Part of Hindsight 2070: We asked 15 experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” Here’s what they told us.

Karen Swallow Prior is Professor of English at Liberty University and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. She is the author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.

The list of those who have had few or no legal rights throughout history is staggering: women, children, orphans, widows, Jews, gays and lesbians, slaves, former slaves, descendants of slaves, those with leprosy, undocumented immigrants — to name a few.

Nothing marks the progress of any society more than the expansion of human rights to those who formerly lacked them. I believe that if such progress is to continue, prenatal human beings will be included in this group, and we will consider elective abortion primitive and cruel in the future.

The eradication of abortion may be difficult to imagine. But consider how difficult it would have been for our grandparents to foresee a culture in which nearly one in four women has an abortion by age 45. Certainly, some factors leading to this situation reflect real and substantial progress for women: greater equality, more work options, improved understanding of sexuality, and increased moral agency. But rights for women that come at the expense of unborn children aren’t true liberation; they merely, as one writer put it, enable the “redistribution of oppression.”

Before the first trimester is over (when the vast majority of abortions are performed), a tiny fetus the size of a fig kicks her feet, yawns, sucks her thumb, and demonstrates her left- or right-handedness. Her heartbeat and brain waves are detectable just a few weeks after conception. Clearly, such beings are human — and all human rights begin with the right to life. The fact that many abortion rights supporters wish abortion to be “rare” is an implicit acknowledgment of these undeniable, if inconvenient, truths.

So what will it take to disentangle the sexual, familial, economic, and political threads of legal elective abortion that have become so tightly woven into our cultural fabric? I think we are beginning to see that unraveling now.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that abortion hit its lowest rate since Roe v. Wade: 11.8 per 1,000 women ages 15-44, a dramatic decline from a peak in the early 1980s that approached 30 per 1,000 women. It’s unclear whether this decrease is owing to increased use of contraceptives; delayed sexual activity among young people; the declining number of doctors willing to participate in abortions; a growing inability to deny — thanks to ultrasound technology, prenatal surgical interventions, and extravagant gender reveal parties — the insuppressible personality of the child in the womb; or a combination of all these factors.

Whatever the cause, however, abortion is becoming less necessary and less desirable. Recent attempts in several states to expand access to late-term abortions in anticipation of the possible overturning of Roe not only violate the view of the majority (who support greater restrictions after the first trimester) but will be seen by future generations as a last, desperate show of stubbornness in the face of human progress.

Every age has its blinders, constructed, usually, through a combination of ignorance and self-interest. Many things such as bloodletting and wet nurses that are seen as good or indispensable in one age are unthinkable in another.  

Our modern-day willingness to settle for sex apart from commitment, to accept the dereliction of duty by men who impregnate women (for men are the primary beneficiaries of liberal abortion laws), and to uphold the systematic suppression of sex’s creative energy and function are practices that people of other ages would have considered bizarre. As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.

When we do, we will look back at elective abortion and wonder — as we do now with polluting and smoking — why we so wholeheartedly embraced it. We will look at those ultrasound images of 11-week old fetuses somersaulting in the waters of the womb and lack words to explain to our grandchildren why we ever defended their willful destruction in the name of personal choice and why we harmed so many women to do so.

Several years ago, a male colleague and I left a meeting on one side of campus at the university where we both teach to return to our offices, a 15-minute walk away. Since I had driven my car to the meeting, I asked my colleague if he’d like a ride back. After an almost imperceptible hesitation, he politely thanked me and said no.

Walking to my car, I suddenly realized I’d just had my first encounter with the “Billy Graham rule,” a concept highlighted in recent news as a result of reports of Vice President Mike Pence’s longstanding principle of not having meals alone with a woman or attending events serving alcohol unless accompanied by his wife.

The rule, famously articulated by the evangelical minister Billy Graham, is basically a guideline that says men and women should not meet alone, whether in offices, or cars, or other places in order to avoid illicit temptations or appearances of impropriety. It’s been adopted by other evangelical pastors and leaders (a history of its origin is here): The late founder of the evangelical university where I work was known for saying that he’d pass by a female member of his church walking in the rain if he were alone in his car to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

Once I realized why my colleague had turned down my offer, I felt a twinge of embarrassment and awkwardness, as though I’d invited him to a game of strip poker instead of a three-minute ride to the other end of campus. Besides, I thought in an imaginary retort, “I’m just not that into you.”

