Advanced AI (generative AI) poses challenges to the practice of law and to society as a whole. The proper governance of AI is unresolved but will likely be multifaceted (soft law such as standardisation, best practices and ethical guidelines), as well as hard law consisting of a blend of existing law and new regulations. This chapter argues that ‘lawyer’s professional codes’ of conduct (ethical guidelines) provide a governance system that can be applied to the AI industry. The increase in professionalisation warrants the treating of AI creators, developers and operators, as professionals subject to the obligations foisted on the legal profession and other learned professions. Legal ethics provides an overall conceptual structure that can guide AI development serving the purposes of disclosing potential liabilities to AI developers and building trust for the users of AI. Additionally, AI creators, developers and operators should be subject to fiduciary duty law. Fiduciary duty law as applied to these professionals would require a duty of care in designing safe AI systems, a duty of loyalty to customers, users and society not to create systems that manipulate consumers and democratic governance and a duty of good faith to create beneficial systems. This chapter advocates the use of ethical guidelines and fiduciary law not as soft law but as the basis of structuring private law in the governance of AI.

The primary motivation of members of the ruling class is the quest for power. Power, which enables people to accomplish other goals, is also a desired end in itself. Those who have the greatest desire for power will self-select into activities that allow them to exercise power over others. Participants in the political marketplace will be most successful if they are open to negotiating any offer from other participants, which implies that principled politicians will be at a disadvantage to those who are less principled. In their quest for power, the ruling class seeks stability to prevent challengers from displacing them. Creative destruction, in markets for goods and services and in the political marketplace, works against the elite, so there is a tendency for the economic and political elite to work together to prevent that creative destruction. Unchecked, this tendency can displace progress with stagnation.

Chapter 4, ‘Ethics and the Everyday’, demonstrates how letter-writing creates a porous space where questions in ethics, ethnography, and everyday living intersect with cultures of friendship, citizenship, and reciprocity in ways that anticipate our late modern fascination with the experiential. Intersubjective sense-making, solidarity, hospitality, and the gift are approached through perspectives drawn from the thought of Jacques Derrida, and from care studies, material culture studies, and eudaimonics. The chapter begins with an investigation of the epistolary encounter with both ordinary and exceptional things, asking how particular objects – the proximate and palpable – inscribe the epistolary imaginary and create a sense of material thickness in letter-writing. Curiosity, attentiveness, and the investment of care in things reveal a sustained commitment to the world of objects, repositories of ethical, eudaimonic, and heuristic value. This ethical commitment informs letter-writing around cultures of gifting. If the sharing of benefits is a major conduit of friendship, modes of calibration temper and regulate relations of power and influence in letter-writing.

The Introduction, ‘Thinking Letterworlds’, makes the case for reading the letter-writing of major modern artists and authors through the prism of their everyday lived experience. Whilst the creativity of Mallarmé, Van Gogh, Morisot, Cézanne, and Zola reaches deep into our cultural imaginary, their letter-writing on matters of physical and mental health, daily habits, community, leisure, solitude, ethics, and material culture is rarely studied in its own right. The book’s aims are thus outlined: to develop an integrative and comparative approach to reading letters through selected approaches in modern critical thought; to explore the deeper narrative of everyday preoccupations in letter-writing; to bring fresh critical attention to the expressivity of everyday letters by examining modes of realism, irony, metaphoricity, and fantasy; to advance a critical redistribution of literary value that recognises the creativity of everyday letter-writing; to consider how letter-writing of the past resonates with readers today in its concerns with the lived body, with subjectivity and social relations, with pressures of work, and with the intermittences of private life.

Chapter 1 introduces the challenges of trusting public cooperation without monitoring and coercion, considers current research on the relationship between concepts such as cooperation and honesty, and examines the effectiveness of voluntary compliance.

This chapter moves from examining institutional changes to the cultural history of morals and emotions, by examining how the evolution of the idea of the self came to supplant the institutional mediation of local law courts. It traces how three concepts – self-love, happiness, and interest – were developed and disseminated as religious and interpersonal ethics, all related to the development of the self within the singular mind. This was a crucial move that allowed the idea and practice of savings to move from taking the form of a debt owed, to the interest-bearing capital described above. It also validated the crucial concept of interest within religion, and this was related to the increasing moral acceptance of the interest rate. Although a legal interest rate had existed from the Elizabethan Act of 1571, interest rates are difficult to find mentioned explicitly in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth, however, they had become commonplace.

I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.

The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.

In the eighteenth century, the practice of law was not a self-governing profession in the modern sense. Many lawyers and judges lacked specialized knowledge and formal training, and only a few were subject to regulation or oversight. This chapter examines how Henry Fielding grapples with the consequences of this undisciplined, undereducated, and ethically unmoored legal culture in Tom Jones (1749). Fielding derides the inadequacies of the period’s legal order by featuring magistrates and attorneys whose primary characteristics are intellectual incompetence, poor judgment, and moral corruption. Yet he also proposes a remedy to the law’s limitations. Drawing from moral philosophies circulating in the mid eighteenth century, Fielding implicitly advocates for a professional system that fosters its representatives’ innate moral virtues and enforces a stable but flexible code of ethics. His proposal has relevance for today’s legal profession, which is likewise susceptible to charges of ineffectiveness, injustice, and unfairness.

The book concludes by pointing out two major shifts that my reading of the Shepherd produces: one focused on how the centrality of slavery in the Shepherd that complicates earlier treatments of the text as most invested in baptism and/or repentance, and the other focused on the ethical and historical anxieties that emerge from the enslaved–enslaver relationship being so deeply embedded in early Christian literature, ethics, and subject formation. Additionally, I point to how my findings reveal why the Shepherd would be appealing to late ancient Christians: its visionary, dialogical, parabolic, and ethical content are aimed toward crafting obedient enslaved believers who were unified in their ecclesiastical vision. The work of feminist, womanist, Africana, and slavery studies scholars offer an intellectual and ethical scaffolding upon which I contend with the centrality in early Christian thought of God as an enslaver and believers as enslaved persons, as well as the continuations and challenges of the embeddedness of slavery in Christian vocabulary into the twenty-first century.