Equals

The film, Equals (2015), presents a fictional story in which people in “the collective” are deemed healthy by the health and safety “police-state” as long as emotions are not detected. Being healthy is predicated on the assumption that emotion just gets in the way, not only of work, but in life more generally. To be sure, they can indeed be difficult for people who have suffered severe psychological and/or physical abuse, or have lost a loved one whether by a death or outright rejection. In the film, Silas voluntarily submits to a cure to the illness of having emotions coming through consciousness because he has been told that Nia, the woman whom he has fallen in love with, has just died. In a modification of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Silas does not commit suicide; instead, he gets the injection because the emotional pain of having lost his loved one is simply too much. Anyone who has fallen in love only to be rejected would be tempted to have emotion itself blocked rather than to go on feeling. As a testament to just how deep love is as an emotion, Silas still feels something for Nia even after the injection as the couple travel on a train to escape from the totalitarian collective. He reaches out to put one of his hands on one of hers. Deep inside, he is fighting the “cure.” In actuality, the cure is the disease, foisted by an authoritarian collective on individuals.

The full essay is at "Equals."

The U.S. Government Spying on Americans: Was It Ethical?

In early June, 2013, while Barak Obama was still the U.S. president, Americans learned of the U.S. Government’s domestic surveillance program, under which the Verizon Business Network Services subsidiary had been turning over call logs “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency[1] The order, signed by a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April of that year, was "lawful,” U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein contended.[2] The program analyzed time and number logs that did not include the calls’ content. According to U.S. Senator Chambliss, “All of these numbers are basically ferreted out by a computer, but if there’s a number that matches a [suspicious] number that has been dialed . . . , then that may be flagged. And they may or may not seek a court order to go further on that particular instance. But that’s the only time that this information is ever used in any kind of substantive way.”[3] Harry Reid, Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate at the time, added that the phone-data program had “worked to prevent” terrorist attacks.[4] Does it make any difference. ethically speaking, that the program had helped stop a domestic attack? Shortly after The Guardian broke the story on Verizon’s subsidiary serving corporate customers, The Wall Street Journal reported, “[T]he initiative also encompasses phone-call data” from AT&T and Sprint, as well as from Verizon itself (i.e., beyond its business subsidiary).[5] Does this revelation on the vast scale of the program make any difference ethically? Moreover, does a positive collective consequence--or the lack of a negative harm to the public good--justify forays into the privacy of a vast number of individuals? 

Not surprisingly, privacy advocates were alarmed at the sheer scope of the program. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, said that “absent some explanation I haven’t thought of, this looks like the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped Americans in clear violation of the law” under the Bush administration.[6] Her statement raises the question of whether the fact that the Obama administration had confined itself to court orders makes the program ethical.

Whereas the content of the phone conversations, including the parties’ names, were said to be not included in the trove of data turned over to the government, internet companies had been providing the contents of emails, online chats, Facebook accounts, Skype video calls, and web searches to the government as per court orders (i.e., not through direct access).[7] Does the inclusion of content make any difference, ethically speaking? Applying a few ethical theories may get us closer to some answers.

The analysis of the ethical theories is at "The U.S. Government Spying on Americans."

1. Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls,” The New York Times, June 5, 2013.

2. Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Maintains Vast Database of Phone Calls, Lawmakers Say,” The New York Times, June 5, 2013.

3. Ibid.

4. Siobhan Gorman, Evan Perez, and Janet Hook, “U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove,” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2013.

5. Ibid.

6. Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls,” The New York Times, June 5, 2013.

7. Siobhan Gorman, Evan Perez, and Janet Hook, “U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove,” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2013.

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan’s extolling of individualism amid the problem that he saw as government itself resonated with the religious overtures of American divine providence as a city on a hill—a promised land akin to the New Jerusalem. Even as material self-interest taking advantage of unbridled markets under the guise of competition was not Reagan’s primary orientation, greed could easily trump the force of Reagan’s normative envelop, human nature such as it is.

The full essay is at "Ronald Reagan."