Showing posts with label social contract. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social contract. Show all posts

29 September 2019

What Place for Privacy in a Digital World?

C. S. Lewis, serene at his desk...

Posted by Keith Tidman

When Albert Camus offered this soothing advice in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘Opt for privacy. . . . You need to breathe. And you need to be’, life was still uncomplicated by digital technology. Since then, we have become just so many cogwheels in the global machinery that makes up the ‘Internet of things’ — the multifarious devices that simultaneously empower us and make us vulnerable.

We are alternately thrilled with the power that these devices shower on us — providing an interactive window onto the world, and giving us voice — even as we are dismayed to see our personal information scooped up, stowed, scrutinised for nuggets, reassembled, duplicated, and given up to others. That we may not see this too, that our lives are shared without our being aware, without our freely choosing, and without our being able to prevent their commodification and monetisation only makes it much worse.

Can a human right to privacy, assumed by Camus, still fit within this digitised reality?

Louis Brandeis, a former justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, defined the ‘right to be left alone’ as the ‘most comprehensive of rights, and the right most prized by civilised people’. But that was proffered some ninety years ago. If individuals and societies still value that principle, then today they are challenged to figure out how to balance the intrusively ubiquitous connectivity of digital technology, and the sanctity of personal information implicit in the ‘right to be left alone’. That is, the fundamental human right articulated by the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence’.
It’s safe to assume that we’re not about to scrap our digital devices and nostalgically return to analog lives. To the contrary, inevitable shifts in society will require more dependence on increasingly sophisticated digital technology for a widening range of purposes. Participation in civic life will call for more and different devices, and greater vacuuming and moving around of information. Whether the latter will translate into further loss of the human right to privacy, as is risked, or that society manages change in order to preserve or even recover lost personal privacy, the draft of that narrative is still being written.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that intervention — by policymakers, regulators, technologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and ethicists, among others — may coalesce to avoid the erosion of personal privacy taking a straight upward trajectory. Urgency, and a commitment to avoid and even reverse further erosion, will be key.

Some contemporary philosophers have argued that claims to a human right to privacy are redundant, for various reasons. An example is when privacy is presumed embedded in other human rights, such as personal property — distinguished from property held in common — and protection of our personal being. But this seems dubious; in fact, one might flip the argument on its head — that is, our founding other rights on the right of privacy, the latter being more fundamentally based in human dignity and moral values. It’s a more nuanced, ethics-based position that makes the one-dimensional assertion that ‘If you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear’ all the more specious.

Furthermore, without a right to privacy being carved out in concrete terms, such as codified in law and constitutions, it may simply get ignored, rendering it non-defendable. For all that, we value privacy, and with it to prevent other people’s intrusion and meddling in our lives. We cling to the notion of what has been dubbed the ‘inviolate personality’ — the quintessence of being a person. In endorsing this belief in individual interests, one is subscribing to Noam Chomsky’s caution that ‘It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy’. To Chomsky’s point, the informed, ‘willing’ acceptance of social media’s mining and monetising of our personal data provides a contrast.

One parallel factor is the push-pull between what may become normalised governmental access to our personal information and individuals’ assertion of confidentiality and the ‘reasonable expectation’ of privacy. The style of government — from liberal democracies to authoritarianism — matters to government access to personal information: whether for benign use or malign abuse. ‘In good conscience’ is a reasonable guiding principle in establishing the what, when, and how of government access. And in turn, it matters to a fundamental human right to privacy. Meantime, governments may see a need for tools to combat crime and terrorism, allowing surveillance and intelligence gathering through wiretaps and Internet monitoring.

Two and a half centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin foreshadowed this tension between the liberty implied in personal privacy and the safety implied in government’s interest in self-protection. He cautioned: 
‘Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’. 
Yet, however amorphous these contrary claims to rights might be, as a practical matter society has to resolve the risk-benefit equation and choose how to play its hand. What we conclude is the best solution will likely keep shifting, based on norms and emerging technology.

