Department of Philosophy, Alfred University in Western New York
Philosophy Now, Issue 79, June/July 2010
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 an 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.
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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.
Purity vs Pragmatism?
Now I expect many people’s response to this sort of anxiety about
moral growth will be scathing. Here are four possible reasons for not losing
sleep over it:
1) It is a merely abstract academic concern. Surely, no matter how
extensive and intrusive surveillance becomes, everyday life will still yield
plenty of occasions when we experience growth-promoting moral tension: for
instance, in the choices we have to make over how to treat family, friends, and
acquaintances.
2) The worry is perfectly foolish – analogous to Nietzsche’s
complaint that long periods of peace and prosperity shrink the soul since they
offer few opportunities for battlefield heroics and sacrifice. Our ideal should
be a world in which people live pleasanter lives, and where the discomfort of
moral tension is largely a thing of the past. We might draw an analogy with the
religious experience of sinfulness. The sense of sin may have once helped
deepen human self-awareness, but that doesn’t mean we should try to keep it
alive today. The sense of sin has passed its sell-by date; and the same can be
said of the saintly ideal.
3) The saintly ideal is and always was misguided anyway. What
matters is not what people desire, but what they do. Excessive concern for
people’s appetites and desires is a puritan hangover. Surveillance improves
behaviour, period. That is all we need to concern ourselves with.
4) Kantians should welcome surveillance, since ultimately it leads
to the achievement of the very ideal they posit: the more complete the
surveillance, the more duty and self-interest coincide. Surveillance technology
replaces the idea of an all-seeing God who doles out just rewards and
punishments, and it is more effective, since its presence, and the bad
consequences of ignoring it, are much more tangibly evident. Consequently, it
fosters good habits, and these habits are internalized to the point where
wrongdoing becomes almost inconceivable.
That is surely just what parents and teachers aim for much of the
time. As I send my kids out into the world, I don’t say to myself, ‘I do hope
they remember they have a duty not to kill, kidnap, rape, steal, torture
animals or mug old ladies.’ I assume that for them, as for the great majority
in a stable, prosperous society, such wrongdoings are inconceivable: they
simply don’t appear on the horizon of possible actions; and that is what I
want. This inconceivability of most kinds of wrongdoing is a platform we want
to be able to take for granted, and surveillance is a legitimate and effective
means of building it. So, far from undermining the saintly ideal, surveillance
offers a fast track to it.
Scrutiny vs Probity?
This would be a nice place to end. A trend is identified, an
anxiety is articulated, but in the end the doubts are convincingly put to rest.
Hobbes and Kant link arms and head off to the bar to drink a toast to their
newly-discovered common ground.
But matters are not that simple. Wittgenstein warns philosophers
against feeding on a diet of one-sided examples, and we need to be wary of that
danger here. Indeed, I think that some other examples indicate not just that
Kant may have a point, but that most of us implicitly recognize this point.
For instance, imagine you are visiting two colleges. At Scrutiny
College, the guide proudly points out that each examination room is equipped
with several cameras, all linked to a central monitoring station. Electronic
jammers can be activated to prevent examinees from using cell phones or
Blackberries. The IT department writes its own cutting-edge plagiarism-detection
software. And there is zero tolerance for academic dishonesty: one strike and
you’re out on your ear. As a result, says the guide, there is less cheating at
Scrutiny than on any other campus in the country. Students quickly see that
cheating is a mug’s game, and after a while no-one even considers it.
By contrast, Probity College operates on a straightforward honour
system. Students sign an integrity pledge at the beginning of each academic
year. At Probity, professors commonly assign take-home exams, and leave rooms
full of test takers unproctored. Nor does anyone bother with
plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin.com. The default assumption is
that students can be trusted not to cheat.
Which college would you prefer to attend? Which would you recommend
to your own kids?
Or compare two workplaces. At Scrutiny Inc., all computer activity
is monitored, with regular random audits to detect and discourage any
inappropriate use of company time and equipment, such as playing games,
emailing friends, listening to music, or visiting internet sites that cause
blood to flow rapidly from the brain to other parts of the body. At Probity
Inc., on the other hand, employees are simply trusted to get their work done.
Scrutiny Inc. claims to have the lowest rate of time-theft and the highest
productivity of any company in its field. But where would you choose to work?
One last example. In the age of cell phones and GPS technology, it
is possible for a parent to monitor their child’s whereabouts at all times. They
have cogent reasons for doing so. It slightly reduces certain kinds of risk to
the teenager, and significantly reduces parental anxiety. It doesn’t scar the
youngster’s psyche – after all, they were probably first placed under
electronic surveillance in their crib when they were five days old! Most
pertinently, it keeps them on the straight and narrow. If they go somewhere
other than where they’ve said they’ll go, or if they lie afterwards about where
they’ve been, they’ll be found out, and suffer the penalties – like, their cell
phone plan will be downgraded from platinum to regular (assuming they have real
hard-ass parents). But how many parents really think that this sort of
surveillance of their teenage kids is a good idea?
Surveillance Suggestions
What do these examples tell us? I think they suggest a number of
things.
First, the Kantian ideal still resonates with us. If we regarded
the development of moral character as completely empty, misguided or
irrelevant, we would be less troubled by the practices of Scrutiny College or
Mom and Pop Surveillance.
Second, the fear that surveillance can actually become so extensive
as to threaten an individual’s healthy moral development is reasonable, for the
growth of surveillance is not confined to small, minor or contained areas of
our lives: it seems to be irresistibly spreading everywhere, percolating into
the nooks and crannies of everyday existence, which is where much of a person’s
moral education occurs.
Third, our attitude to surveillance is obviously different in
different settings, and this tells us something important about our hopes,
fears, expectations and ideals regarding the relationship between scrutinizer
and scrutinizee. The four relationships we have discussed are: state and
citizen; employer and employee; teacher and student, and parent and child. In
the first two cases, we don’t worry much about the psychological effect of
surveillance. For instance, I expect most of us would readily support improved
surveillance of income in order to reduce tax evasion. But we generally assume
that government, like employers, should stay out of the moral edification
business.
It is possible to regard colleges in the same way. On this view,
college is essentially a place where students expand their knowledge and
develop certain skills. As in the workplace, surveillance levels should be
determined according to what best promotes these institutional goals. However,
many people see colleges as having a broader mission – as not just a place to
acquire some technical training and a diploma. This broader mission includes
helping students achieve personal growth, a central part of which is moral
development. Edification is then seen not just as a happy side-effect of the
college experience, but as one of its important and legitimate purposes. This,
I think, is the deeper reason why we are perturbed by the resemblance between
Scrutiny College and a prison. Our concern is not just that learning will
suffer in an atmosphere of distrust: it is also that the educational mission of
the college has become disappointingly narrow.
Finally, most of us agree that the moral education of children is
and should be one of the goods a family secures. If not there, then where? So
one good reason for parents not to install a camera over the cookie jar is that
children need to experience the struggle between obligation and inclination.
They even need to experience what it feels like to break the rules and get away
with it; to break the rules and get caught; to break the rules, lie about it
and not get caught; and so on. To reference Wordsworth again, in his
autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’, the emergence of the young boy’s moral
awareness is connected to an incident when Wordsworth stole a rowing boat one
evening to go for the eighteenth century equivalent of a joy ride. No-one
catches him, but he becomes aware that his choices have a moral dimension.
This is not the only reason to avoid cluttering up the house with
disobedience detectors, of course. Another purpose served by the family is to
establish mutually-satisfying loving relationships. Moreover, the family is not
simply a means to this end; the goal is internal to the practice of family
life. Healthy relationships are grounded on trust, yet surveillance often
signifies a lack of trust. For this reason, its effect on any relationship is
corrosive. And the closer the relationship, the more objectionable we find it.
Imagine how you’d feel if your spouse wanted to monitor your every coming and
going.
These two objections to surveillance within the family – it
inhibits moral development, and it signifies distrust – are connected, since
the network of reasonably healthy relationships provided by a reasonably
functional family is a primary setting for most people’s moral education. The
positive experience of trusting relationships, in which the default expectation
is that everyone will fulfill their obligations to one another, is in itself
edifying. It is surely more effective at fostering the internalization of
cherished values than intimidation through surveillance. Everyone who strives
to create such relationships within their family shows by their practice that
they believe this to be so.
Conclusions
The upshot of these reflections is that the relation between
surveillance and moral edification is complicated. In some contexts,
surveillance helps keep us on track and thereby reinforces good habits that
become second nature. In other contexts, it can hinder moral development by
steering us away from or obscuring the saintly ideal of genuinely disinterested
action. And that ideal is worth keeping alive.
Some will object that the saintly ideal is utopian. And it is. But
utopian ideals are valuable. It’s true that they do not help us deal with
specific, concrete, short-term problems, such as how to keep drunk drivers off
the road, or how to ensure that people pay their taxes. Rather, like a distant
star, they provide a fixed point that we can use to navigate by. Ideals help us
to take stock every so often of where we are, of where we’re going, and of
whether we really want to head further in that direction.
Ultimately, the ideal college is one in which every student is
genuinely interested in learning and needs neither extrinsic motivators to
encourage study, nor surveillance to deter cheating. Ultimately, the ideal
society is one in which, if taxes are necessary, everyone pays them as freely
and cheerfully as they pay their dues to some club of which they are devoted
members – where citizen and state can trust each other perfectly. We know our
present society is a long way from such ideals, yet we should be wary of
practices that take us ever further from them. One of the goals of moral
education is to cultivate a conscience – the little voice inside telling us
that we should do what is right because it is right. As surveillance becomes
increasingly ubiquitous, however, the chances are reduced that conscience will
ever be anything more than the little voice inside telling us that someone,
somewhere, may be watching.
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