Abstract
The release of ChatGPT has stirred considerable concern and discussion in the field of education. Educators have expressed both frustration and optimism regarding the technology. In this article I argue that when educators consider potential uses of ChatGPT in the classroom, they should use ChatGPT in ways that do not undermine the formation of intellectual virtues. I begin by briefly reviewing a classical virtue theory, particularly as expressed by Aristotle and Aquinas. Then I define and discuss two intellectual virtues, open-mindedness and intellectual humility, explaining why these virtues are important for human flourishing. In short, these virtues contribute to the contemplation of God. Next, I explore the nature and purpose of ChatGPT. Once I have outlined what ChatGPT is, I consider potential uses of ChatGPT in light of the goals of developing open-mindedness and intellectual humility. In short, I defend the view that appropriate uses of ChatGPT must not replace students exercising the mental processes necessary for developing intellectual virtues. I conclude by noting how this discussion of ChatGPT implies that content mastery alone is not a sufficient condition for determining whether adequate education has taken place.
In November 2022, OpenAI publicly released its groundbreaking software, “ChatGPT.” Because of its linguistic and reasoning capabilities and its easy accessibility, ChatGPT quickly sent educators scrambling to figure out how to address the new technology and its implications for assessing student work. The Harvard Crimson ran an article detailing how some students had used the software to produce essays and answers to exam questions (Duffy et al., 2023). Moreover, New York Public schools temporarily banned ChatGPT (Rosenblatt, 2023).
Yet, many other voices in education were quick to point out that banning ChatGPT runs the risk of ignoring beneficial uses of the technology and may do very little to keep students from using ChatGPT to cheat in the long run. Will Heaven at the MIT Technology Review writes, [M]any teachers now believe ChatGPT could actually help make education better. Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more. (2023)
The purpose of this paper is not to prove that ChatGPT has no place in educational settings. On the contrary, I am proposing a framework intended to help guide educators in determining appropriate uses of ChatGPT. I will argue that when educators are considering a particular use of ChatGPT in their classrooms, they should consider whether the potential use undermines or enhances a student's development of intellectual virtue. I will begin with a brief summary of virtue theory, paying particular attention to Thomas Aquinas and how Aquinas adapts Aristotle's virtue paradigm for Christian theism. Then I will explore two intellectual virtues, open-mindedness and intellectual humility and how these virtues fit within a Thomistic system. Next, I will explore the nature of ChatGPT and develop a framework for thinking about potential uses of ChatGPT in education. Lastly, I will explain why this discussion of ChatGPT suggests content mastery alone is an insufficient goal of education.
Virtues
In this paper I will explore a broadly Aristotelian virtue account. Sometimes referred to as “eudaimonistic” virtue theory this account conceives of virtue as human excellences that are constituent of a flourishing (or happy) human life (Hursthouse & Pettigrove, 2003). That is, human virtues are excellences proper to human beings and when human beings express these virtues, they are acting in excellently human ways. In an oft-cited passage, Aristotle writes, For just as a flute-player, a sculptor, or any artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the “well” is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. (Aristotle, 2009, 1097b)
Yet it is not immediately clear that Aristotle's biological account of human nature is alone an adequate foundation from which to identify human excellences. Rosalind Hursthouse acknowledges this potential difficulty succinctly. For either we speak from the neutral point of view, using a scientific account of human nature—in which case we won’t get very far—or we speak from within an acquired ethical outlook—in which case we will not validate our ethical beliefs, but merely express them. (Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 2002, p. 193)
Robert Adams seems to agree with Hursthouse that human biology alone is inadequate to ground human virtue because even if biology can identify activities in which humans engage, it cannot explain what it means to do them well. He argues that it is better to identify individual human excellences prior to attempting to describe what a flourishing human life looks like. “Value, I believe, is not to be defined by the demands of the merely biological… but by approximation to an objective ideal or transcendent standard” (Adams, 2006, p. 52). If Hursthouse and Adams are correct, it will be necessary to identify reasoning well with some objective transcendent standard of excellence. In other words, if reasoning well is truly an excellence, it is excellent not merely because it is a human activity. What makes a human activity excellent is that the activity aligns with a good identified independently of human biology.
