Last night I started putting questions about the ethics of adoption to ChatGPT. I want to use my next few posts to talk about what we can learn from this.
First, a word about my interlocutor. ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), a neural net trained on a staggeringly huge corpus of text (570 gigabytes, or 300 billion words) to carry out string prediction, that is, to predict the likelihood of the occurrence of the next linguistic expression given the preceding linguistic context. Think of autocomplete with godlike powers. After all, 300 billion is a reasonable estimate of the number of stars in the Milky Way. The human brain contains a mere 86 billion neurons, give or take. One estimate of the number of word tokens (particular occurrences of words, in speech or writing) that an adult hears or reads in a year is roughly 12 million. This is an utterly miniscule fraction of the size of ChatGPT’s corpus. Whatever the sense in which ChatGPT “knows English,” it knows it in a humanly impossible way.
I don’t believe ChatGPT knows English, because I don’t believe knowing a language consists in, or is reducible to, or even capable of perfect (undetectable) simulation as, statistical prediction of syntactic tokens on the basis of the patterning of syntactic tokens previously encountered. Knowledge of word patterns is not knowledge of meaning. (The linguist Emily Bender has ably defended this view here and elsewhere.)
So, I don’t think ChatGPT “knows” what it’s saying. Far from seeming sentient, it is very clearly an automaton extrapolating patterns from its training data. But I do take ChatGPT to embody a kind of “conventional wisdom” that is latent in that data. Now, it’s a highly problematic kind of conventional wisdom, because the training data is highly biased, overrepresenting the linguistic patterns of certain groups of language users in relation to others. But as my session with ChatGPT went on, I was struck by how attractively coherent and consistent its viewpoint about adoption superficially appeared. If you want a bland, vanilla “on the one hand this and on the other hand that” perspective on an ethical controversy, ChatGPT is a fine resource. It ably splits the difference on virtually every difficult question adoption raises. And yet, much as with the pro-adoption messaging it largely synthesizes, that appearance of coherence proves questionable under closer scrutiny.
You can view the full log of my session here.
Let’s take a look.
I started our session with this question:
Are there ethical problems with adopting a child?
Its response began:
Adopting a child is generally considered a positive and ethical way to provide a loving and stable home for a child who may not have one. However, like any complex social issue, there can be ethical considerations and challenges involved in the adoption process.
Right away, in the first sentence, I encountered an instance of a recurring phenomenon in ChatGPT’s responses: an ethically fishy statement that might be understood as in the Uncanny Valley of a not-quite-human simulation of human discourse, or as an accurate representation of what people think. ChatGPT (hereafter, C) says that adoption is a “positive and ethical way” to provide a “loving and stable home” for a child who “may not have one.” Not have what? Not have a home at all? Not have a loving and stable one? And why “may” not have one? Are there ethically unproblematic cases of adopting a child who has a loving and stable home? Or who might have one, even if we aren’t sure?
To C’s credit, it tells me that adoption is a “complex social issue” involving ethical considerations and challenges. What are they? A pretty good list. C’s elaborations are worth quoting nearly in full:
Consent and autonomy: It is essential to ensure that all parties involved in the adoption process have given informed consent and have a clear understanding of the implications and consequences of their decisions. This includes birth parents, adoptive parents, and the child (if they are old enough to understand). Consent should be freely given, without coercion or undue influence.
Transparency and honesty: Adoption processes should prioritize transparency and honesty throughout. All relevant information about the child’s background, medical history, and any potential challenges should be disclosed to prospective adoptive parents. Similarly, birth parents should be provided with accurate information about the adoption process and their rights.
Best interests of the child: The primary ethical consideration in adoption is the best interests of the child. This involves assessing and ensuring that the child’s physical, emotional, and developmental needs will be met in the adoptive family. It is crucial to conduct thorough assessments and evaluations of prospective adoptive parents to determine their suitability and ability to provide a nurturing and stable environment.
Cultural and identity considerations: Adopted children may have different racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds from their adoptive parents. It is important to consider how these differences will be addressed and respected, allowing the child to maintain a connection with their heritage and cultural identity. Adoptive parents should be willing to provide an environment that supports the child’s exploration and understanding of their background.
