Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?

[Nom De Plume]

Emrys Westacott asks a probing question.
Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and urges her to try the forbidden fruit. Eve reaches her hand out – in paradise the fruit is always conveniently within reach – but at the last second she notices the CCTV and thinks better of it. Result: no sin, no Fall, no expulsion from paradise. We don’t have to toil among thorns and thistles for the rest of our lives, earning our bread by the sweat of our brows; childbirth is painless; and we feel no need to wear clothes.

So why didn’t God do that and save everyone a lot of grief? True, surveillance technology was in its infancy back then, but He could have managed it, and it wouldn’t have undermined Eve’s free will. She still has a choice to make; but once she sees the camera she’s more likely to make the right choice. The most likely explanation would be that God doesn’t just want Adam and Eve to make the right choices; he wants them to make the right choices for the right reasons. Not eating the forbidden fruit because you’re afraid you’ll be caught doesn’t earn you moral credit. After all, you’re only acting out of self-interest. If paradise suffered a power cut and the surveillance was temporarily down, you’d be in there straight away with the other looters.

So what would be the right reason for not eating the fruit? Well, God is really no different than any other parent. All he wants is absolute, unquestioning obedience (which, by an amazing coincidence, also happens to be exactly what every child wants from their parents.) But God wants this obedience to be voluntary. And, very importantly, He wants it to flow from the right motive. He wants right actions to be driven not by fear, but by love for Him and reverence for what is right. (Okay, He did say to Adam, “If you eat from the tree of knowledge you will die” – which can sound a little like a threat – but grant me some literary license here.)

Moral philosophers will find themselves on familiar ground here. On this interpretation, God is a follower of the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (This would, of course, come as no surprise to Kant.) According to Kant, our actions are right when they conform to the moral rules dictated to us by our reason, and they have moral worth insofar as they are motivated by respect for that moral law. In other words, my actions have moral worth if I do what is right because I want to do the right thing. If I don’t steal someone’s iPod (just another kind of Apple, really) because I think it would be wrong to do so, then I get a moral pat on the back and am entitled to polish my halo. If I don’t steal the iPod because I’m afraid of getting caught, then I may be doing the right thing, and I may be applauded for being prudent, but I shouldn’t be given any moral credit.

Highway Star

These musings are intended to frame a set of questions: What is the likely impact of ubiquitous surveillance on our moral personalities? How might the advent of the surveillance society affect a person’s moral education and development? How does it alter the opportunities for moral growth? Does it render obsolete the Kantian emphasis on acting from a sense of duty as opposed to acting out of self-interest? Such questions fall under the rubric of a new field of research called Surveillance Impact Assessment.

Here is one way of thinking: surveillance edifies – that is, it builds moral character – by bringing duty and self-interest closer together. This outlook would probably be favoured by philosophers such as Plato and Thomas Hobbes. The reasoning is fairly simple: the better the surveillance, the more likely it is that moral transgressions will be detected and punished. Knowing this, people are less inclined to break the rules, and over time they form ingrained rule-abiding habits. The result is fewer instances of moral failure, and patterns of behaviour conducive to social harmony. A brief history of traffic surveillance illustrates the idea nicely:

Stage One (‘the state of nature’): Do whatever you please – it’s a free for all. Drive as fast as you want, in whatever condition you happen to be in. Try to avoid head-on collisions. Life is fast, fun and short.

Stage Two: The government introduces speed limits, but since they are not enforced they’re widely ignored.

Stage Three: Cops start patrolling the highways to enforce the speed limits. This inhibits a few would-be tearaways, but if you’re clever you can still beat the rap; for instance, by knowing where the police hang out, by tailing some other speedster, or by souping up your car so the fuzz can’t catch you.

Stage Four: More cops patrol the highways, and now they have radar technology. Speeding becomes decidedly imprudent, especially on holiday weekends or if you’re driving past small rural villages that need to raise revenue.

At this point you can respond in one of three ways:
A) Fight fire with fire: equip your car with fuzz-busting anti-surveillance technology, and revert to your criminal ways.
B) Buy a car with cruise control and effortlessly avoid transgression;
C) Carry on as before, monitoring your speed continually and keeping an eye out at all times for likely police hiding spots. Those who choose this option are less likely than the cruise controllers to doze off, but they’ll find driving more stressful.

Stage Five: To outflank the fuzz-busters, police use cameras, and eventually satellite monitors, which become increasingly hard to evade. Detection and prosecution become automated, so speeding becomes just stupid. The majority now obey the law and drive more safely.

Stage Six: Cars are equipped by law with devices that read the speed limit on any stretch of road they’re on. The car’s computer then acts as a governor, preventing the car from exceeding the limit. Now virtually every driver is un upstanding law-abiding citizen. If you want to speed you have to really go out of your way and tamper with the mechanism – an action analogous to what Kant would call ‘radical evil’, which is where a person positively desires to do wrong.