Synthesizing Christian metaphysics and Aristotelian virtue theory, Thomas Aquinas attempts to link human rationality with such a transcendent standard, God. Aquinas goes further than Aristotle and asserts that human flourishing is fully expressed in a special kind of experience of God. That is, the most excellent human activity is apprehending God in a certain way. “Ultimate and perfect happiness cannot consist in anything other than a vision of the divine essence” (Aquinas, 2016, I–II.Q3.A8).
In Aquinas’ view, proper intellectual functioning leads human beings toward this experience. “Now the object of the intellect is what-something-is, that is, the essence of a thing” (Aquinas, 2016, I-II.Q3.A8). In other words, discovering the nature of something, the “what-something-is” (essence), is the proper function of the human intellect. Understanding something's essence requires one to understand the cause of a thing, then that cause's cause etc., so that one's quest for learning about the essence of things will not properly be fulfilled until one discovers the First Cause, that is God. Moreover, discovering that there is a God will not be sufficient. One will want to discover the essence (“what-something is”) of God. The full discovery of God's essence (at least insofar as humanly possible) is the experience of God which is ultimate human flourishing (and happiness). “So perfect happiness requires the intellect to reach the very essence of the First Cause. And in this way it will have its perfection by being united with God as its object; and human happiness consists in this alone, as I have said” (Aquinas, 2016). It is important to note that Aquinas does not believe apprehension of God is alone constitutive of human happiness. For a human being to be ultimately happy, she must both apprehend God and delight in Him (Aquinas, 2016, I–II Q4.A1).
Yet, even though thinking about God is not a sufficient condition for flourishing, it is certainly a necessary condition. Mary Catherine Sommers notes that Aquinas’ view of divine contemplation is not anti-intellectual. “For, although Aquinas roots the motivation for contemplation in love, his doctrine ‘concedes to the intellect its apprehensive function’” (Sommers, 2015, p. 168). It is well known that Aquinas distinguishes between virtues acquired through habit (e.g., courage, justice, prudence, temperance) and virtues infused by the Holy Spirit (e.g., faith, hope, and love). Yet, this distinction does not lead Aquinas to encourage an anti-intellectual lifestyle where one passively awaits the full infusion of virtues to the exclusion of developing acquired virtues. Instead, he believes the acquired virtues and the infused virtues work together cooperatively.
In fact, the infused virtues are means by which the acquired virtues can function to their maximal capacity. To this end, Aquinas believes that the intellectual virtues one acquires will function symbiotically with the infused virtues to facilitate the contemplation of God. Properly functioning faith and reason work together to make divine contemplation possible. “At the very root of the baptized Christian, faith has taken up residence with reason and each operates alongside the other per humanum modum, the new ‘base’ from which human nature's orientation towards contemplative truth becomes capable of the beatific vision” (Sommers, 2015, p. 181). Contemplative activity regarding non-divine objects prepares one for contemplation of God by developing requisite intellectual excellences which are also necessary for contemplating God. If Aquinas is right, the way we develop our intellectual virtues in the pursuit of mundane truth affects the way we can live in contemplation of God. In short, the more intellectually virtuous one is, the better one will be able to contemplate God. With this in mind, I will argue that at least two intellectual virtues are important for contemplating God the way Aquinas imagines, open-mindedness and intellectual humility. I will explore the nature of each of these virtues in turn and explain why each is important for contemplating God.
Before turning to the individual virtues, however, I think it will be helpful to quickly review other features of a Thomistic (and Aristotelian) framework. According to both Aquinas and Aristotle, a virtue is an excellence. This excellence is most often some kind of mean between two vices, one a deficiency of virtue and one an “excess” of virtue. For example, we might think that courage is a virtue. This virtue is located between cowardice (a deficiency) and foolhardiness (an excess). This does not mean that the virtue must be something like the quantitative mean perfectly centered between two vices. Rather, the virtue is usually located somewhere between an excess and a deficiency. It could be that courage is closer to foolhardiness than cowardice.
