Sam Harris’s ethics are simply utilitarianism that he’s attempting to make objective with his Worst Possible Misery for Everyone claim. In his ethical model, what alleviates suffering is a ‘better’ or ‘more morally good outcome.’ If we apply that to this example, the ‘pervert’ is suffering less presumably because he gets to enjoy watching his naked neighbor, and the neighbor is suffering the same since her life is not impacted at all and other ‘conscious beings’ that are creating the morality similarly are not impacted because we don’t even know it’s happening; ergo, this is a morally good action. We can attempt to put a ‘foreseeable consequence’ model of utilitarianism over this action where we judge it based on foreseeable consequences, but that really only tells us that the pervert should be really, really careful that he’s not caught.
This is why some people* need* God. Somebody watching over their shoulder even if there was nobody else looking.
You add in “Oh by the way, somebody else knows you’re doing this, and not happy about it, and might make you pay for it dearly for it someday” and the answer becomes OBVIOUS. I’m an atheist, and I don’t discuss it very often. When I do, I occassionally get the question of, “well, if there is no God, why be good?” At that moment, I pretty much end the discussion with “Ah, what do I know anyway?” because I’m talking to a person that NEEDS God.
This is still a gross violation of privacy, and an illegal act to boot. It doesn’t suddenly become morally fine just because nobody found out about it.
The question being asked here isn’t ‘Why be good?’ Rather, ‘What IS good?’ Why is ‘a gross violation of privacy’ a moral ill? You obviously think that this is ‘bad’ in some objective sense, now you need to justify why it’s ‘bad.’ Whether or not you should do bad things is a much different discussion. The legality is neither here nor there, since I think most of us can agree that legality has only a tangential relationship with morality.
Well let’s have a go at refining the OP’s hypothetical into something with reduced potential for harm, so as to get at the question of inconsequentiality.
Regarding the subject of the peeping, let’s assume she has taken only typical steps to assure her privacy within her dwelling; curtains drawn or blinds adjusted at night time, doors to bathrooms and toilets closed during use, no disrobing or changing of clothes in front of windows, etc. However, she has had no prior contact with the voyeur, has given no explicit permissions to anyone else outside of selected intimates, and has never publicly exhibited any typically private behaviors or modes of dress - in other words, she has not implicitly encouraged the attention of others by word or action.
Regarding the voyeur, let’s propose that, instead of taping the woman in the shower, our peeper surreptitiously observes the woman doing daily household activities which involve no nudity or typically embarrassing bodily functions, and no recording is attempted. It’s a closed circuit setup, video/audio signal sent via hard wire to a non-buffered viewing screen which is itself incapable of any sort of network connection. The voyeur only views his subject’s actions in real time, in a locked viewing room with no accomplices and no reasonable possibility of being interrupted by another potential viewer.
Furthermore, this setup is completely removed and destroyed upon the conclusion of the session. (If further peeping is done, the same private setup and immediate destruction is/will be accomplished.)
Lastly, and most improbably, let’s say that the setup and destruction can be accomplished without any structural modifications to the subject’s dwelling, and without any possibility of an encounter occurring between the subject and the installer of the monitoring equipment.
I would propose then that the following questions must be resolved in order to make a moral judgement on the voyeur’s actions: 1) Has the voyeur really eliminated risks to his subject and to the community in general? and 2) Regardless of the first answer, and assuming no negative consequences actually occur from his actions, has the voyeur acted improperly?
My answers are: 1) Absolutely not. 2) Unequivocally yes.
My justifications are:
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Physical alterations had to occur to do the monitoring, even assuming “no structural modifications” and “no possibility of encounters… with the subject” as stated in the proposal. Wires had to be routed through physical pathways; the house/apartment had to be surveyed and cameras hidden (or found and activated), electrical power had to be provided and some agent or actor had to perform the physical actions all this alteration required. All without the permission or knowledge of the subject. Risks are inherent to all of this; in rough order from high to low probability the voyeur/agent runs the risk of encounters occurring between the agent and uninvolved third parties, of discovery by authorities, of disturbing or damaging intervening real estate between the viewing room and the subject’s domicile, of electrical connection errors propagating into fire or shock hazards, of the equipment being stolen or hijacked. None of these risks are inconsequential. Each could lead to some sort of harm occurring to someone.