And the notions of a human right to privacy differ as markedly among cultures as they do among individuals. The definition of privacy and its value may differ both among and within cultures. It would perhaps prove unsurprising if a culture situated in Asia, a culture situated in Africa, a culture situated in Europe, and a culture situated in South or Central America were to frame personal privacy rights differently. But only insofar as both the burgeoning of digital technology and the nature of government influence the privacy-rights landscape.

The reflex may be to anticipate that privacy and human rights will take a straight, if thorny, path. The relentless and quickening emergence of digital technologies drives this impulse. The British writer and philosopher C. S. Lewis provides social context for this impulse, saying:
‘We live … in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private.’
Despite the invasion of people’s privacy, by white-hatted parties (with benign intent) and black-hatted parties (with malign intent), I believe our record thus far represents only an embryonic, inelegant attempt to explore — with perfunctory legal, regulatory, or principled restraint — the rich utility of digital technology.

Nonetheless, if we are to steer clear of the potentially unbridled erosion of privacy rights — to uphold the human right to privacy, however measured — then it will require repeatedly revisiting what one might call the ‘digital social contract’ the community adopts: and resolving the contradiction behind being both ‘citizen-creators’ and ‘citizen-users’ of digital technologies.

17 April 2016

Is Political Science Science?

Leviathan frontispiece by Abraham Bosse
Posted by Bohdana Kurylo
Is political science science? The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes would seem to present us with a test case par excellence. Claiming that his most influential work, Leviathan, was through and through scientific, Hobbes wrote, ‘Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.’  His work, he judged, was founded upon ‘geometrical and physical first principles of matter and motion’, combined with logical deductions of the human sciences, psychological and political.
Through his scientific researches, Hobbes came to hold a pessimistic view of human nature, which he called the ‘state of nature’, the ‘Natural Condition of Mankind’: a ruinous state of conflict. Paradoxically, he considered that such conflict arose from equality and rationality. Possessing limited resources, a rational man would try to take as much as possible for himself. At the same time, others would need to do the same, as a defensive measure. The likeliest outcome was ‘war of every man against every man’, where law and justice have no place. Such a life, he famously wrote, would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Hobbes proposed, therefore, a contract between the people and the Sovereign, as a means of creating peace by imposing a single, sovereign rule. It is the fear of punishment, he wrote, that preserves peace and unity, and ties people to the ‘performance of their Covenants’. Following his logic, individuals are likely to reach the conclusion that a social contract is the best alternative to their natural condition, so surrendering their liberties and rights.

On the surface of it, Hobbes' logic seems compelling, his deductions persuasive, his arguments admirable. Nonetheless, for a number of reasons, it is questionable that his analysis of human nature was truly scientific.



His 'state of nature' was not well founded in history. In Philosophical Rudiments, he wrote (much as he did more generally) that the existence of the American tribes was ‘fierce, short-lived, poor, nasty, and deprived of all that pleasure and beauty of life’. Yet rather than supporting his arguments, this appears to prove him wrong. Historians have generally claimed that the Indians were simple, peaceful, innocent, and uncorrupted by the evils of civilization. Hobbes, it seems, may have absorbed the Puritan tendency of separating the ‘natural’ as regressive, and the non-natural as progressive.

Furthermore, Hobbesian political philosophy becomes complicated when it comes to the fact that his work was both descriptive and prescriptive. The descriptive side is present in his analysis of the state of nature, while his idea of the Sovereign and the Social Contract as a universal solution is evidently prescriptive. Today we are keenly aware of the difficulty of passing from descriptive to prescriptive language. Not only that, but Hobbes' prescriptive language seems to be excessively strong – even emotional.

