Salzburg Ethics Group

– Privacy –

The Source View on the Right to Privacy

In the last decade, some of the most widely discussed events concerned how states, institutions, or companies dealt with people’s data. Here are some examples: the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that British and US secret services had ready access to millions of emails and other sources of potentially personal information from many people around the world. In the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, a private company used personal data of about 87 million Facebook users, most of whom did not give consent, to develop, among other things, election campaigns. The Chinese Social Credit System aims at providing a record that enables the government to evaluate the trustworthiness of businesses, institutions, and individuals. It works in part by employing the mass surveillance system Skynet, which includes cameras, surveillance drones, facial recognition systems, and various mobile phone apps and internet devices. Besides these issues, which have caused a public outcry in many societies, there are countless more small-scale incidents people worry about that involve, for example, smart TVs that record conversations in living rooms, facial recognition systems that uncover protesters or sex workers, or hacked smart speakers. These are some paradigm examples of many similar events and developments that have at least one thing in common: many think that the involved people’s right to informational privacy is endangered or even violated. In order to find out whether this is so and, if yes, how bad it is, we need a good understanding of what the right to privacy is and how important it is. The overall goal of this research project is to provide such an understanding.

– Praiseworthiness –

Skepticism about Praiseworthiness

According to an everyday idea, we usually deserve moral blame for our misconduct and moral praise for our good deeds. The philosophical position of Responsibility Skepticism denies this. It says that there is good reason to doubt that humans ever deserve moral blame or praise because there is good reason to believe that we aren’t morally responsible for our actions. The project “Skepticism about Praiseworthiness” is concerned with the part of Responsibility Skepticism that doubts that we ever deserve moral praise.

The skeptical position about deserved blame has received considerable attention in the philosophical literature—far more so than the skeptical position about deserved praise (Skepticism about Praiseworthiness). Much time and energy have been dedicated to spelling out how, exactly, the terms “moral blame” and “deserve” are to be understood and which arguments speak for and against the view that we deserve moral blame for our conduct in the relevant sense. Usually, the authors assume either explicitly or implicitly that what they say about moral blame applies, with minimal modifications, to moral praise as well. The project is based on the contention that this is a mistake. It regards Skepticism about Praiseworthiness as a research topic in its own right with the potential to expand and sharpen our understanding of Responsibility Skepticism in general. The project assumes neither the truth nor the falsity of the thesis of Skepticism about Praiseworthiness. Rather, the aim is to develop the best version of this thesis and to investigate its implications and plausibility.

A starting point of the project is the widespread view that “deserve” is to be understood in terms of justice. Skeptics thus hold that it is unjust to morally blame people because they don’t deserve moral blame. Usually, skeptics say the same thing about deserved praise: it is unjust to morally praise people because they don’t deserve moral praise. The core idea of the project is that this position about moral praise is implausible. Just because a person doesn’t deserve praise, this doesn’t mean that praising her inflicts an injustice on her. The project’s goal is to develop a different, more plausible version of Skepticism about Praiseworthiness. According to the hypothesis to be substantiated in the project, skeptics should say that it is not unjust not to praise people. This idea will be spelled out in detail with the aim of showing that it is more plausible than the alternative skeptics typically endorse and that it has significant implications and differences to the skeptical position about deserved blame.