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The voyeur understands that his attention and monitoring of the subject are not welcome, in the sense that the subject expects her actions to be private and unobserved by others. Although no direct physical interaction between voyeur and subject is intended or required, that’s not the only interaction between the entities that’s important.
I think we must consider the consciousness of each moral agent involved, which while slippery to define, at least exists as the base context in which moral judgement occurs. -I don’t intend to be abstruse here; I’m just saying the existence of morality as a concept in human action depends on the assumption that humans are conscious of their own decisions -or at least those decisions which are immediately causative- and that their consciousnesses are affected by the evidence of their senses.
If we accept that the voyeur is aware of his own transgression (the violation of the subject’s expectation of privacy), then even if we grant that the subject will forever remain unconscious of the voyeurism, we must also consider how the voyeur’s actions affect -and will affect- his own consciousness, which effectively we can call his own moral reality, and how that affects the overall moral universe.
The relevant consideration here, IMO, is that the voyeurism in the hypothetical is not accidental or opportunistic; it is deliberate and planned. If the voyeur happens to see the woman doing her daily routine through the open windows of her house, that may violate her (poorly based) expectation of privacy, but the opportunity was presented to the voyeur through her actions, not his own. If he lingers and maneuvers for a better view, that draws closer to a moral line, and is definitely creepy (again IMO) but doesn’t unquestionably get to that line.
But in the case of the hypothetical, the voyeur has taken proactive and secretive action to observe his subject. Because he is human, he must have conscious or unconscious motivations. Regardless of his intent, whether it is protective, prurient or malicious, the voyeur knows his observation is undesired (because of the hindrances he must overcome) and will be resisted if discovered (hence, his secrecy). And having taken those surreptitious actions and successfully violated his subject’s privacy, the voyeur has established a level of intimate connection with his subject he would not have enjoyed without having done so. Worse, he’s created an intimacy of which his subject is completely unaware.
This is morally meaningful because voyeur and subject coexist in a physical world where direct physical interaction between them is not only possible but, since their spheres of existence are finite and interwoven, not improbable. The voyeur has given himself two things through his peeping; one is perhaps morally neutral but the other is not. He has intimate knowledge of his subject, however benign that knowledge might be, that she does not know of and cannot reasonably anticipate. More importantly, he now has the knowledge that he can violate her wishes at will, and he has direct experience of having done so with no consequences to himself.
We can’t know how that knowledge will affect the voyeur’s consciousness and intentions, but we can know, being fellow humans, how those alterations can and frequently have played out in our shared reality. He is now much better equipped to more fully realize his protective, prurient or malicious motivations, due entirely to the successful voyeuristic actions.
It’s the necessary and inevitable shift in the voyeur’s consciousness, the potential for human frailty such a shift promotes and encourages, that turns the violation of the subject’s expectations into a direct violation of a moral precept. He knows what he’s done and he also knows, in this hypothetical, that he got away with it. The voyeur’s actions do violence to his own expectations of consequence and to his own consideration of others’ moral expectations, and those facts threaten all other actors in his moral universe.
I don’t think morality has a tangential relationship with legality.
Now yeah, there’s definitely been some exceptions. For example, slavery being codified into law. But a lot of laws are created to prevent harm to other people (thus maintaining a cohesive, less anarchistic society), based off creeds that go back hundreds of years and in some cases millennia. I am not a moral relativist, and I think there is some merit to the Judeo-Christian value system. To me, murder is self-evidently wrong.
But some people, I guess, don’t have that baked in to their moral compass and need stuff like laws and rules (and God) and subsequent punishments as deterrents. Would I want some pervert invading my privacy as long as I never found out about it? No? Then why would I even THINK it was okay for me to do it?
I do not think society is better off with everybody thinking its okay to be a pervert as long as they don’t get caught. Not only because there will undoubtedly be cases where they DO get caught, but because it would embolden them to do it where before they might think twice.
The reason these hypotheticals never work is that they use things that are known for certain, that in the real world could never be known for certain.
