For some reason, your otherwise peaceful planet attracts the most reckless drivers in the galaxy. So your government has introduced a plan to address the record-breaking rates of traffic tickets and deadly hovercar accidents. They propose assigning driver credit scores to every car-owning citizen.
Drvers’ scores will go up when they drive in legal and considerate ways, and down when they drive recklessly. Citizens with high scores will then be rewarded with car-related benefits, like easier access to car loans and cheaper gas and toll payments. But drivers with low scores will see the price of those things go up.
Your planet's already tested this system, and researchers found a drastic decrease in car accidents and inconsiderate driving. But to implement this planet-wide, the government needs to observe every driver’s behavior. And because hover cars routinely drive off-road, it won’t be enough simply to surveil the roads— the government will need to install cameras and microphones in every vehicle.
The recordings would be stored on government servers to document driver behavior and justify scores. Clearly it would be good for everyone if the roads were safer. But is this undeniable benefit worth the cost to drivers’ privacy?
The government has put their controversial plan to a vote. Where do you stand? Your answer will likely depend on what you think the value of privacy is.
Philosophers often understand privacy as the ability to control information about oneself. From this perspective, privacy matters because it impacts how each of us navigates the social world, deciding when and to what extent to be in the public eye. Some think this kind of control is essential to being free, and that any policy which reduces privacy therefore impairs our freedom.
For example, living in a surveillance state would likely affect your actions even if no one was using your private information against you. But in cases like your planet’s, the conflict is between your own personal freedom and the good of the larger social world. And since society is really just a collection of individuals with their own rights, how can we determine what the “greater good” even is?
For the philosopher Plato, this was very straightforward. He defined justice as referring to the welfare of society as a whole— not the well-being or liberty of its individual members. He likened this to the way we talk about the health of a human body, where the condition of any single limb or organ matters only as part of the bigger picture.
For Plato, the same is true of individual members of society; justice requires prioritizing the collective good over their own individual good. On the other hand, other philosophers have defended privacy as a means of moderating the “tyrannical excesses of an unchecked security state. ” In the present case, your government could misuse this surveillance data.
But even if your government were perfectly trustworthy, some feel your right to privacy would still be an essential cornerstone of democracy. Ruth Gavison notes that the protection of privacy fosters “moral autonomy,” which she argues is necessary for people to exercise their democratic rights. She maintains that democracy depends on people’s ability to form independent judgments and preferences, and this requires knowing that we're free from the threat of public hostility or humiliation.
However, perhaps it’s worth questioning whether privacy is really valuable in its own right. If privacy is only instrumentally valuable— meaning valuable to the extent that it brings about other valuable things for society— then its worth can be outweighed by other social goals. It’s also possible that our right to privacy doesn’t even exist in the way we think it does.
Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that our so-called right to privacy is really just a combination of other, more specific rights, like the right to own property or to use our bodies as we see fit. By this logic, all debates over privacy should be refocused on the rights which are actually being compromised. So is the safety afforded by this new system worth the cost to individual privacy?
What will you do with your vote?
