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[ipatgold22-blog]

To Harm or Not To Harm?

I believe that the concept behind The Circle’s need to know everything raises too many ethical concerns. This topic is extremely controversial because the creation of laws on the matter will change lives. To understand why this is such an ethical issue, we must further define ethics. Ethics is the study of what is right versus wrong behavior. We must all arrive at a common ground in order to come to one conclusion. The government wanted to be more like the circle. They wanted  to allow technology to act as a window into everyone’s personal life. I am questioning whether this idea would pass in real life. Is this concept morally “right.” Lawmakers today would realize that allowing one company to monopolize all resources goes against what our country stands for.  

I am arguing that our personal lives should be private. We should not be followed by our peers. We should be able to have private moments without a camera following our every move. We should make our own decisions about what is shared with others. Many times, we try to blend in. We follow societal trends. We, as human beings are natural born followers. The Circle is a trend. Today, it would be seen as an invasion of privacy. However, because humans enjoy to act like their peers, they would definitely adopt the new technologies. The rulers of a society should realize the poison that over-sharing possesses. The rulers of a society should follow the normative ethics principal.

Normative ethics tries to arrive at moral standards that regulate right versus wrong. Do the ends justify the means? Would the end result of creating a uniform technology driven society outweigh the possibilities of knowing everything about our neighbors? Yes. The idea of utilitarianism states that ethics theories arrive at what is best for the greatest number of people.

Exploring further into the question of “right” versus “wrong,” we must look to John Stuart Mills. His work, The Harm Principal states that our government can only pass legislation limiting our freedom if we are actually harming someone else. Through invasive technology practices, our freedoms are being limited. According to Mills, it would be corrupt to allow such limitations.

Ethical reasoning is moving in a forward direction. Ethics is the study of what is right and what is wrong behavior. Law makers feel the need to regulate or ban certain trends if they do not point due north of a moral compass. Specifically, normative ethics is a theory that tries to drive at moral standards that regulate right and wrong behavior. Who is to decide what is moral behavior and what is immoral behavior? In The Circle, there were not many people opposed to the idea of sharing all knowledge via technology. Not many people determined right from wrong. Deontological ethics refers to the duties and rights of human beings. It is a government’s duty to keep current on technology and share safe methods to better populations. In fact, utilitarianism describes the best actions taken for the greatest amount of people. Now, since the progression of ethical reasoning, ethic boards have been put into place to maintain safe technology practices and procedures. Ethicists combat each other’s opinions until deciding on the safest practices. They have been created as the best solution for differing views on the subject of over-sharing. I believe that we should not over-share. We should not know everything. Like Eggers, I believe that “We are not meant to know everything, …that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day (Eggers 322).

Ethical concerns are relevant to any topic involving the creation of laws. Laws are set into place to ensure that the masses are practicing morally correct behavior. What would be appropriate moral conduct for over-sharing our personal lives? The woman’s experience should be the moral theory that this topic is judged upon. It states that it is only appropriate to care for every situation as a “unique circumstance.”  Law makers must take a care-based approach to arrive at the best ruling. They must understand that every person is not comfortable sharing and learning about each other’s personal lives. They must understand that this advancement of technology could worsen communication of the entire human race. Face-to-face communication and interactions as we know it would be different. I for one, would hate to live in a society that accepted The Circle’s practices. I would hope that lawmakers in the book’s society would revert back to simple communication and sharing.