Oh, the train is sure to hit either 5 people or one person, so which do you chose? In reality if you were standing by that train switch there’s no way you could be certain about what would happen. You’d have to rely on your imperfect knowledge to do something with your imperfect human organs.
So, what if you fire the gun in the air, but the bullet never hits anyone and no one heard the gunshot and no one was frightened. So no harm, no foul. Except in the real world it is obvious that you shouldn’t fire guns into the air, because in the real world you can’t be sure that no bad outcomes will occur. And sure, that also applies to picking up trash or other good things. You pick up the discarded soda bottle, but that means that tomorrow a kid on a bike doesn’t run over the broken glass and doesn’t get a flat tire so he doesn’t stop to fix it, and therefore gets hit by a truck.
Consequentialism! You picking up that soda bottle led to a bad outcome. Except the bad outcome was not foreseen, or foreseeable. And so with a lot of these hypotheticals. We set up the hypothetical such that the bad or good outcomes are precisely spelled out, so we know for sure what will happen if we choose A or choose B.
But in the real world, the potential for harm isn’t known in advance, and we have to use our fallible human brains and fallible human senses to make our best guesses. I could help a little old lady across the street, but what I didn’t know is that tomorrow an asteroid is going to hit the earth and wipe out all human life, rendering my good deed pointless. So I should stop helping little old ladies across the street now?
Utilitarianism is fine and all, but it goes wrong when people refuse to consider the second or third or nth order effects. We don’t want to live in a world where people are constantly told that it’s fine to do something bad, as long as you get away with it and no one finds out. What’s wrong with a rule that it’s wrong to steal? Yes, we can have all sorts of asterisks and caveats and special cases, but the reason we have the rule is not because it was handed down by God, or by Nature’s God, or is some objective Moral Truth. We have the rule because otherwise modern society would be impossible, we’d be fighting each other all the time like kids in a preschool when the teacher isn’t looking.
And so we have the rule not to rape. Even if the victim is unconscious and would never know and it turns out that they don’t suffer any lasting physical damage. I have a no-rape rule for myself, and I don’t keep a sharp eye out for situations where it just so happens that rape would be OK. And I round that rule up to “it’s always wrong”, because that’s a much simpler rule and much easier to understand than a gigantic footnoted list. And maybe someday I’ll find myself in a situation where it would have been morally OK for me to violate my rule, and I’ll diminish the marginal utility of the universe by some trivial amount by sticking to the rule even when it didn’t make sense. Oh well. My judgement is that such a situation is so unlikely to happen or imagine, that I can just dismiss it out of hand.
And then we grade that all the way down to picking up trash, and the unforeseen problems that might arise. At some point I have to abandon my hard and fast rules and actually use ones with footnotes and dependent clauses, because the harms and benefits of the rules are not nearly as clear cut. And while picking up trash is good, I don’t spend all my time picking up trash, because I’ve got other stuff to do. So, like the fallible human being that I am, I just try to muddle through, and rely heavily on my innate human instincts, because I have no other choice.
And because I’m fallible, that makes my clinging to a few simple rules explicable. I know it’s easy for me to make a mistake, and what are the odds that the one time I really want to murder someone is the one time that would actually turn out to be a good idea? Isn’t it more likely that I’m making a mistake, rather than this being the time to kill a guy? Again, I really can imagine circumstances where I’d kill a guy, but I’ve never actually ran into such circumstances, and I hope I never will. But I’m probably going to err on the side of not killing people when I should have rather than err on the side of killing people when I shouldn’t have, because I live in a time and place where not killing people is the overwhelmingly correct choice.
Maybe I’ll make a mistake, but again, I’m not constantly asking myself if the time has come to kill a dude. OK, how about now? No? OK, how about now? Still no? Dang, it’s like it’s almost never time to kill a dude. What’s up with that? And so I don’t carry a gun around mentally prepared to stand my ground. Someday I might make a mistake and not kill a dude when I should have killed him. But it seems to me that there are a lot more people out there who killed a dude when they shouldn’t have than there are people who didn’t kill a dude when they should have. I don’t want to end up in the first group, even if it increases my chance of ending up in the second group.
Obviously, this is wrong, he intended to and succeeded in violating her privacy. I was wrong from the moment that he conceived of the idea, until the moment when he died.