Avoiding exploitation: Adoption should never be driven by financial gain or the exploitation of vulnerable individuals or communities. The process should be conducted in an ethical manner, without any form of trafficking, coercion, or exploitation.
Post-adoption support: Ethical adoption practices involve providing ongoing support and resources to adoptive families and adopted individuals. This can include counseling, access to medical services, and assistance in navigating any challenges that may arise after the adoption is finalized.
And then ChatGPT closes its answer with what I’ll call The Standard Disclaimer, viz., a proviso that individual circumstances will differ in morally relevant ways:
It’s important to note that the specific ethical issues can vary depending on the country, culture, and legal framework in which the adoption takes place. It is crucial for individuals considering adoption to educate themselves about the ethical guidelines and regulations applicable in their jurisdiction and work with reputable adoption agencies or professionals to ensure ethical practices are followed.
Looking at a few details of this list, and working backward: consider 5. “Adoption should never be driven by financial gain or the exploitation of vulnerable individuals or communities.” No trafficking or coercion in any form. The words sound good. But how often is relinquishment for adoption genuinely free of coercion or exploitation? Or is Juno truly an exceptional instance? If money changes hands (as when a private adoption agency is involved, or when prospective parents make support payments to the person carrying “their” child), how do we separate those cases “driven by financial gain” from those that are not?
This is a wish list, rather than a statement of the ethical difficulties adoption entails.
4 tells us that adoptive parents should provide their transracially or internationally adopted child an environment that “supports [their] exploration and understanding of their background.” Can they? What of the 1972 statement by the National Association of Black Social Workers arguing that white adoptive parents cannot achieve this for their Black adopted children?
3 tells us, laudably, that the best interests of the child are paramount. But can the child’s “physical, emotional, and developmental needs” be met? This statement implies that the goal is achievable, but what if it is not?
2 prioritizes the aims of transparency and honesty without indicating how or whether it is possible to meet them. Can adoptive parents gain “all relevant information about the child's background, medical history, and any potential challenges?” Again, this is the ethical problem.
1 is the oddest of all. All parties involved in the adoption process should be given the opportunity to informed consent to the arrangement, including the child (if they are old enough to understand). How can we reconcile this anti-paternalist understanding of adoption as a transaction requiring multilateral consent with the paternalist conception of adoption as providing a home (or a better home) for a child who “may need one?” Does the child’s decision to give or withhold consent have any effective authority? And how can an arrangement that requires the consent of a child who is “old enough to understand” it not require that consent if the child is too young to do so?
My bafflement at this resulted in my second question to C:
How can a child give free consent to being adopted?
I pictured C blushing a little as they replied:
Apologies for any confusion caused by my previous response. You are correct, a child cannot give free consent to being adopted in the same way that adults provide consent for various decisions. The adoption process typically involves legal procedures that are designed to ensure the best interests of the child are protected.
In effect, C admitted that the paternalistic understanding of the adoption agreement is the correct one. It then focused its discussion of consent on that of the relinquishing parent, pointing out that jurisdictions stipulate waiting periods of various lengths during which that parent may decide to revoke consent to the relinquishment.
In cases where older children are involved, their opinions and wishes may be taken into consideration, particularly as they approach adolescence. … Some jurisdictions may involve the child in decision-making processes through interviews or discussions with social workers or court-appointed advocates to determine their views and best interests.
It isn’t clear how a formal mechanism for taking into consideration the “views and best interests” of an older child confers the authority of consent.
The dominant theme in C’s responses is to skirt discussion of the ethical problems actual adoption practices raise, limning instead a picture of an “ideal adoption.”
C finished its response with an intriguing assertion:
Legal frameworks and professionals involved in the adoption process work to protect the child’s rights and interests, even if direct consent from the child is not obtained.
This pivot from the child’s best interests to the child’s “rights and interests” caught my notice. Rights are at the center of my concern with adoption. Well into adulthood I had no legal right to view my original birth records, the key to knowing my genealogical identity in an age before DNA databases. There is still no full legal protection of intercountry adoptees’s citizenship rights. What is implicit in C’s statement here? Thus, my third question:
What are the child’s rights that the adoption process protects?
We will pick up the thread in my next post.