Mill, J.S., 1978. On Liberty, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/#JohStuMilHarPri

Fieser, James. Ethics. Internet Encyclopedia of Ethics. Retrieved from www.iep.utm.edu/ethic

[ipatgold22-blog]

Hall of Mirrors

The Circle depicts a world not too far from the one that we live in now. What makes this book so chilling to me is that is almost as if it could be true. Maybe this text is some type of prophecy sent to us to warn us of what is to come. I cant help to make the connections from what Eggers describes The Circle to be to the many agencies and companies that exist around the world we actually live in. Companies like Google, FaceBook, and Twitter have changed how people experience life and the world forever. They have made it so, much like how Eggers describes the intentions of The Circle, that anyone can have the tools to know anything about everything. The Circle takes it a step further and makes plans to basically track and record everything that goes on in people’s lives. The heads of the company, which Eggers names The Wise Men, believe that this unabridged collection of data could help sort out truth from fiction. Maybe it would stop wars from happening, but I am not willing to give up my right of privacy. The belief that every aspect of our life could be recorded, or transparent so to say, and stored to be referenced to at anytime in the future may have many positive effects, but if you look at some of the things that go on in Dave Eggers’ book The Circle a lot of the negative contingencies show their face. This alternative society of total transparency that The Circle represents in the book would strip all people of some very essential human rights.  

This type of society where everyone is put on surveillance like The Circle does in the book would reduce privacy to an absolute zero. Imagine: cops, your girlfriend, boyfriend, mom and dad, practically everyone could look at a catalog of all your movements at any specific point in time. Constantly under the microscope that many are blind to see.

I believe that many citizens of America could not go “transparent" like Mae and the dozen or so politicians that participated in The Circle’s experiment. I find myself to be more of a Mercer type of character. I believe that technology is a great benefactor to our society, and yes technology could help us understand and alleviate many of the problems we face in mankind. But there is a question of when is there too much. Ty one of the creators of the Circle, Ty, conspires to ruin The Circle by writing a sort of PSA discussing that al people, “must of the right to anonymity” (Eggers 490). What he means by this is that everyone should have the right to privacy. He brings up a few other points that reveals the demise of life as we know it if this societal transparency takes effect. Maybe it would decrease crime and violence if we had a camera on every corner, but it wouldn't eliminate it. Bad people are going to always to do bad things. The fact that everyone knows that they are being watched would force them to live in fear of falling outside the lines of the rules, instead of them consciously knowing what is right and wrong. Steven Kurlander points out in his article Technology Drives Advances in Domestic Surveillance that we live in a world, “where every movement we make and every communication we engage in can be easily tracked by the government, the cell phone provider—and each other” (Kurlander). So then we are left with a society that doesn't think for themselves, but only thinks of the consequences of any move they make. Some may think that this will make people stay in line more often than not, but that doesn't mean that this is the “TrueYou”. You would be the product of a society that scrutinizes and judges people outside of the lines of  “the circle”.

 Steven Kurlander also discusses in his article that this type of surveillance is everywhere, “We walk Main Street that are monitored by cameras. We work at computer terminals that allow our bosses to monitor [us]… and we use social media and search engines that can track our usage and establish personality profiles to sell and share” (Kurlander). You may not think of each click of your mouse or swipe of your touch screen as a piece of data that someone is closely analyzing and sharing or selling that information to major corporations. The Circle believes that, “privacy is theft” (Eggers 305), when in reality most people would think transparency is theft of privacy. Privacy is the right to have secrets, to have a personal life, to be human. We all have secrets behind closed doors and we have a right to these as humans. This should worry all of us, because we aren't that far away from what The Circle proposes in this book. Its not just the companies that start up these data hogs, but also the consumers of the services they provide. We are so quick to feed into the newest app or the newest social media site. Many never stop and think what they are actually signing up for.        

[ipatgold22-blog]

Murder Caught on Camera

It is crazy to think that there is yet another case in which a police officer kills an unarmed man. This time it was all caught on camera. A brave citizen of Northern Charleston, South Carolina loomed behind the trees as this scene unfolded in front of him.

It seems as if the officer tries to cover up the crime he just committed by planting evidence on the suspected perp. Other officers come on the scene and nothing is done to aid the man in anyway for dew minutes. Its as if they were too worried about getting in trouble.   

What is going on through the minds of these supposed men of the law. The video is all over the internet, and every news channel is covering this story. This is issue is definitely getting out of hand.