Slightly different scenario. Say he had security cameras set up to watch his back fence. His neighbor was nude sunbathing one day, and was caught on camera.
The guy changes the way the cameras are set up so that this doesn’t happen again, but doesn’t erase the tape or tell the neighbor about it.
What you’re doing here is telling me your opinions, but you’re not providing justifications for them. The only real justification I find is that you’re appealing to some sort of version of the Golden Rule. “I don’t want people to do it to me, so it’s immoral.” Firstly, this is problematic because you are prioritizing your wants when you don’t know what the wants of others are. You’re setting yourself up as the arbiter of morality with no justification for that other than that that’s what you think. Maybe our pervert friend is a pervert in more ways than one and would get a thrill out of people unknowingly watching him. In our Golden Rule scenario then, does his action become moral? Or a better question is, why does his opinion of what is moral have to be subservient to your opinion? Your society comment runs into the same issue. YOU don’t think that society is better off with secret perverts, but our pervert is on a bunch of message boards and is convinced that society needs more secret perverts, not fewer. Why does your vision of what is ‘best’ for society take precedence over the pervert’s vision?
As an aside, laws sometimes have something to do with morals and sometimes they don’t. There are many, many, many, many laws that are immoral and many that aren’t and many more that have no moral bearing at all. Using the law as a foundation of morality is extremely problematic unless you’re Jeff Sessions, so I think we’re safe not bringing it into the discussion.
Perhaps, “She has been robbed of her dignity,” makes it more clear.
One definition of dignity is “formal reserve or seriousness of manner, appearance, or language”. An image of her private, behind-closed-doors appearance (reserved for only those she chooses to share it with) has been stolen. And the recording doesn’t even enter into it. “Just peeping” steals it, too.
Yes, nailed it.
In this case I would say it’s a battle of opinions then, and mine’s better. And I think more people would agree with my “golden rule” opinion than the “its fine if nobody finds out” opinion, and thus might means right. My opinion will be enforced at the end of the barrel of a gun if needed.
Look I don’t like that I have to pay taxes or go to jail. That’s just my opinion. But my opinion means jack shit in a practical sense in this particular case.
I don’t accept your interpretation of Harris’s view. I don’t think he intends it to apply to a narrow isolated action but more widely to human actions in general and society as a whole.
So certainly you can frame a single incident as neutral or even a net good if you throw in enough “what-ifs” and imagined non-impacts but, I think my own original point still stands.
For this to be practically designated as neutral or good we should have no problem in recommending it as common practice (within society as we understand it rather than imaginary scenarios)
If you are asking the ultimate source of rights, that is pretty much un-answerable, because we don’t agree. Maybe they come from natural law, maybe they come from God, maybe they come from something else, like utilitarianism.
The fact that we don’t agree on the source doesn’t mean we don’t agree on what they are. It’s based more or less on consensus - all of us agree, more or less, that we don’t want to be spied on in the shower, so we don’t let anyone spy on anyone in the shower. Maybe you don’t agree, and think we need to use some other standard to decide if spying in the shower is allowable or not. Too bad - the rest of us think it is not allowable, for good and sufficient reasons of our own.
In practical terms, it hardly matters - if I spy on someone in the shower, and nobody else ever finds out about it, and I destroy the tape and take the secret to my grave, then I got away with it. Whoopee-doo for me. “I got away with it” doesn’t sound like much of a justification to me.
Regards,
Shodan
I was thinking more along the first example you gave, so there is no question that some would see the potential violation of her privacy.
It is interesting what you chose as your second (or third) example (i.e., filming outside an open window). Technically speaking, that is still illegal in most places. I said I wouldn’t bring up the legal arguments. But I only bring this up to show, some people would stil have a problem with even that.
I think this type of hypothetical can be sorted out by assuming the lady has perfect knowledge. And if so, would she feel violated knowing that someone was watching her? If so, it’s “wrong” regardless of if she actually knows this happened or not.
We shouldn’t assume that the pervert, by indulging his impulse to violate another person’s privacy, hasn’t actually caused harm to himself. Could a part of him feel guilty over his actions? Certainly. Could he constantly be worried about being caught? Yes. Could this emotional burden negatively impact his health, his productivity, and/or his relationships with others? I think so.