But the good part of this story is that despite working for nearly two decades at an evangelical university, I’ve had only two or three such encounters with the Billy Graham rule. While I have tremendous respect for men who place their marriages before their work, such a rule befits the world of Mad Men more than the modern-day work world where women are to be treated as equals. But even more importantly, good character is even more trustworthy than the most well-intentioned rules.

Virtue ethics is better than the Billy Graham rule.

Virtue ethics relies on moral character that is developed through good habits rather than rules or consequences for the governing of behavior. Aristotle defined virtue as the mean between two extremes, one of excess and one of deficiency. It is a habit of moral character, which, because it is a habit, becomes a kind of second nature. As Aristotle explained, it does not depend upon rules.

Despite decades of working at evangelical institutions, I haven’t encountered the Billy Graham rule all that often

Although I had grown up evangelical, I had never heard of the Billy Graham rule until well into my 30 years of professional life, most of it ministry- and church-related. I’ve spent a lot of time around a lot of men in educational, political, and church contexts, some of that time one on one: discussing a book proposal over lunch, talking politics over coffee, traveling overseas to meet with foreign leaders, and having many closed-door meetings with male colleagues, male bosses, male students, and men under my supervision.

In fact, my first secretary was a man. I was an administrator in a church-run school, and we spent a lot of time in close proximity, our two desks jammed into an office that had been built to hold just one person. Our little office was a busy place where a steady stream of students, parents, and teachers, flowed throughout most of each day. Still, we spent a lot of time alone together, man and woman, each of us married to other people. Somehow we managed to do our jobs without having an affair, falling in love, or (speaking for myself, at least) feeling one passing moment that even closely resembled lust.

And yet as soon as I type these words, I am checked by a sense of undue pride in my own self-mastery, remembering that it is exactly such that goes before a fall.

While most Vox readers are at least passingly familiar with Billy Graham (and now his “rule”), many may not know about his grandson, Tullian Tchividjian, once a Presbyterian minister like his grandfather, but now disgraced after a series of extramarital affairs involving women under his ministerial care. The distance between the rule and its fall is, apparently, just one generation — and perhaps one dose of a sense of invincibility.

The real tool for avoiding workplace romance: the virtue of prudence

Of course, one need not look far to find myriad examples of such failures and betrayals. If these don’t give us pause, then we are imprudent indeed.

Prudence, in fact, is what seems to be missing from the conversation about the vice president’s “rules.” And I don’t mean prudence in the way that some supporters of the Billy Graham rule are using the term. Prudence as properly understood is a virtue, not a rule.

It is the virtue most applicable in the context of guarding against workplace romances, the habit of making right decisions. Prudence, which literally means foresight, is the mean between cunning and negligence. It is wisdom in action.

While prudence does not rely on rules, it doesn’t shun them either. Failure to acknowledge this would be as foolish as praising the federal Title IX regulations out of one side of the mouth while mocking Pence’s personal protections against sexual misbehavior out of the other. I would be unable to serve half of my students if I had a rule not to meet with a man alone, and the same would be true of my male colleagues and their students. On the other hand, because of this necessity, my school (like most) has windows on all office doors and a rule that those windows are not to be covered. This is prudent. The lack of any guiding principles is a deficiency, specifically the vice of negligence.

The opposite vice, the excess of prudence, is cunning. Cunning in this context manifests itself in a particular way. Cunning foresees too much of sex too much of the time. It anticipates and plans excessively. As many critics have pointed out, excessive attempts to avoid potentially sexualized situations only sexualizes them further. Like my offer of a ride to my colleague: It wasn’t sexual — until it was.  While boundaries are not only good but necessary, they will shift from time to time, person to person, and situation to situation. After all, rules about no closed doors, lunches, or car rides were made many years before the internet became the most ubiquitous form of infidelity. Only moral character can guard against some things. Rigid, one-size-fits all rules tend toward the excess of cunning, which is a vice.