In addition, virtues transcend skills because virtues require one not to only be disposed to execute acts the right way, persons must also be properly motivated. Thus, a virtuous person will be disposed to act excellently because they are motivated in an appropriate way. John Locke (2017) frames the importance of this motivation for intellectual virtues succinctly. Anyone wanting to engage seriously in the search for truth ought first to prepare his mind with a love of it. Someone who doesn’t love truth won’t take much trouble to get it, or be much concerned when he misses it. (Book IV.xix.1)
Open-Mindedness
I understand open-mindedness to be excellence in considering the viewpoints of others. Open-mindedness allows one to learn information one did not previously know because open-mindedness requires the recognition that one's own perspective is limited. For this reason, I believe open-mindedness to be closely related to intellectual humility. For one to be open-minded in the right way, one must recognize and value the possibility that others have important insight about the world that one currently lacks. Philosopher Wayne Riggs (2015) writes, “Being open-minded makes us aware of alternative perspectives and disposed to give them a sympathetic hearing” (p. 22).
Of course, one might worry that one might be too open-minded. That is, we might worry that one considers all perspectives on a given topic to be equally valuable. For instance, someone who is too open-minded might consider the perspective of a third grader and a nuclear physicist to be of the same value when attempting to learn about the nature of fundamental particles. The excess in this concerns an inability to properly recognize and evaluate the expertise of other persons and the impact this expertise has on one's perspective. In a different scenario, one who is too open-minded might value the perspective of someone else above their own perspective in important contexts. For instance, I may believe that I feel afraid of large bodies of water because I almost drowned as a child. An acquaintance of mine might tell me that I am afraid of large bodies of water because I don’t like the feeling of getting wet. In this second situation, the excess has to do with not rightly evaluating my own epistemic position in comparison with another person's. It would be a mistake for me to privilege my friend's perspective over my own because they are not privy to much of my personal history nor do they have firsthand access to my thoughts and emotions. “The open-minded person must exercise discrimination in the exercise of the standpoint-transcending abilities that are partly constitutive of the virtue. More importantly, such discrimination is itself partly constitutive of the virtue as well” (Riggs, 2015, p. 23).
Conversely, one might not be open-minded enough. That is, the close-minded person is one who refuses to consider the perspectives of others. This is problematic because no human being is omniscient. If no one is all-knowing, each person's perspective is limited and can be potentially enhanced by another person's knowledge and experience. “Being open-minded is all about not getting stuck in one's own mental rut. It requires the flexibility of mind and character to ‘take seriously’ some point of view different from one's own” (Riggs, 2015, p. 22).
The virtuous person is motivated to be open-minded because they value coming to know truth and they understand their perspective is limited. Thus, considering others’ perspectives in the right ways allows one to come to know more about the world, thereby enlarging one's own perspective. Thus, if there is a perspective that is omniscient, the open-minded person will privilege this perspective above all possible perspectives, including one's own.
Open-mindedness is important for human flourishing because God is omniscient and invites us to consider his perspective of the world. A person with the virtue of open-mindedness will want to consider God's perspective because the virtuous person appropriately values God's omniscience as being a superior perspective than one's own because God's perspective is not limited in the ways that human perspectives are. In addition, God invites believers to consider the world from his own perspective. For instance, consider Philippians 2:5. “In your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (NIV). In this section where Paul invites believers to imitate Christ's humility, Paul encourages believers to adopt Christ's perspective as motivation to imitate Jesus’ humility. In Isaiah, the prophet declares, Seek the Lord while he may be found; Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways And the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, And to our God, for he will freely pardon. (55:6–8, NIV)
Here, God explicitly calls on the unrighteous to forsake their thoughts and instead adopt God's perspective by “seeking” him. Furthermore, if one is to contemplate God in the way Aquinas suggests, one must be open to contemplating God's perspective of himself because God's omniscient perspective is the most illuminating perspective, and no one delights in God more than God himself.