In addition, maybe getting away with this crime makes it that much easier for him to rationalize spying on other people. Maybe eventually he gets careless and these victims discover their privacy has been violated. Wouldn’t this cause harm that might not have occurred had he not spied on the first woman?
I think this is where you are getting the pushback. Exposing one’s naked body to a stranger is terribly embarrassing for the majority of people. Even if she doesn’t know that it happened, her naked form is exposed to the pervert who is now using her real (not imagined in the mastubatory example) image in violation of her privacy.
She has a moral right to keep that image private and the pervert has no right to view it.
What if the shower was acid glue and the camera was Hitler?
Exactly.
These hypotheticals introduce all sorts of information that is flatly stated to be known or unknown, the outcomes of the various choices are spelled out exactly in advance, and then we’re invited to grind the gears and see the predictable outcomes of our choices.
But again, real life doesn’t work that way. We don’t start with known outcomes and then work out whether the choices that lead to those outcomes were moral or not. Instead we’re looking at our future behavior and trying to decide what to do, and therefore in the real world we’re dealing with uncertainty about the outcomes.
Like, we’re told flat out that no one every discovers the peeping tom’s actions. OK, but then how did we discover it, to make a moral judgement about it? And what’s the point of our moral judgement, if not to guide our future behavior?
And the obvious point of “it’s wrong to be a peeping tom, even if you get away with it” is that the people who say that won’t be voyeurs themselves and will support various legal and social punishments for people who are discovered to be voyeurs.
Voyeurism that no one ever finds out about is irrelevant, because the point of moral judgements is what we decide to do about voyeurism we do find out about.
“Steve spied on this woman and took videos of her, but then he erased the videos and no one ever found out. What do you think of Steve now that you’ve found out?”
“I think Steve is a pervert and I hate him!”
“But why? You never found out Steve was a pervert, so how could you think he was a pervert?”
“But you just told me he was a pervert!”
“Yeah, I told you he was a pervert, but I also told you that you didn’t know he was a pervert. So you can’t be mad at him for perving, because you don’t know.”
“OK, so if I don’t know I guess I can’t be mad at Steve, because I’m unaware of his perversion.”
“HAH HAH! You don’t care that Steve’s a pervert! What’s wrong with you?”
And so the whole hypothetical falls apart, because it’s based on a fact pattern of both knowing and not knowing at the same time, which can’t happen in real life.
As I wrote with a previous example, that is completely different, because when you shoot at me, you intend to harm me and there’s a high likelihood that I’m going to be harmed. That, by chance, I wasn’t, doesn’t negate the fact that this action was harmful hence can be considered immoral on that basis.
On the other, you’re aren’t harmed directly by me watching you taking a shower. If you never know about it, there’s no psychological harm, either.
“Gross violations of privacy” is abstract. Contrarily to the bullet you shoot at my car, it can’t cause any kind of direct harm to you. And if you’re unaware of it, it can’t cause any psychological harm, either. So, while shooting at my car is an harmful action, watching you under the shower unbestknown to anybody is of no consequence for you. A better example would be you shooting a blank at me. Or point a fake gun at my car. I can’t be harmed, but I can be frightened. But if I’m not even aware that you pointed the fake gun at me, there’s no conceivable harm that could result from it. Is it immoral?
So, the question stands : can an action that cannot cause harm be immoral, and if so, on what basis can we decide which of those actions are immoral and which aren’t?
On top of which, in this particular case, the fact that you consider it a “gross violation of privacy” is completely cultural. If we were living in a nudist society, this would be considered of no importance. If we were living in an extremely strict society, watching your ankle might be considered a “gross violation of privacy”. So, the action can’t possibly be considered as inherently wrong. It’s only so in a specific cultural context, even if everybody, you included, is made aware that I watched you under the shower. Which makes even more difficult to demonstrate that it’s immoral.
Like in my previous response, by saying “watching someone under the shower is a gross violation of privacy” you’re just taking as granted that this inconsequential action is immoral, you don’t explain why it is. It’s essentially begging the question.