Surveillance

Central argument: When one has a purpose of doing something just to show other people that he/she is morally upright does not make one morally better because the true desire is morally wrong.

Emrys Westacott, the author of the article, Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?, suggests that moral is something related to the way the person thinks not what the person does; doing something in front of other people with the fear of consequences does not make someone morally upright.  Surveillance helps people make the right choice, but does not help people to be morally upright; people have to keep their outlawed thoughts to themselves when there are consequences because there are rules enforced by the government and discouraging nasty things to happen.  I agree with Westacott because she says, in a way, that following the rules is basically putting on a mask to hide the true thoughts and desires which are morally incorrect.

When I was a young boy, I used to get into a lot of trouble, stealing cookies from the kitchen, stealing money from my elder brother and have little arguments with my sister. I used to get a real beating from my parents and sometimes, bullied by my siblings as I am the youngest. Every time this happens, I used to think of the amount of things I could do to them. The knife on the table, my father’s gun or even my sister’s scissors. It occurred to me how my life would be if they had just disappeared from it. The thing is you can never really do the things you think of, because of the fact that you know the amount of guilt you are feeling or the morality of your thoughts if you did the things you think.

Say for example, you are in an exam hall and you haven’t studied for your previous test. You see the teacher leaving the room because he/ she had a bad stomach ache. You imagine yourself stand up and look at your friend’s paper. You leave the exam-hall without getting caught. You would naturally have the bad feeling, a guilty feeling, which haunts you for the rest of the week as you know it is not the right thing to do. The fact that you know that cheating is not a right thing to do, which allow you to not cheat during an exam is a moral statement of the human mind.

Similarly, if a teacher allows trusts you and allows you to grade your class’s paper and you know the teacher is stupid enough not to check your classmates grades, you have this epiphany of trying to change your friends grades as you check it yourself so he/she wouldn’t fail. You would naturally not do it due to the fear of getting caught or the amount of guilt you feel when you finish cheating for a friend.

                Therefore, if you cheat, steal, or act inappropriately, you have this state of mind that you are wrong, in other words, you are feeling guilty of your actions. Thus you are morally upright. On the other hand, if you don’t cheat, don’t steal, or don’t act inappropriately, but you had the chance to do so, you wouldn’t have done it because you feel that it is morally wrong. Thus you are not morally upright.