Intellectual Humility
Ian James Kidd (2015) construes intellectual humility as the excellence in managing the confidence of one's intellectual capacities. The virtuous person with intellectual humility will have the appropriate degree of confidence in their intellectual abilities. Kidd points out intellectual humility operates at three levels, but I will only focus on the “agential” level (“The second level is collective confidence: the confidence invested in others, including peers, teachers, and the social communities with which one engages…[The last level] is the level of deep confidence: the confidence invested explicitly, or perhaps more typically implicitly, in the deeper social, intellectual, and historical foundations upon which individual and collective activities and projects rest” (Kidd 2015, 57)). The first level is agential confidence: the confidence a person invests in their cognitive capacities and experiences, skills and training, and perhaps their general ‘self-trust’ in their status and ability as an intellectual agent, able to pursue and attain truths about the world. (Kidd, 2015, p. 57)
Kidd suggests that intellectual humility is cultivated through “confidence-calibration” activities. Confidence-calibration activities are “cognitive and social practices whose purpose is to gauge agential, collective, and deep confidence, and these can take many different forms: for instance, basic fact checking, debate and argumentation, psychological studies, historical inquiry, and, of course, philosophical practice” (2015, p. 58). We might think of teacher feedback on essays, multiple choice test grades, and live in-class discussions as examples of confidence-calibration activities.
Ostensibly, any confidence-calibration activity must provide an accurate reflection of one's intellectual abilities in each context. Thus, one will be careful not to extrapolate an evaluation of their abilities from an abnormal context to a normal one. For instance, a student who performs poorly on an exam just after her mother died will not regard this particular performance as indicative of how well she would perform on an exam in normal circumstances. Furthermore, if the teacher feedback is to assist student confidence calibration, the feedback must concern a student's actual work. Thus, it is important the feedback received from completing the activity must evaluate the exercise of these abilities accurately. Because this article is concerned with intellectual virtue more broadly conceived, I will focus on confidence-calibration activities that are reflective of a person's intellectual abilities in normal situations.
If one is motivated by a love for truth, one will place the most confidence in whoever's abilities are most likely to yield truth in any particular case. Of course, because God is omniscient, the virtuous person will place supreme confidence in God's intellectual abilities. Thus, if one is to flourish as a human, they will recognize the disparity between one's own intellectual abilities and God's and desire the conveyance of God's intellect. If one is not appropriately intellectually humble, they will not desire the conveyance of God's intellect.
Thus far I have argued that education ought to be concerned with developing intellectual virtues because intellectual virtues are part of a flourishing human life that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the knowledge of God. Thus, education ought to be concerned with developing at least the following three things. First, education ought to seek to develop a love for truth. Second, education ought to seek to develop open-mindedness in students. Third, education ought to seek to develop intellectual humility in students. I will now turn toward a discussion of AI use in education, specifically ChatGPT. I focus on discussing whether using ChatGPT undermines these three key goals of education.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) artificial intelligence. Essentially, NLP translates natural human language user input into computer code and then generates a natural language output by applying linguistic pattern analysis to formulate a natural language response. The SAS Institute, a purveyor of business focused AI explains, “Basic NLP tasks include tokenization and parsing, lemmatization/stemming, part-of-speech tagging, language detection and identification of semantic relationships. If you ever diagrammed sentences in grade school, you’ve done these tasks manually before” (Natural Language Processing (NLP): What it is and why it matters, n.d.). The NLP output is the program's attempt to predict a response based on patterns in natural language. NLP can be subdivided into two stages: natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG). NLU is the more difficult of the two tasks because of ambiguity in natural language. For instance, the sentence, “I am going to drink soda and fish” could be taken to mean either that I am going to drink both fish and soda, or it could mean that I am going to drink soda and engage in the activity of fishing. For NLU to be successful, it must be able to disambiguate the meanings of sentences which includes determining the intended usage of homophones and gerunds. Turing, an AI tech services company explains, “NLG is a method of creating meaningful phrases and sentences (natural language) from data. It comprises three stages: text planning, sentence planning, and text realization” (Natural Language Processing Functionality in AI, n.d.).
