I don’t see a contradiction.
EVERYBODY has something he/she wants to hide, and 99.99% of the time, it’s not relevant to the police or anyone else.
I have no idea what you consider to be “bad” or “wrong”, so if I told you everything I don’t know what, if anything, you’d attack me for.
That isn’t a counterargument based on formal logic, but the argument in the thread title isn’t wrong because of a formal flaw; that is, the syllogism is sound, it is just based on premises which are factually incorrect and/or philosophically unsupportable.
A corollary to my point is that privacy acts as a social lubricant, allowing people who have utterly different views of morality to interact with each other peacefully because they don’t know that, and each doesn’t know what the other’s been up to.
It works the same way in regards to laws: It’s hard to predict what will be outlawed tomorrow, so privacy today can save a lot of trouble, even if the rules about ex post facto laws are adhered to strictly.
Well, I guess I would say there are two separate things:
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“I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s never done anything wrong.” Everybody has petty foibles that aren’t really anybody else’s business. Most of us wouldn’t want, for example, microphones in our steering wheels recording for posterity every unkind thing we say about our fellow drivers during rush hour, and as long as we aren’t actually sinking to the level of “road rage”, our muttered curses aren’t really anybody else’s business (even if maybe we would be happier people if we adopted a more Zen attitude about our daily commute).
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Things that we do that really aren’t wrong in any way, shape, or form, but are nonetheless private.
These are separate and complementary reasons for rejecting the “Only guilty people have something to hide” claim.
I’ll add another: “No one truly knows that they’re innocent.”
In the US at least, and I suspect any developed nation, the set of laws is immense. No one can possibly know them in their entirety. And it’s absolutely filled with things that no reasonable person would suspect are wrong (even when the laws have good intentions).
In a way, part of the fallacy here is a conflation of the legal sense of “guilty” vs. a more philosophical one. If someone truly knows that they’ve broken no law, then I suppose in some sense (i.e., ignoring privacy) they have nothing to hide. But here, “guilty” is implying a kind of morality: “Only people who have done something wrong have something to hide.” And that’s just false, because there are all kinds of things which are not wrong, per-se, but definitely illegal.
This dovetails nicely into my point, so I’ll add on here at the end that the line between malum prohibitum (things which are only bad because they’re prohibited by law) and malum in se (things which are bad in themselves) is very blurry once you get two people to attempt to agree to it. For example: Malum prohibitum includes some kinds of homicide (based on the specific technicalities of self-defense and home-defense laws in your jurisdiction), whereas malum in se obviously includes such all-time hits as picking grain on the Sabbath and “knowing” the wrong kinds of people, at least historically.
Did you mix those up or have I been whooshed?
Or is “obviously” meant as sarcasm?
Yes, it’s sarcasm, but don’t tell certain people that: Certain Judean radicals might be running around, disobeying labor laws and raising the dead.
You can add to all of that how exceedingly easy it can be to de-contextualize information to use it against someone.
I’m thinking that part of this issue rests on the word, hide. Hiding or concealing something is an action, and some people think that if you actively hide something, it’s because you’re guilty of something and that you’ve taken steps to keep someone from finding out. Maybe locking your underwear drawer would be intentionally concealing something. To some people, that looks like guilt. But the guy who locks his door at night isn’t guilty, even though he’s intentionally making it impossible for someone to know something about him. In other words, it seems like motive is unknown when some information is not forthcoming and one who makes an assumption of guilt is taking self-protection for concealment.
Also, privacy and secrecy are two things that look pretty much the same from the outside although they are not always the same thing.
I don’t think it’s a logical fallacy, per se; that is, without the context of the argument in which it’s being made, we can’t say whether or not the logic is flawed or the axioms are flawed. Regardless, it is false–and easy to prove as such–in all but the most general case that assumes that all people are guilty of something, which is so general as to be use. That is, if we run with the generalized case that all people are guilty of something, then we’re just saying that only people have something to hide, which is a worthless statement, unless perhaps we’re arguing about the rights of privacy for animals.
But, again, it’s easy to prove because the implication of this statement is that innocent people have nothing to hide. All we have to do is find someone the person making that statement can agree is innocent, and then see if that person is actually willing to expose everything, defecation, sex, financial information, etc.
More specifically, though, this is usually meant to imply that only someone who is guilty of a specific crime will attempt to hide something related to it, and this is a more common application and more difficult to disprove. That is, someone who might be accused of, say, drug smuggling might reasonably expect privacy in his sex life, but would be unreasonable in having an issue with someone searching his car for drugs. But, again, we just have to find someone whom the person asserting that agrees is innocent of that charge but still wouldn’t like people going through their car. Speaking for myself, even though I don’t have anything private in my car now, it’s possible I might, or maybe I might not want them damaging things or giving them the chance to plant evidence. Hell, maybe it’s just part of my personal space and I feel like it’s invaded unless someone is invited. After all, I don’t like close-talkers either, even if they are unoffensive and have good hygiene; I just don’t like having people in my space without my consent.
But, again, it’s just an assertion, not a logical fallacy, either it’s something they believe to be true axiomatically, or they derived it from other axioms at which point it’s still possible the logic is sound and one of those other axioms is false, or they used a logical fallacy from sound axioms, or possibly both. That something is provably false doesn’t mean it is inherently a logical fallacy itself.
I’m going to take the opposite view and say that this axiom may be mostly true.
I think a society without any privacy could function just fine…if everyone loses their privacy. If just a few people have nude videos of themselves online, they get embarassed and ostracized. If there’s a billion of these videos, yawns, nobody cares.
I do wonder how certain things would function, of course. How would startup entrepreneurs get started if anyone can just look at their records and find out their company is just a few overdrawn credit cards and a P.O. box? How would the President function if everyone has seen a video of him in the Lincoln bedroom with his wife or an intern? And so on.
And the ole “who watches the watchers”. If (on a time delayed feed), you can see that the homeland security agents who are watching everyone spend all their time spying on hot chicks, well, they face censure for their negative actions. The problem with the government getting privileged access to spy on everyone else is they get to abuse their discretion to attack whoever they like.
Prosecutorial discretion becomes totally broken in a world with zero privacy because I suspect if you had a perfect camera feed of every individual’s actions, you could find something they were guilty of every time. (even if it is just ripping mattress tags)
It’s noteworthy, too, that the same authoritarian mindset that says “you have nothing to hide, you should let the authorities look at what they think is necessary” tend to take the opposite view when the tables are turned. When asked for details about government in the spirit of “Freedom of information”, the usual responses combine national security, individuals’ privacy concerns, risk to civil servants if the information comes out, “it’s an ongoing investigation”, redacted, and “costs too much!”. Apparently no price is too high to pay when it comes to invading your privacy, but the opposite is true when it comes to providing the information to the citizens that their tax dollars have paid for.