Does Surveillance Promote Virtue?监控能提高道德水准吗？

儒家讲究“慎独”，意思是即使一个人独处，行为也要谨慎不苟，这是个人风范的最高境界。在人前表现好容易，没人看着的时候也严格要求自己就难了。那么，如果到处都是摄像头，时刻感到被别人的目光注视，人们就会表现好了吗？ “Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching,” Thomas Jefferson said, never envisioning that two centuries later, the whole world would be watching indeed. From license-plate cameras to secret videotapes, from white-hat hacking to social-media checks by employers, never have Americans been so exposed. Corporate computer experts scrutinize our buying habits, even at the supermarket; technologically savvy police as well as car-rental companies and insurers track our driving habits; and hackers can expose our banking and email transactions with impunity. We’ve become a Santa Claus society year round: That is, they see us when we’re sleeping and they know when we’re awake. So will this make us good for goodness sake? Jefferson presumed that if the world were watching, people would behave better; we would strive to be our noblest selves. And there is evidence that he is right. A few years ago, Scientific American reported on a study at Newcastle University in England, in which subjects behaved better when there were not real eyes, but posters with images of eyes in the rooms. Even the subliminal suggestion of being watched, it turned out, nudged people into more ethical behavior. In other settings, posters depicting watching eyes deterred bike thieves and encouraged people to clean up after themselves at lunch. “The researchers found that during periods when the posters of eyes, instead of flowers, overlooked the diners, twice as many people cleaned up after themselves,” Sander van der Linden wrote in the magazine. Extrapolate, and you might assume that in the Orwellian state to which we’re devolving, the national character will improve. With license-plate cameras mounted on poles, no one will speed, run red lights, or tailgate. With white-hat hackers on the prowl, no one will join Ashley Madison or slither around the seedier parts of Tinder. With video cameras prevalent in phones, no one will joke while they’re dissecting babies. Perhaps they won’t dissect babies at all. …………………… 想了解更多英语原文， 请关注微信公众号“Cassay小站”。