Yet, while ChatGPT is primarily an application of NLP, it is capable of much more than analyzing natural language inputs and generating coherent natural language outputs. ChatGPT is also capable of performing logical calculations and advanced reasoning. These capacities are reflected in ChatGPT's performance on standardized testing requiring advanced reasoning skills. For instance, ChatGPT-4 scored in the top 10% of test takers on the Uniform Bar Exam, the top 12% on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), and the top 20% on the Quantitative reasoning section of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) (OpenAI, 2023, p. 5). According to their technical report, the creators of ChatGPT-4 “did no specific training for these exams” (OpenAI, 2023, p. 4).
The potential uses of ChatGPT are tremendous. Open AI states that applications like ChatGPT “are an important area of study as they have the potential to be used in a wide range of applications, such as dialogue systems, text summarization, and machine translation” (2023, p. 1). Ross Gruetzemacher (2022) writes about the added efficiency of using a ChatGPT-based research assistant named Elicit. [W]hen I need to start digging into a new research topic, it has become my go-to resource. All of this is changing how I work. I spend much less time trying to find existing content relevant to my research questions because its results are more applicable than other, more traditional interfaces for academic search like Google Scholar. Today's machines can analyze more language-based data than humans, without fatigue and in a consistent, unbiased way (To be fair, the claim that NLP unbiasedly analyzes data is a highly contentious claim. For a discussion of bias in NLP applications see (Hovy & Prabhumoye, 2021) or (Callskan, 2021)). Considering the staggering amount of unstructured data that's generated every day, from medical records to social media, automation will be critical to fully analyze text and speech data efficiently. (Natural Language Processing (NLP): What It Is and Why It Matters, n.d.) ChatGPT has been used to develop intelligent tutoring systems that can provide personalized learning experiences to students. These systems can understand students’ learning styles and adapt the content and teaching methods to their needs, helping them to achieve better learning outcomes. (p. 7)
ChatGPT offers great promise, in part, because it greatly increases people's efficiency. Tasks that used to take hours, days, or weeks for someone to accomplish can now sometimes be accomplished in minutes. Additionally, ChatGPT does not need to eat, sleep, or rest so it is near constantly available to virtually anyone with internet access.
Yet, with all its promise, ChatGPT has important limitations. Perhaps one of the most well-known limitations is that ChatGPT “hallucinates,” that is, ChatGPT makes up facts and makes reasoning errors. “It fails at basic math, can’t seem to answer simple logic questions, and will even go as far as to argue completely incorrect facts. As people across social media will attest, ChatGPT can get it wrong on multiple occasions” (Wu, 2023). Open AI acknowledges this shortcoming and its potential. GPT-4 has the tendency to “hallucinate,” i.e., “produce content that is nonsensical or untruthful in relation to certain sources.” This tendency can be particularly harmful as models become increasingly convincing and believable, leading to overreliance on them by users … Counterintuitively, hallucinations can become more dangerous as models become more truthful, as users build trust in the model when it provides truthful information in areas where they have some familiarity. Additionally, as these models are integrated into society and used to help automate various systems, this tendency to hallucinate is one of the factors that can lead to the degradation of overall information quality and further reduce veracity of and trust in freely available information. (OpenAI, 2023, p. 46)
Yet, as I have already stated, my concern is less about ChatGPT's content and more about the mental processes and habits that the technology may supplant in education. I have identified two intellectual virtues, open-mindedness and intellectual humility, that are important to develop because these virtues contribute to a student's overall human flourishing. I will explore each of these in turn and how uses of ChatGPT might be evaluated in light of virtue development.
