Former Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer, in his article titled “Does AI increase likelihood of lawful not being permissible?”, recalled the warnings previously expressed by our university’s founder Alev Alatlı by stating, “Not every legal right is lawful.”
In her speech at the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards ceremony, Alev Alatlı, a famous Turkish philosopher, emphasized that what is lawful may not always be permissible (halal); therefore, the real issue is to create the possibility for what is lawful to also be permissible “because not every legal right is permissible, and it never can be!” What is moral is already permissible. She then gave examples of such dilemmas encountered in life. Referring to the sense of solidarity once found in old neighborhoods, she illustrated how things have changed: “For instance, it may be your legal right to purchase your bankrupt brother’s house that is being sold off at auction, but it is not permissible.”
In fact, this is a striking example of how values have been transformed. When a local shopkeeper in the neighborhood faced financial hardship, the tightly knit network of relationships ensured that the community became aware of it and gathered to find a solution. The goods that the troubled neighbor had to sell urgently were not regarded as an opportunity simply because their prices dropped under market conditions. Even if it benefited the individual, it was considered contrary to morality. The principle “he is not one of us who sleeps full while his neighbor goes hungry” was not merely a saying but was still alive in practice. Alatlı also draws attention to such contradictions within the dynamics of the new economy: “Likewise, a baker who adds a carcinogenic substance to bread in order to extend its shelf life is not guilty, since he lists the formula on the package and thus acts within the law – but what he does is not permissible.”
In another example, Alatlı frequently refers to urban development issues: “A contractor with a building permit is legally innocent while violating the skyline of a city, but what he does is not permissible.” In ancient values, every intervention in the world took the other into account. Looking back at old neighborhoods, we see that all the possibilities of geometry were used so as not to block the neighbor’s line of sight to the street. This was a sign of respect for the other. In fact, the “other” did not exist. The other was us. Therefore, when we violate through construction, ultimately it is our own right that we trespass upon. In short, the one who loses in this way is not the other, but us!
About 30 years ago, prominent Turkish architect Turgut Cansever also issued a warning on this matter: “Instead of mutual rights, instead of participating in the construction of a more beautiful world, the way has been opened for denser settlements that provide greater access to urban infrastructure and yield higher material gain. In this process, while our cities have been turned into fields of war, death, and pollution in pursuit of entirely illegitimate profits, our society has, on the other hand, been dragged into complete moral collapse.” In fact, at the very beginning of his book, in his 1993 article titled “Planning Istanbul on a National Scale,” Cansever also proposed a way to eliminate this very distinction: “The legal structure must be designed so as to render impossible the embodiment of any morally corrupting or speculative factors.” Urban developments that show no respect for their surroundings and focus solely on maximizing profit not only increase economic gain but also accelerate the collapse of morality.
Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also issued a similar warning in 1978 at the Harvard University commencement ceremony: “It is enough for a person to be legally right; nothing more is required. No one dares to say that, despite this, he may not be entirely right, nor can anyone argue that a person ought to restrain himself and renounce these rights, or demand self-sacrifice and the willingness to take risks without self-interest: this would be considered sheer absurdity. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everyone seeks to push the legal framework to its very limits.”
Alatlı’s words are a striking expression of the long-standing pain endured by these lands, where different values still clash in their struggle to hold on to life. It is the story of the drama our people have faced since the Tanzimat era, from which no clear way out has yet been found. In other words, what we are witnessing is the ongoing conflict between morality and the new values upon which the present life is built.
These lands were once a geography of the heart, filled with countless examples of moral stances and behaviors that prevailed regardless of profit or loss. And the reckoning, the calculations, the journey were not directed here, but toward him, God! The problem lies in the disappearance of this language and the emergence of new, different codes of behavior rooted in another language, which have taken hold in our lands, giving rise to contradictions and gradually leaving morality with no place in life – not as knowledge, but as a lived state. For morality is not knowledge, it is a state of being. If this state is determined by profit, then where does morality fall? You may legally construct a fifty-story building in front of a neighborhood of three- to five-story houses, but what you bury in its foundations is morality itself. In a city climate where such immoral states and behaviors proliferate, what meaning does the curriculum correspond to, and to what can it aspire?
Since all the dynamics in the economy and the labor market are built on the destructive competition of producing more than what is needed at the lowest possible cost and persuading the consumer to consume through communication strategies, what, then, can be done in such a situation? Moreover, in a world where even what is not needed is imposed and marketed as a necessity, how is the isolated individual supposed to act, and according to what? To what can he hold on? While the world of values that shapes the behavior of both producers and consumers continues to be imposed globally in an overwhelmingly dominant way, spreading deeper and taking root day by day, how challenging it is to live in such a world and yet act according to different values!
In this context, with the spread of artificial intelligence, it appears that the possibility of acting otherwise will weaken even further, and, on the contrary, non-permissible behaviors will become more widespread. For instance, a recent study shows that as AI increasingly replaces humans in decision-making, it tends to exploit every possible option to maximize profit – even if such options are morally questionable. The study examines how appointing machines as proxies in decision-making can lower the moral costs for both the principal and the agent, thereby increasing dishonest behavior.
As we noted above, although certain decisions may be legal, human decision-making is influenced by moral concerns. When decisions are delegated to machines, however, those concerns disappear, and decisions are left to the discretion of algorithms – which, in fact, have none. Ultimately, as the authors point out, the likelihood of cheating increases. If we recall that the debates about AI’s contribution to scientific articles often highlight the fact that AI cannot assume responsibility for the results or decisions it produces, we can see the same issue here: AI’s lack of accountability functions in such a way that it increases compliance with immoral decisions. In short, since AI is not forced to confront the costs and responsibilities of its decisions, we can say – using Alatlı’s words – that its likelihood of “bending toward evil” is very high.
While immoral requests may cause humans to hesitate, even if only for a moment, this possibility either weakens or disappears entirely in machines. For example, according to the results of the study, even when human agents were given instructions that involved outright cheating, the rate of compliance ranged between 25% and 40%. In contrast, for machines, this rate was significantly higher – between 60% and 90%, depending on the model used. In other words, machines exhibit a remarkably high capacity to comply with cheating. Even when measures are introduced in algorithms to prevent such moral corruption, as the authors note, the tendency of machines to conform to immoral decisions still remains high. For this reason, the authors suggest that precautions against unethical machine delegation should be directed not so much at machine agents as at the human principals themselves.
Thus, the question of how morality can be decisive in every moment of life stands before us in a truly challenging way – and it has not yet found its answer. For this reason, Alatlı calls this the most formidable project of our century: “The toughest project of the 21st century must be to align what is permissible (halal) with what is legal. We must find ways to prevent freedoms, once tied to ancient values, from bending toward evil. We must bring about a new order in which renouncing legal rights for the sake of humanity and for the sake of God is not considered strange.” Today, as artificial intelligence transforms every layer of society and rapidly creates a new ecosystem with entirely different dynamics, the solution to this problem has become even more complex. Nevertheless, we must continue to grapple with understanding the dimensions of the problem and exploring possible solutions – taking artificial intelligence into account as well.