In all things, moderation

It’s interesting, but no great wonder, really, that we elected to our highest office, together, a self-confessed sexual predator and a sort of Pollyanna purist. As Charles Dickens once said of another revolution (not the sexual one), “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In other words, it was, and is now, an age of immoderation. We humans are creatures prone to immoderation. This is why virtue ethics is so crucial to human flourishing.

The proper response to excess isn’t excess in the opposite direction (both of which are vices) — it’s virtue. If Pence’s guardedness toward his marriage and his heart seems excessive, the response to it ought not to be excessive. For example, it’s not rape culture, as one writer proclaims, to live a life that acknowledges the fact that people are sexual and that sexual attraction is heightened in some circumstances more than others, and to guard against that reality. On the other hand, there are a lot more reasons in my workplace for me to meet alone with a man than to plan my spouse’s surprise party or a funeral, as one public figure tweeted in response to the controversy.

It is prudent, too, not to get too bent out of shape over one man’s good-faith efforts to guard his marriage wisely. If our shared goal is equality for women in the workplace and protection of marriages and families, we cultivate the virtues in ourselves — and model them for others who are struggling to do so along with us — for the good of all.

In all things, moderation — even in our responses to those we wish were more moderate.

Karen Swallow Prior is a professor of English at Liberty University, a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and Fierce Convictions — The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist. Her forthcoming book on literature and the virtues will be published in 2018. 

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Plagiarism is as American as apple pie.

The discovery this week that passages in Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech were lifted from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama scurried up a storm of complaints, accusations, counteraccusations, and questions about what plagiarism is, what it isn’t, and whether it even matters.

The Author is a modern, Western invention, really, and plagiarism exists only as its flip side

Necessary to any serious conversation about Mrs. Trump’s mistake — or rather, her speechwriter’s mistake (for which the writer has now apologized) — is shaking the dust off our forgotten memories of similar incidents of plagiarism by public figures, from President Barack Obama to Vice President Joe Biden, from Ben Carson to Rand Paul. (No one ever seems eager to recall the plagiarism by Martin Luther King Jr. in his doctoral dissertation.)

But if plagiarism does matter — and as an English professor, it matters to me very much, every working day — it matters in whole, not in part.

Pointing to this historical example or that cultural trend about plagiarism leads only to incoherent and incomplete conclusions about plagiarism within its current place in the history of ideas. Plagiarism, like most things, is best understood within a long evolution of concepts such as authorship, originality, and intellectual property.

The concept of plagiarism is modern — and very American

The concept of plagiarism as we understand it didn’t exist in ancient cultures. Societies in which knowledge came from divine revelation—an Author, if you will — didn’t value individual ownership of words and ideas, as we do now in modern Western civilization.

Consider how Plato recorded the words of his mentor Socrates in a way that makes the two men and their works difficult to distinguish. Or how Greek and Roman mythology share many of the same deities and stories, merely swapping out names and other details. Even the greatest writers of the Renaissance, including Shakespeare, borrowed and adapted freely from other writers, as was the norm. Indeed, current-day debates over the true authorship of Shakespeare’s works merely reflect that era’s lack of concern with originality and attribution.

As one college publisher points out in its plagiarism tutorial for students, “Throughout most of history ‘originality’ has been met with suspicion or disdain, and writers have been scorned as mere ‘scribblers.’” And even now in some non-Western cultures, the understanding of plagiarism we hold to in Western countries doesn’t exist (a cultural difference that’s a tricky and frequent challenge to professors in the college classroom). In such societies, “knowledge-making is not open to everybody as it is in the West,” but, just as it was in ancient cultures, “is a privilege belonging to a handful,” explains one expert.

The Author is a modern, Western invention, really, and plagiarism exists only as its flip side. It was the invention of the printing press that made the proliferation of original authorship possible. Then Descartes’s declaration, “I think, therefore I am,” bestowed greater importance on individual experience — and expression — and the conditions were created for the author to emerge: the rise of the individual and of print culture. Both print culture and the modern concept of the individual helped replace the Author with authors.

Not coincidentally, the Author was invented by the same force that helped give birth to America: literacy. With its ability to foster ideas and empower individuals, literacy both fostered and was fostered by the pamphleteering that promoted democratic ideals from religious liberty to the Rights of Man.

