A Braver World
It is a warm night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.
It has transpired that next iterations of Apple’s operating systems for iPhones and Macs will scan user photos for child abuse imagery. No doubt this feature will be introduced with utmost concern for privacy. (In particular, only known child abuse imagery will be flagged. Beach photos of one’s own children won’t be flagged.) No doubt Apple will do what its competitors are already doing —only better. It is hard to find fault with this particular initiative. But it sets a precedent and introduces a technology that could be abused. Therefore, one wonders: Is it right to enable your phone to snitch on you to the authorities by looking over your private photos?
To ask whether it is right to police photos is to ask whether it is right to police thoughts. Presumably, in a liberal society, one is free to think whatever one pleases and, in particular, is free to conjure up, remember, and recall any image. Should one not be similarly free to store and view any photograph on one’s phone? One could argue that certain images — say, pornography — require a victim — a trafficked woman — while conjuring up images in one’s head does not require a victim. This distinction is not so clear-cut, though. To conjure up an appropriate image in one’s head, one may be compelled to seek a live model for one’s fantasies— a new victim — not a digital copy.
To ask whether it is right to police thoughts is to ask whether it is right to police tastes. Someone who spends hours thinking about, say, trains and bridges presumably does so because of his strong taste for trains and bridges. Would we trust (a much cleverer descendent of) Siri, iPhone’s digital assistant, to analyse our personality and to report any undesirable traits it finds to police? The rationale for doing so would be to prevent a future crime from being committed. But it is far from obvious that someone with a taste for X would commit X. Imagine that Alice has a strong taste for an illegal substance, which nevertheless she never consumes. Instead, she sublimates her taste for the substance by losing herself in the socially beneficial activity of engineering more efficient batteries. Indeed, suppose that everyone with a taste for this illegal substance behaves as Alice does. Surely in this case it would be wrong to report Alice’s taste for the illegal substance to police with the intention to persecute her.
People are complex. Society should not prosecute individuals for tastes that they possess, for society knows little about how tastes influence actions: anti-social, pro-social, or private. Similarly, society ought not to prosecute individuals for the mere act of indulging in certain thoughts or for hoarding and viewing photos in the privacy of one’s iPhone.
Of course, each of us individually is justified in befriending and de-friending others on the basis of the tastes their behaviour reveals, the thoughts they share, or the pictures they frame in their room. One may find a friendship more rewarding with those whose tastes one shares. One may be rightly circumspect of those whose tastes — especially moral tastes — one does not share. It is just that the government — the monopolist on violence — as any monopolist must meet a higher standard than each of us faces individually. Perceived statistical association between tastes and actions ought not to be enough to condemn and destroy, just as perceived statistical association between gender, age, and race on the one hand and the propensity to kill on the other hand does not currently suffice to convict one of murder.
Thank you kindly.
