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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. |
| | Surveillance, anonymity and obedience |
| | People are naturally inclined to seek security. The Hobbesian social contract intervenes to ensure security by alienating individual freedoms. By entering into the social contract, people willing to live in a democratic society have accepted a limitation of their freedom in exchange for laws guaranteeing their security and the perpetuation of the social body. People therefore agreed to abide by man-made laws and obedience is necessary to ensure their safety. |
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But the social contract is an illustrative narrative, a parable, not
a historical fact, right? Something should be said to indicate that this is a story we tell, not a claim that the people around us have actually consented on some informed basis to the terms on which they are governed.
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| | But people likely behave differently when they are on their own than when they are in the public sphere. It goes from the way they dress, the way they talk, to whether they will abide by legal rules. People can find themselves in two different situations: when they are on their own, i.e. when they are not seen by others, they only have to deal with their self-consciousness; when they are outside of their private sphere, i.e. when they are facing public judgment. |
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< | If people comply with the rules only when being watched, then surveillance is a condition for obedience. If obedience is the way to social safety, people likely agreed to being watched. But surveillance through nowadays’ technology seems to be coupled with absence of anonymity. Are people willing to sacrifice anonymity in order to be safe? |
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I'm not sure how the distinction works, or what it has to do with contractarian attitudes about social organization. Are my promises to others not binding on me when I am alone? Or is the point that guilt or shame at being seen to do what I have agreed not to do are the primary sources of personal integrity? It would be good to be clear if the point is important.
If people comply with the rules only when being watched, then surveillance is a condition for obedience.
But self-governing people are not "obedient." They are principled. I don't steal when people aren't looking. So surveillance is not a condition of my not stealing. Assuming a view of human nature I don't recognize as my own nature, society would be constructed differently than I would want it to be and am living according to my desire that it be. Is that the point of the social contractarianism from which we began?
If obedience is the way to social safety, people likely agreed to being watched. But surveillance through nowadays’ technology seems to be coupled with absence of anonymity. Are people willing to sacrifice anonymity in order to be safe? |
| | Is anonymity a hurdle to a peaceful social body? How does it influence our behaviors? Identity-shielding online and anonymity in general has the power to abet antisocial behavior and lead to a different set of manners than those which would occur in a transparent sphere.
Being watched might be a condition for obedience (I) and being constantly identifiable prevents feeling of impunity (II). |
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How does the pile of rhetorical question help here? It seems to me that this is where the reader would expect answers to be, rather than tendentious questions that assume, as I said above, what appears to be the conclusion.
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| | Section I Surveillance, a condition for compliance with the law and pro-social behaviors
People are more inclined to obey rules and standards when they know they are being watched or recorded. |
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< | A study of hand-washing among medical staff found that when the staff knew they were being watched, compliance with hand-washing was 55% greater than when they were not being watched1. Moreover, Daniel Batson’s experiment on moral hypocrisy and pro-social behavior2 showed that there is something about us as social being that encourages us to behave in moral ways when the sense of being observed is activated within us. The simple act of feeling that we are being observed is sufficient to provoke pro-social behavior. When we think of ourselves as unobserved, it is hard to act in conformity with moral norms. Therefore, we could argue that for the greater good of the social body and for it to remain disciplined, allowing the state to surveil people is preferable and even necessary. |
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> | A study of hand-washing among medical staff found that when the staff knew they were being watched, compliance with hand-washing was 55% greater than when they were not being watched1.
Where is the link here?
Moreover, Daniel Batson’s experiment on moral hypocrisy and pro-social behavior2 showed that there is something about us as social being that encourages us to behave in moral ways when the sense of being observed is activated within us.
Two studies are proof of something about human beings always everywhere?
The simple act of feeling that we are being observed is sufficient to provoke pro-social behavior. When we think of ourselves as unobserved, it is hard to act in conformity with moral norms.
What if this is not the reader's experience? Some religious persons would disagree because the think God sees all. And some Stoic persons, to pick only one example, would identify the meaning of life as directly contrary to this hypothesis. And then there are people, of whom I think I am one, who believe in living by a code which is not suspended because others don't know about it, or observe the degree of my compliance with it. Are all such readers invited to go ashore now?
Therefore, we could argue that for the greater good of the social body and for it to remain disciplined, allowing the state to surveil people is preferable and even necessary. |
| | However, modern technology has rendered surveillance so easy that individuals are not only being watched but they are also identified, thus losing anonymity. The modern society is structured in such a way that there are the equivalent of eyes in our smartphones and eyes in our computers and everywhere we go. States could argue that in order to provide the stability and safety to their citizens, they need their citizens to act in keeping with the laws, and a way to make them do so is to “provide” surveillance and destroy anonymity. States can claim that surveillance is required to correct the inclination on the part of human beings to act in anti-social way when being unobserved.
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16941318/
2. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/whats-wrong-with-morality-a-social-psychological-perspective/ |
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Why aren't these links?
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| | Section II Anonymity, a gateway to impunity and anti-social behaviors |
| | But surveillance and absence of anonymity might go far beyond the conditions of the social contract. The idea of constantly monitoring citizens evokes features of totalitarian states. Nowadays, technology generally surveils in the name of providing safety. How much of our identity are we willing to give up in this process? Appropriate balance should be found between protecting anonymity and guaranteeing safety, because surveillance leads to fear, which leads to self-monitoring, which leads to a loss of free speech. We should neither be living in a fishbowl nor wearing the ring of Gyges. |
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As I have indicated, I think the most important route to improvement is to give more texture and complexity to the social psychology. The treatment of the social contract as an actuality rather than an image is balanced by the image of more or less complete "other direction" as the source of sociality. I refrain from asking whether you really think you would engage in anti-social activity if you felt certain you would not be observed. But I do think that there has to be a way to make your points without requiring readers to agree that this is how social life is held together, either at present in the real world or in their own narrative of social cohesion.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |