Jeremy Bentham, "Panopticon"

Any and all moral theories have utterly failed to make humans gravitate towards the good and away from the bad. — TheMadFool

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.

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. — Tzeentch

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.

Perhaps one may at first obey out of fear, but later get used to obeying, and even later reflect on what good it does, and then just be morally good about it. Kind of like how some discipline their children.

I just got a letter asking me to pay the toll for the Whitestone Bridge.

Jeremy Bentham, "Panopticon" — Pantagruel

That's the perfect word. Panopticon. Thanks. Looks like Bentham was a pessimist at heart.

And the East Germans had Stasi. Stasi was extremely effective, for the time, about finding out a lot of stuff about people. I am not sure East Germany was more moral than West Germany. Panopticon societies, which, it seems to me are on the way, depend on good governments and corporations and banks, since they will end up being the ones able to use the tech. Oddly, I don't trust them. The hope with God was that you'd have a nice guy in the security booth monitoring all the CCTVs. Unfortunately the various scriptures didn't really describe a nice guy. We have demiurges or defacto big brothers. And what does it do to people who grow up in the panopticon? What kind of humans are we creating? What are we saying to them about who and what they are?

The hope with God was that you'd have a nice guy in the security booth monitoring all the CCTVs. Unfortunately the various scriptures didn't really describe a nice guy. — Coben

: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

:up:

"I am the eye in the sky, looking at you
I can read your mind"

We don't have God but we do have a most effective substitute - the CCTV camera. — TheMadFool

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?

Imagine a world where you always get caught, you always get found out and you always get punished to a degree that the crime really doesn't pay. Virtue would be mere common sense and vice idiotic. Even the nastiest little toe-rag would conform just like the saintly. One couldn't tell the difference. God has to avert his gaze somewhat to sort the wheat from the chaff.

What CCTV (that's odd--Closed Caption TV?) does is assist in the identification and apprehension of scofflaws, major criminals, and evil doers. It doesn't prevent people from violating the law, it doesn't make people more moral. It makes some more clever in their deviousness, and many resentful toward the state that they can never casually whip out a spray can and apply vulgar, disrespectful, and inconsiderate comments to Trump and Johnson re-election posters.

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...

:up:

Guys, what is ethics? Everyone argues "this is ethical", "that is unethical", moral, immoral, but what is the bases on which you make these judgments on?

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?

what the heck is all this belly-aching about ethics? — god must be atheist

If you don't start behaving yourself, you'll find out what the belly-aching is about.

If you don't start behaving yourself, you'll find out what the belly-aching is about. — Bitter Crank

Excuse me. Is this a threat?

it varies. There isn't agreement on what is ethical nor on how one determines it. I am not sure we were all bellyaching.

@Baden

Excuse me. Is this a threat? — 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.)

We don't have God but we do have a most effective substitute - the CCTV camera. — TheMadFool

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.

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. — Hanover

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.