A university faced with a growing crime problem
involving the theft of electronic devices wanted to install a number of
surveillance cameras on buildings. Some on campus argued that the university,
instead, should design public spaces with enough activity and “eyes on the
street” that surveillance cameras would not be necessary, while others objected
to the cameras as a violation of their privacy.
The philosopher Peter
Singer has written an insightful essay in Harpers* looking at some of the ethical
dilemmas raised in our media-saturated world, where between the widespread use
of cameras and the apparent urge of people to tell all on their Facebook pages,
privacy has almost completely disappeared. Singer makes his point by an
architectural analogy: Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Imagined by Bentham as the
perfect surveillance device, the Panopticon was a radial building in which one
person could stand at the center and observe the activities of everyone at the
perimeter.
Singer then observes that
“The modern Panopticon is not a physical building … With surveillance
technology like closed-circuit television cameras and digital cameras now
linked to the Internet, we have the means to implement Bentham’s inspection
principle on a much vaster scale. What’s more, we have helped construct this
new Panopticon, voluntarily giving up troves of personal information. We blog,
tweet, and post what we are doing, thinking and feeling.”
Key to the ethics of our
“modern Panopticon” is the question of whether we participate in it voluntarily
or not. When we choose to go into public places, we give up a degree of privacy
in order to be with or interact with other people. In our era, that also means
our acceptance of being monitored by surveillance cameras. That fact
invalidates the claim by some, in this case, that the additional security
cameras on campus would violate their privacy. Their being in public means that
they have already relinquished a degree of privacy, whether observed by cameras
or by other people.
That claim, though, does
reflect a widespread misunderstanding of and indeed an unfortunate decline in
public life and the public realm. Busy streets, full of pedestrians able to
watch for possible criminal behavior, can make cameras irrelevant, which is
what those who argued for an enlivened campus in lieu of cameras had in mind.
Meanwhile the lack of such crowds has not only prompted the electronic
surveillance of public spaces, but also perhaps the growing use of social
media, which in some sense moves “public” visibility to the Internet.
Social contract theory has
some relevance here. Thomas Hobbes argued that we need a strong central
authority to keep people from harming each other, as he believed we would do
without such restraint. He would likely have supported the use of surveillance
cameras on campus for that reason. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in contrast, had a
suspicion of central authority and believed people to be naturally good apart
from the corrupting influence of society. Rousseau would probably have argued:
the fewer cameras, the better.
Between those two extreme
views stood John Locke, who recognized the value of central authority, but
argued that its legitimacy rests with the consent of the governed. Locke might
have urged the university to find a balance between deploying cameras where
absolutely necessary and doing whatever possible to encourage people to
assemble in public. Singer’s essay echoes Locke. Singer observes that
electronic devices now allow those surveyed to watch their surveyors as well as
the other way around. Such two-way surveillance becomes analogous to democracy,
in which we, the governed, watch our representatives – protecting not only our
security, but also our liberty.
* Singer, Peter. “Visible
Man, Ethics in a World without Secrets,” Harpers,
August 2011, p. 32-36.
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