CCTV cameras - The Ethical Revolution
@Bartricks thanks for the inspiration.
God couldn't prevent the fall of man.
Neither Aristotle nor Kant nor Bentham-Mill could stop the holocaust.
Any and all moral theories have utterly failed to make humans gravitate towards the good and away from the bad.
Is it a total failure, the human quest for goodness?
Wait a minute. There's an invention that is almost magical in efficacy to keep people on the highway of morality with as few attempts at taking detours into the wilderness of evil and if they do, despite warnings plain and clear, we can always catch them and bring them to justice.
This great invention is the CCTV camera.
Yes, I'm probably overestimating its moral utility but do you notice the uncanny resemblance between the CCTV camera and the all-seeing eye of God? Some might find it disturbing though but you know and I know if there's nothing to hide from the law no one will mind the CCTV camera at all.
Apart from being a vindication of the universal applicability of technology it also lifts the veil off of the countenance of humanity. You may not like what you see because its morally corrupt nature demands God's existence to rein in our depravity.
We don't have God but we do have a most effective substitute - the CCTV camera.
God couldn't prevent the fall of man.
Neither Aristotle nor Kant nor Bentham-Mill could stop the holocaust.
Any and all moral theories have utterly failed to make humans gravitate towards the good and away from the bad.
Is it a total failure, the human quest for goodness?
Wait a minute. There's an invention that is almost magical in efficacy to keep people on the highway of morality with as few attempts at taking detours into the wilderness of evil and if they do, despite warnings plain and clear, we can always catch them and bring them to justice.
This great invention is the CCTV camera.
Yes, I'm probably overestimating its moral utility but do you notice the uncanny resemblance between the CCTV camera and the all-seeing eye of God? Some might find it disturbing though but you know and I know if there's nothing to hide from the law no one will mind the CCTV camera at all.
Apart from being a vindication of the universal applicability of technology it also lifts the veil off of the countenance of humanity. You may not like what you see because its morally corrupt nature demands God's existence to rein in our depravity.
We don't have God but we do have a most effective substitute - the CCTV camera.
Comments (22)
I disagree. Some have helped me greatly.
On the topic of CCTV; righteousness in thoughts and action constitutes a good man, is what Marcus Aurelius would say. In other words, if an external force is what is withholding one from committing an immoral act, one cannot be said to be moral at all.
I'm afraid it has come to this.
One CCTV camera is worth more than 2000 years of Christianity or any other religion for that matter because religion is, in a disturbing way, about a 24×7 surveillance camera - God.
I just got a letter asking me to pay the toll for the Whitestone Bridge.
That's the perfect word. Panopticon. Thanks. Looks like Bentham was a pessimist at heart.
:rofl:
The road is narrow
no leader to follow
a tightrope actually
on both sides folly
god is a guard
ethics is hard
do we forfeit
freedom or surfeit?
the divine eye
let's not evil fly
the CCTV sees
evil recedes
into the darkness
it's learned to harness
I got used to the eye
and the eye got used to me
someone needs to be watched
from birth until I die
Who is the I that needs to be eyed
Surely not a good 'ol guy
implicit mantra by which I'm dyed
self-hatred rules and on the sly
I can read your mind"
Once computer programs can monitor the cameras, it makes sense. In the meantime, who watches the people watching the cameras?
Can't we just invent some fake panopticon in the sky (maybe 2? that big yellow one (day), and the big white one (night)) that whips your ancestors every time you do wrong? Maybe we should keep 'god' around for awhile to keep the riff-raff in line?
While you may be onto something related to keeping people in line, that would not work to further develop human morality. If you ever had to learn stages of development (piaget, ericson, kohlberg, etc - I think kohlberg was specifically moral development), the panopticon would perpetuate lower level ethical development (it keeps the good boys/good girls and deontologists in line). But true moral development would be "good for the sake of good", not "because I might get caught"....right?
People will start wearing special cosmetics that disrupt facial recognition software (note Hong Kong demonstrator methods). Some bizarre people look like they are already wearing it! Our computer monitors (not the screens, but the AI that never sleep) will be hacked to defeat ID by AI, at least sometimes.
I'll grant you, Total Information Systems will be very difficult to escape. Once every credit card purchase, transit pass card, facial recognition system, RFID chips in everything (including you), and universal CCTV coverage is linked together and correlated, you won't be able to fart without it registering on the web of control. Add to that neighborhood spies who report that you are serepticiousy feeding squirrels (it might be against the law one of these days) and then we will become automatons. Until that great and glorious day we rise up, smash the cameras, blow up the server farms, melt-down every AI device, and take axes to the officials who oversee the system...
Is there an agreed-upon defintion or description of ethics? Real or imagined, real or artificial, natural or artificial?
If there is none (and I haven't heard of any, really, ever), then what the heck is all this belly-aching about ethics?
If you don't start behaving yourself, you'll find out what the belly-aching is about.
Excuse me. Is this a threat?
Quoting god must be atheist
Of course it is not a threat. It is a jokey riposte to your quip "what the heck is all this belly-aching about ethics?" Electronically transmitted communications are regularly misinterpreted that wouldn't be if they were delivered in person, because facial expression, body language, intonation, etc. are missing.
Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to be reacquainted with the fact of how easily the electronic word can be misperceived.
Ethics in the sense in which it is normally used equates with "Normative Ethics" which simply put translates as "what people ought to do."
So if something is unethical, it is unethical with respect to a certain set of rules or norms, either what people actually do do (the domain of descriptive ethics) or some hypothesized universal value (greatest happiness for the greatest number; good in and of itself; etc.)
I'll take your reference to ubiquitous video surveillance to really be just one representative example of how technology is now overseeing our every move. It's not just CCTV. It's tracking of our cell phones, registering our every credit and debit card purchase, reviewing our emails, storing data on our car computers, registering our arrival at work when the fob is scanned, and on and on and on. Despite the increasing difficulty to get away with much o f anything, it hasn't had the effect you've suggested, which is to result in greater ethical adherence. Things are just as immoral now as they were before. It doesn't seem like our criminals or liars have gotten much smarter, still mostly relying on the hope that no one will spend the time to catch them.
Indeed. I wonder though if the CCTV and other technological inventions will eventually make crime without being caught possible at all. If, as you say, every device that we use, and we are using a lot of them, can be tracked accurately and in real time I think it'll result in a decrease in crime-rates. But, there's always a loophole in anything. Cyber-criminals and hackersmay be able cheat the system and they'll be in great demand in the coming future.