what it would be like to be off medication? Did I make a mistake going on meds so early without thinking about how difficult an offramp might be?

Dear Antidepressant Ambivalence,

You’re in good company: One in six adults in the US currently takes antidepressants, and many wrestle with this question. That includes me; I take an antidepressant for chronic anxiety. And the wrestling makes sense, because antidepressants come with a lot of unknowns — both scientific and philosophical.

I have no medical training, so I can’t give medical advice, and decisions about psychiatric drugs should absolutely be made in conversation with a mental health professional. But let me offer you some framing thoughts that might help you get situated in this confusing landscape. 

On the scientific level, we do have strong evidence that antidepressants are more effective than a placebo, though their effectiveness varies from person to person. On average, people are 25 percent likelier to feel better if they take the real drug than if they take the placebo.

But we’re not really sure why antidepressants work. The old “chemical imbalance” model, which proposed that depression arises because there’s not enough serotonin floating around in the brain, is not taken seriously today among experts. Instead, scientists now have other hypotheses, like the idea that antidepressants work by boosting neuroplasticity. But you’re right that there’s still a lot we don’t know. 

And then there are the philosophical uncertainties. Antidepressants shape our thoughts and emotions, which make up a lot of what we think of as the self. So they can raise big questions about identity, about who we “really are,” especially for those of us who’ve been taking them for years. 

Most psychiatrists, with their meager 20-minute appointments, fail to help their clients explore these deeper questions productively. Yet the questions are extremely important. 

The anthropologist Alice Malpass and her colleagues offer a useful framework for thinking about this. Based on a lot of ethnographic research, they report that managing antidepressant medication involves two interconnected dimensions. On the one hand, there’s the “medication career,” which consists of your decision-making about whether to take meds, how much to take, and for how long. On the other hand, there’s the “moral career,” which is about how you make meaning out of all those practical decisions. What story are you telling yourself about your condition? About yourself?

Notice that to Malpass, the moral career is a full half of the equation, and rightly so: We know that the meanings people assign to their medications feed into their treatment outcomes. So I think it’s important to tackle the moral dimension of your question head-on. You ask, “Do I owe it to myself to find out what it would be like to be off medication?”

I believe the answer is no.

A common trope in the discourse on antidepressants is the worry that taking psychiatric medication means you’re moving away from your “true self” or “true personality.” That leads some people to wonder if they’re failing that self by not seeing what they’d be like off the medication. But I don’t think any of us has one “true self.” We are always being shaped and reshaped by everything we encounter. 

When I consider my own identity, I don’t see one preexisting essence — I see myself being constantly co-constituted by the influence of my family and friends, by the articles and videos I encounter online, by the yoga and meditation I do, by the coffee I’m drinking as I write this.

If there’s no preexisting one true self, then you can’t “owe” it to that self to act in this way or that. 

Instead, your task is always to look forward — to choose what sort of self you want to become. That means weighing the pros and cons of each option life offers you, and picking the options that you believe, based on the knowledge available to you in the current moment, will move you closer to the version of yourself you wish to be. 

As the 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once observed: Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

So, no, I don’t think you made a mistake by going on meds as a teenager. “Mistake” implies a regrettable choice, but since you were making the choice that seemed best given the knowledge available to you at the time, there’s nothing you need to regret. Chances are the meds did help you feel better back then, even though they raise the tricky question of whether and how to consider an offramp now. (You know who should feel regret? The psychiatric establishment, which has failed to properly study how to safely wean people off these medications. That lack of research is outrageous.) 

It’s easy to imagine that if you hadn’t started meds as a teen, you wouldn’t have to deal with any tricky questions today. But as the psychiatrist Awais Aftab points out, that’s a fallacy:

Sometimes the patients I see start psychiatric treatment for depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc., for the first time in their 30s, after years of hesitancy. When the treatment works, a common emotion I hear in such situations is regret: “I wish I had started this medication 10 years ago.” While people on long-term antidepressants wonder, “Who would I be off these medications?” the unmedicated are not immune from what-ifs of their own. Who could I be if I were taking antidepressants? Could I be more functional, more productive, a better parent, or a better spouse? Would I have been less obsessive, less neurotic, or more assertive?

In other words, there are trade-offs either way. Ambivalence is a totally normal response to a situation like this — maybe even the most appropriate response. As Aftab writes, this ambivalence is simply “the moral cost of living in a world in which medical progress presents us with more and more choices, and by doing so, brings the full diversity of human values into play and generates dizzying varieties of uncertainties and trade-offs.” 

In the face of all these uncertainties, which make it impossible to know if being on antidepressants is the best possible choice in some objective sense, the best you can do might be to consider — in partnership with a mental health professional — how the trade-off is showing up in your own life: Are the benefits of being on medication most likely outweighing the costs?

Be aware that even if the answer is no, and even if you want to come off the medication, it’s not advisable to stop taking antidepressants abruptly or at a time of high stress; a professional can give you some guidance on how to taper gradually, which can lessen the chance of withdrawal struggles.  

The fact that some people experience severe withdrawal symptoms when they stop antidepressants has made some people wonder about dependence. So it’s worth noting that, although people can form a physical or psychological dependence on antidepressants, that’s not the same thing as “addiction.” The latter generally comes with several other features, including compulsiveness, turning away from social connections, and using a drug in larger doses even when it causes health problems. 

Still, I know some people hate the idea of being “dependent” on anything at all — even, yes, coffee. If you’re among them, you might find the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s ideas helpful. 

Frankfurt drew a distinction between first-order desires (what we want) and second-order desires (what we want to want). To Frankfurt, what distinguishes the situation of a person with an unwilling addiction to some substance is that they have a first-order desire that conflicts with their second-order volition — they want not to want the substance, but they find it too difficult to act on that second-order preference. 

When considering my own experience, I find this clarifying. I know I have a second-order stance about the kind of person I want to be: someone capable of being deeply present with others, being kind and patient, being creative and productive, and being (more often than not) delighted by life. And this, for me, translates into a first-order desire to take my medication because I think it’s helping me achieve that second-order desire. In other words, my desires feel aligned. 

Importantly, I feel capable of taking a step back periodically and choosing whether I want to continue taking the medication or whether I want to get medical support to taper or come off it. I recognize that the latter might be very hard, but it still feels within the realm of choice. So although I feel some ambivalence, like you do, it doesn’t keep me up at night. 

If your experience is different — if it does keep you up at night — then I hope you’re able to find a mental health professional who is sensitive to the importance of the “moral career” and can help you thoughtfully explore it.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• In light of this week’s question, I reread Lauren Oyler’s New Yorker piece about her anxiety. She explains that, despite her various symptoms, she’s never tried to get a formal diagnosis or go on psychiatric medication because “I do not want to have these problems that are notoriously difficult to solve, about which there is no professional agreement.”

• My mind is always spinning up a narrative about my life, and that storytelling tendency is so strong that I was surprised to learn, from the philosopher Galen Strawson, that some people don’t experience themselves narratively at all.
  
• This recent Aeon essay explains how Japanese philosophy thinks of the “self,” and argues that the tendency of Western philosophers like Descartes to believe in one true self has led to a messed-up view of ethics for the rest of us. A taste: “Western philosophers succumb to the temptation to hold on to a fixed notion of the self that exists independently of that uncompromisingly polyphonic world, so that we can somehow construct a universal theory of ethics through the self-referential universalisation of individual consciousness.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.