Saturday, March 24, 2012

Week 3, Prompt 2: "Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?" by Emrys Westacott (Philosophy Now)

Central argument: All the right things we do under surveillance are not always moral.

There are many choices in our life, but in the cruel world that we are living right now, we do not really have the choice. All the choice that we have which use to decide what to do in life have narrowed down until only two choice which are ethical or not. We have to do the right thing to suit the people around us. According to Emrys Westcott, a professor of philosophy at Alfred University believes that surveillance fails to make people morally better. I do agree with Westcott belief because under the surveillance of the CCTV we tend to do the ethical choices which make us look more morally but in fact we are not, novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest and The yellow wallpaper . For an example we try not to cheat but in reality cheating is unavoidable.

Imagine, in the future, CCTV is everywhere. Let’s make it easier to understand. I will use the case which the police use CCTV to observe the traffic. We, as a human being are born will no evil, but the our action is the way that leads ourselves to the ethical choice. In the traffic system, everyone does want to follow the laws or rules. Not always, everybody will follow the rules and laws because there are some obstacles which are lying in our way. These obstacles are the main reason why we want to break the laws or rules. For an example, a person who follows the rules for his entire life, but one day his mom is sick and almost passes away. As a good son, that person has to make his ethical choice. One is following the rules not to pass the red traffic light, but late to see his mom. Second he has to pass the red traffic light to see his mom. Ethical choice is made in this case. With CCTV we will see how people make their decision which sometime is ethical but sometime is not. In the case that a person follows the rules, he does the right thing, but do you think that by doing this action will make him look morally.

In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ nest, the nurses’ action was to surveillance the patient. The outcome turns out that the action of the patients did not look morally at all. All they did was rebelled the nurses to get their free. The moral of the novel is that no one can beat down the system, because the system has the power to control everything within its range. Therefore under the surveillance of the nurse, the victims were like the dog listen to the order of the system. Until Mc Murphy comes, everything changes. All the well educate people who read the novel for the first time will think that Mc Murphy does the right thing and see the system as a bad thing. After reading for two or three times, people who read the novel might think like this: Mc Murphy is just a stubborn person who does not know anything about the ethical choice, because all Mc Murphy did was just making the victim goes against the system. Let’s look back, victims are under the surveillance of the nurse but still their actions are not moral.

Another novel which is called The yellow wallpaper, by ….. shows that under the surveillance people action is not moral. The novel talks about a woman who traps herself in the room, and her intuition or might be imagination which led her to her dead. The readers seem to be a the surveillance of the woman in the book. First we see that the woman in the novel seem to choose the right thing to believe. Until on part of the novel, the woman’s imagination has gone beyond the limit, and that is the place where the ethical choice took place. In the end of the novel, the woman chooses to kill herself. Under the surveillance of the reader, she chooses the dead. Does anyone think that the action that the woman took was moral? I do not think so.

Surveillance is a way to make people decide to take their path. The path that people choose might be ethical for some cases, but some cases it is not ethical. Nothing is perfect in this cruel world that we are living. Therefore I personally think that under surveillance will make people have more in choosing the right thing to do.

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