In the first years of print culture, printers paid writers for their work, and all proceeds for sales went to the printer. This meant that an author could make as much writing anonymously (and in years of civil unrest, better avoid imprisonment or execution, too), so authorship and therefore plagiarism weren’t important at first.

In the years leading up to the Revolution, what we would now consider plagiarism was as rampant as taxes on tea. In his article “How Plagiarism Made America,” Todd Andrik describes what print culture was like in that early stage before the principles of copyright and intellectual property had emerged:

Without professional writing staffs of journalists or correspondents, eighteenth-century newspaper printers relied heavily on an intercolonial newspaper exchange system to fill their pages. Printers often copied entire paragraphs or columns directly from other newspapers and frequently without attribution.

Thomas Jefferson, plagiarist?

We can actually witness the notion of plagiarism emerging historically in a contemporary controversy surrounding the founding documents of our nation. Some of Thomas Jefferson’s peers accused him of plagiarizing parts of the Declaration of Independence, and while these charges have carried down through history, scholars generally agree that Jefferson did not actually plagiarize. Written when print culture was still in its infancy, these suspect lines from the declaration perfectly illustrate the gray area that persisted as the oral culture finally gave way to print culture.

Within the context of the times, one scholar explains, Jefferson’s aim was merely to synthesize widely circulating ideas that were increasingly held in common. Liberty was, after all, in the air, even across the pond. Originality was neither Jefferson’s goal nor anyone else’s expectation. Without the expectation of originality for its own sake that is so valued today, there was really no possibility of plagiarism. But this controversy does offer a historical marker: With the founding of America, originality would come to reign.

Where originality is a virtue, theft of intellectual property becomes a vice

The US Copyright Act of 1790 codified originality as an American value. According to the Association of Research Libraries, this law, passed by the first Congress, “was meant to provide an incentive to authors, artists, and scientists to create original works by providing creators with a monopoly.” Where originality is a virtue, theft of intellectual property becomes a vice.

By the 19th century, the line between imitation and plagiarism was taken seriously enough that Edgar Allan Poe, in an essay called, “Mr. Longfellow and other Plagiarists,” accused fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of crossing it.

Originality is a quintessentially modern value. A society like the one found in America, one founded on ideals that emphasize the individual over the community, uniqueness and creativity over tradition, progress over preservation, and exceptionalism over globalism, will naturally also value ownership, including that of intellectual property. Plagiarism goes against all these ideals. (On the other hand, notably, there is no plagiarism in the world of George Orwell’s 1984.)

Ironically, I’ve found in nearly three decades of teaching college students that a misguided belief in the primacy of originality over research and scholarship is the root of much of their plagiarism. Students mistakenly think that citations make their work look inferior when, in fact, evidence of studying authorities makes their work better — much better. Politicians (and their speechwriters) seem increasingly prey to this same kind of thinking.

However, the same technologies that make research more easily accessible to more people also make both plagiarism and its detection easier as well.

How digital technologies make plagiarism easier to commit — and easier to detect

Furthermore, as we slip, according to some formulations, from the modern age to a postmodern age, the role of the author will likely go the way of the Author in society. In fact, one central tenet of postmodern literary theory is the so-called “death of the author,” which, among other things, erases the significance of an author’s identity, background, and context in the interpretation of a text. (Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, illustrates the idea brilliantly.)

Now with the growth of the World Wide Web and its increasing emphasis on curation and collectivism over creation, ownership of intellectual property may become less important. And with that, citation and attribution, too.

Whether or not this erasure of the author happens — and with it concerns about plagiarism — will depend on how we respond to the recurring incidents of plagiarism in our midst. Despite the various methods and forms now used for citations across disciplines and forums, the essence of plagiarism is the same: presenting material from others as if it were your own. While a culture’s expectations about how to use others’ material may change, using that material in a way that opposes that community’s standards is, ultimately, a form of theft and deceit.

That is a sin in every society.

Fortunately, where there is the concept of sin, there is also the concept of repentance. And forgiveness.

Plagiarism — like all sin — happens all too easily. But when public figures are guilty (not only the writers or staff who act in their stead), they must own it. It’s the American way.

Karen Swallow Prior is a professor of English at Liberty University, a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and Fierce Convictions—The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist.

Watch: Did Melania Trump plagiarize Michelle Obama?