It’s easy to see the advantages of each successive stage in this evolution of traffic surveillance. At the end of the process, there are no more tearaways or drunk drivers endangering innocent road users. Driving is more relaxing. There are fewer accidents, less pain, less grief, less guilt, reduced demands on the health care system, lower insurance premiums, fewer days lost at work, a surging stock market, and so on. A similar story could be told with respect to drunk driving, with breathalyzers performing the same function as speed radar, and the ideal conclusion being a world in which virtually every car is fitted with a lock that shuts the engine off if the driver’s blood alcohol concentration is above a certain limit. With technology taking over, surveillance becomes cheaper, and the police are freed up to catch crooked politicians and bankers running dubious schemes. Lawbreaking moves from being risky, to being foolish, to being almost inconceivable.

But there is another perspective – the one informed by Kantian ethics. On this view, increased surveillance may carry certain utilitarian benefits, but the price we pay is a diminution of our moral character. Yes, we do the wrong thing less often; in that sense, surveillance might seem to make us better. But it also stunts our growth as moral individuals.

From this point of view, moral growth involves moving closer to the saintly ideal of being someone who only ever wants to do what is right. Kant describes such an individual as having (or being) a ‘holy will’, suggesting thereby that this condition is not attainable for ordinary human beings. For us, the obligation to be moral always feels like a burden. Wordsworth captures this well when he describes moral duty as the “stern daughter of the voice of God.” Why morality feels like a burden is no mystery: there is always something we (or at least some part of us) would sooner be doing than being virtuous. We always have inclinations that conflict with what we know our duty to be. But the saintly ideal is still something we can and should aim at. Ubiquitous surveillance is like a magnetic force that changes the trajectory of our moral aspiration. We give up pursuing the holy grail of Kant’s ideal, and settle for a functional but uninspiring pewter mug. Since we rarely have to choose between what’s right and what’s in our self-interest, our moral selves become not so much worse as smaller, withered from lack of exercise. Our moral development is arrested, and we end up on moral autopilot.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/79/Doe ... lly_Better

[Black Orchid]

Does Surveillance make us morally better? No. It just makes us more careful and evasive.

[The Reboot]

Does Surveillance make us morally better? No. It just makes us more careful and evasive.

Granted they have enough brain cells to be evasive

I don't believe it's made much of a difference in deterring crime in Australia. It would help if our court system didn't slap criminals with wet lettuce leaves and called it "justice".

[Texan]

Good fences make good neighbors, locally and nationally.

Video surveillance helps keep people honest, but it doesn't change their morals.

[Bobby]

I guess we enrolled?


David Bowie - 1984.






[Verse 1]
Someday they won't let you
Now you must agree
The times they are a-telling
Changing isn't free
You've read it in the papers, tracks are on TV
Beware the savage jaw of 1984

They'll split your pretty cranium, fill it full of air
Tell that you're eighty, brother, you won't care
You'll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow's never there
Beware the savage jaw of 1984

[Chorus]
Come see, come see, remember me?
We played out an all night movie role
You said it would last, but I guess we enrolled
In 1984 (who could ask for more)
1984 (who could ask for mor-or-or-or-ore)
(Mor-or-or-or-ore)

[Verse 2]
I'm looking for a vehicle,looking for a ride
Looking for a party, looking for a side
Looking for the reason that I knew in '65
Beware the savage jaw of 1984

[sprintcyclist]

Good fences make good neighbors, locally and nationally.

Video surveillance helps keep people honest, but it doesn't change their morals.

that is what I was thinking.
it reduces illegal behaviour, I am very happy about that.

[Texan]

I'm not a fan of public traffic cameras, facial recognition, and 24/7 public scrutiny by camera, but an army of private citizens offering their footage up after a crime is an awesome thing.

A couple of years ago, we had a crime spree where over 50 car windows were shot out in one night with a BB pistol. They shoot small metal ball bearings with air pressure. It's a kid's toy here, although they have received a lot of scrutiny lately because of crimes like this. My parents were one of their victims. They turned over their home security camera footage over to the police who gave it to the local news. The footage identified the car used in the crime and revealed the face of the shooter. Someone turned them in and they were busted for shooting out all of the windows. The video of the drive by was from when they shot my mom's van. Dad has upgraded his cameras to get license plates from cars and now the police come to my parents for time stamped video of people fleeing the neighborhood after a crime in the area.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaPworEY ... go[youtube][/youtube]

[Texan]

Cameras are becoming Big Brother in a hurry here. At professional sporting events, they use facial recognition to look for criminals. Some police departments have vehicle license plate cameras on their cars. These cameras read all visible license plates on cars as they go through their day and if the camera discovers a vehicle owned by someone with a warrant out for their arrest it notifies the officers so they can arrest them.

The biggest offence has been the traffic light cameras. They film people running traffic lights and mail the vehicle owner a notice of a fine. It is counted as a civil offense and cannot be challenged in court. If I loan my car to somebody, I could be fined for their crimes even if I can prove that I wasn't driving the car. These cameras have been outlawed in Texas as people have been found to cause more accidents trying to avoid running lights and causing accidents in the process.

[Bogan]

"Morality", my dear Texan, has been defined as "the way we behave when nobody is looking".

[Texan]

"Morality", my dear Texan, has been defined as "the way we behave when nobody is looking".

I agree.