More than anything, Leviathan reveals that fear was a core element in Hobbes' political study and life. This may be most explicit in his verse autobiography: 'For through the scattered towns a rumor ran / that our people's last day was coming in a fleet / and so much fear my mother conceived at that time / that she gave birth to twins: myself and Fear.' Happy is he, he wrote, quoting Virgil, 'who treads beneath his feet all fear of Fate'. Could it be, then, that Hobbes' political philosophy was born of his own personal history? That it was his own experience of fear which shaped his so-called 'science'? In fact, that his mother's fear of a fleet outweighed all subsequent thought?

If this should be true, what implications may this have for our understanding of political philosophy today? May our political philosophies be shaped by our emotional and historical heritage? May this be a survival mechanism – a memory of the past which cannot be erased through any 'scientific' theory? Were Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Rawls and so many others with them – mere symptoms of their times – in fact, symptoms of the times which preceded them?

20 March 2016

Is Political Science Science?

Leviathan frontispiece by Abraham Bosse
Posted by Bohdana Kurylo
Is political science science? The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes would seem to present us with a test case par excellence. Claiming that his most influential work, Leviathan, was through and through scientific, Hobbes wrote, ‘Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.’  His work, he judged, was founded upon ‘geometrical and physical first principles of matter and motion’, combined with logical deductions of the human sciences, psychological and political.
Through his scientific researches, Hobbes came to hold a pessimistic view of human nature, which he called the ‘state of nature’, the ‘Natural Condition of Mankind’: a ruinous state of conflict. Paradoxically, he considered that such conflict arose from equality and rationality. Possessing limited resources, a rational man would try to take as much as possible for himself. At the same time, others would need to do the same, as a defensive measure. The likeliest outcome was ‘war of every man against every man’, where law and justice have no place. Such a life, he famously wrote, would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Hobbes proposed, therefore, a contract between the people and the Sovereign, as a means of creating peace by imposing a single, sovereign rule. It is the fear of punishment, he wrote, that preserves peace and unity, and ties people to the ‘performance of their Covenants’. Following his logic, individuals are likely to reach the conclusion that a social contract is the best alternative to their natural condition, so surrendering their liberties and rights.

On the surface of it, Hobbes' logic seems compelling, his deductions persuasive, his arguments admirable. Nonetheless, for a number of reasons, it is questionable that his analysis of human nature was truly scientific.

His 'state of nature' was not well founded in history. In Philosophical Rudiments, he wrote (much as he did more generally) that the existence of the American tribes was ‘fierce, short-lived, poor, nasty, and deprived of all that pleasure and beauty of life’. Yet rather than supporting his arguments, this appears to prove him wrong. Historians have generally claimed that the Indians were simple, peaceful, innocent, and uncorrupted by the evils of civilization. Hobbes, it seems, may have absorbed the Puritan tendency of separating the ‘natural’ as regressive, and the non-natural as progressive.

Furthermore, Hobbesian political philosophy becomes complicated when it comes to the fact that his work was both descriptive and prescriptive. The descriptive side is present in his analysis of the state of nature, while his idea of the Sovereign and the Social Contract as a universal solution is evidently prescriptive. Today we are keenly aware of the difficulty of passing from descriptive to prescriptive language. Not only that, but Hobbes' prescriptive language seems to be excessively strong – even emotional.

More than anything, Leviathan reveals that fear was a core element in Hobbes' political study and life. This may be most explicit in his verse autobiography: 'For through the scattered towns a rumor ran / that our people's last day was coming in a fleet / and so much fear my mother conceived at that time / that she gave birth to twins: myself and Fear.' Happy is he, he wrote, quoting Virgil, 'who treads beneath his feet all fear of Fate'. Could it be, then, that Hobbes' political philosophy was born of his own personal history? That it was his own experience of fear which shaped his so-called 'science'? In fact, that his mother's fear of a fleet outweighed all subsequent thought?

If this should be true, what implications may this have for our understanding of political philosophy today? May our political philosophies be shaped by our emotional and historical heritage? May this be a survival mechanism – a memory of the past which cannot be erased through any 'scientific' theory? Were Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Rawls and so many others with them – mere symptoms of their times – in fact, symptoms of the times which preceded them?