ChatGPT and Virtue
One of the keys to developing the virtue of open-mindedness is providing students with opportunities to evaluate the perspectives of others. These opportunities hone a student's ability to determine when to consider another person's perspective and how much evidential weight to attach to that perspective. One might help students develop a habit that yields open-mindedness by creating assignments where students are asked to evaluate an opposing viewpoint like a debate or a persuasive paper. Yet it is unclear how ChatGPT might be used constructively in these scenarios. Perhaps, one might use ChatGPT to summarize a variety of arguments for and against a particular position. Once ChatGPT has summarized the arguments, the student may evaluate them and determine which arguments are sound and which are unsound.
However, an important part of evaluating viewpoints requires one to know the source of the viewpoint under consideration so that one can appropriately assign evidential weight to perspectives. As I mentioned earlier, expertise is important when considering how much weight to attach to a given viewpoint. Unless ChatGPT reliably cites its sources, a student cannot appropriately assign epistemic weight to differing perspectives. As of the writing of this paper, ChatGPT does not reliably cite sources (Welborn, 2023).
To develop open-mindedness, one needs opportunities to appropriately evaluate perspectives and receive feedback on how well one evaluates those perspectives. Students need opportunities to evaluate to hone the use of the skill(s) associated with being open-minded, and they need feedback to better improve their viewpoint evaluation in the future. Furthermore, appropriate feedback will help motivate the student to desire to be open-minded and by extension, desire to learn truth. Thus, using ChatGPT to summarize arguments for students to evaluate could encourage the development of open-mindedness insofar as ChatGPT reliably cites its sources and allows students to engage in the mental processes of perspective evaluation.
Earlier, I defined intellectual humility as excellence in managing the confidence of one's intellectual abilities. Kidd identified three levels of intellectual humility, but I want to focus on one level: agential confidence. Agential confidence is the confidence one has about oneself and their own abilities, specifically, their intellectual abilities. This means that for someone to exhibit excellence in intellectual humility they must maintain an appropriate level of confidence in their intellectual abilities. For instance, an intellectually humble person who can solve complex calculus problems will have a high degree of confidence they can solve complex calculus problems. Similarly, another person with intellectual humility who is not able to solve complex calculus problems will have a low degree of confidence that they can solve complex calculus problems.
Following Kidd, I have also suggested intellectual humility is developed through confidence calibrating activities. These activities must accurately reflect one's intellectual abilities so one does not extrapolate a general assessment of one's intellectual abilities from an abnormal situation (e.g., scoring low on a test because of a family death). These activities must also reflect a student's own abilities and not someone else's (e.g., not plagiarizing).
When evaluating opportunities to use ChatGPT in the classroom, we must be careful not to undermine confidence-calibration activities by subverting a student's exercise of the relevant intellectual skill and/or ability. This means that as educators, we must be able to identify what intellectual skills or abilities each educational activity develops and whether ChatGPT's function replaces or significantly limits the exercise of those intellectual skills or abilities. For instance, let's say I ask my 11th grade literature class to write a short essay explaining how William Blake's use of metaphor in his poem “The Tyger” contributes to the reader's understanding of a tiger. I gave this assignment because I want my students to exercise their ability to identify metaphors, to develop their understanding of how individual metaphors contribute to the beauty of the whole poem, and to develop their own writing skills by encouraging them to use similar literary techniques in their own writing. If I instructed students, as part of the assignment, to ask ChatGPT to identify the metaphors in the passage I would be depriving the students of an opportunity to exercise and evaluate their ability to identify metaphors, and thus undermine their development of intellectual humility. However, I could have students ask ChatGPT to write a short biographical summary of Blake to help situate students to the context of his writing. This second use of ChatGPT does not eliminate an opportunity to develop intellectual humility because ChatGPT does not perform the intellectual activity I desire my students to perform. In fact, this second use might increase students’ ability to understand how individual metaphors contribute to the beauty of the whole poem by helping students to understand the meaning of the metaphors in their original context.
Thus, a key factor in determining when and how to incorporate ChatGPT into the classroom is to determine whether ChatGPT will replace the intellectual processes required for virtue formation. If a use of ChatGPT substitutes for students evaluating perspectives well or undermines confidence-calibration activities, that use of ChatGPT undermines developing intellectual virtue. If a use of ChatGPT aids students’ development of the ability to evaluate perspectives or facilitates confidence-calibration activities, that use of ChatGPT may encourage the development of intellectual virtue.
Lastly, our discussion of ChatGPT and virtue raises an interesting point regarding proper motivation for intellectual virtue. Earlier in the paper, I asserted that love for truth is an appropriate motivation for developing intellectual virtues. Yet, this motivation alone does not seem to be sufficient for developing at least some intellectual virtues like open-mindedness and intellectual humility. To flesh out why this is, I want to consider some of the potential of ChatGPT.
As it stands now, ChatGPT “hallucinates” facts, but OpenAI programmers significantly decreased the incidence of hallucinations from ChatGPT-3 to ChatGPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023, p.10). It is quite plausible that one day ChatGPT will hallucinate very little and thus produce false information in sufficiently small quantities as to be considered a trustworthy source of information. It is conceivable that someone who is only motivated by a desire to know truth could use ChatGPT without seeking to develop open-mindedness or intellectual humility. Any time someone wanted to know something, they could simply ask ChatGPT their question and receive a true answer without developing habits necessary for the relevant virtues. In this way, one could satisfy one's desire to know truth without intellectual virtue.
However, someone who lacks open-mindedness or intellectual humility seems to be an impoverished human being. After all, all other things being equal, we would consider an open-minded intellectually humble person better than someone who lacks both of those qualities. I believe this intuition helps highlight why content mastery is not a sufficient condition for determining whether adequate education has taken place, though it may be a necessary condition. Just because a student can remember a fact or be able to look one up does not mean they are exhibiting the qualities necessary for flourishing. For this reason, I believe it appropriate to assert that in addition to a love for truth, intellectual virtue is properly motivated by a desire to be excellently human (One might assert that “love for God” is a sufficient motivation for intellectual virtue. Here I assume the desire to be excellently human includes a desire to love God because human beings are created to love God). If this is true, excellent education must also seek to foster students’ desire to be excellently human.
Conclusion
This paper was born out of experience in my own classroom. Teaching theology and philosophy classes at the high school and undergraduate levels, I have had students attempt to use ChatGPT to complete varying degrees of work. It became readily apparent to me that I needed a principled way to educate my students in the AI's use. In addition, I became concerned that many critiques of ChatGPT were missing something about the purpose of education. This paper is the result of wrestling with these concerns. I want to end by discussing applications that are more particular to the Christian ministry/education classroom.
If I assign students a paper defending an argument for God's existence, I want students not to just memorize the content, but I also want students to evaluate the arguments because this intellectual activity develops open-mindedness and intellectual humility. I suspect there are many readers who have experienced overconfident students who exhibit the attitude they know everything there is to know about any argument. My experience has almost always been that these kinds of students do not have much practice in thoughtfully evaluating differing perspectives. If I allow students to use ChatGPT to evaluate these arguments, I deprive them of the opportunity to evaluate the arguments themselves, thus not only depriving them of an opportunity to develop virtue, but possibly further inculcating vice. Moreover, if I allow students to use ChatGPT to summarize arguments, students lose exposure to some of the distinctiveness of differing perspectives. However, ChatGPT might be a helpful tool for students to become aware of what arguments there are and who the principal defenders are.
Similarly, if I assign a sermon to write, I want students not only to develop engaging rhetoric, I want them to sort through different exegetical perspectives, illustrations, and applications in a way that makes them better pastors (i.e., more virtuous). In this case, it might be appropriate to use ChatGPT to collect a group of resources like exegetical commentaries or to suggest particular applications. However, I want to make sure my students read and evaluate the content of these resources. If I allow students to use ChatGPT in a way that circumvents the processes of perspective evaluation and confidence calibration, I deprive them of the opportunity to develop excellence. Insofar as Jesus is the moral exemplar par excellence, how I direct my students to use ChatGPT affects what opportunities they have to become more Christlike.
