Mother is Watching — Ethics in the Age of Observation
A woman calls the police on a young girl selling water in front of her apartment complex. A national sitcom star blasts a racist tweet to her 880,000 followers. A group of prospective Harvard students share a collection of inappropriate memes in a group chat on Facebook. A man accosts a woman in a public park for wearing a Puerto Rican flag shirt as an officer looks on but doesn’t intervene.
- A woman gets publicly shamed and becomes #permitpatty.
- Roseanne Barr later apologizes, but it is too late. Her successful “Roseanne” comeback is swiftly canceled.
- Harvard rescinds admission offers to at least 10 prospective students for immoral behavior.
- A disgraced police officer resigns and a man is arrested for disorderly conduct and assault.
Welcome to the age of observation. Where everything you say and do is being watched, scrutinized, and recorded to live forever on the internet. Many people see these stories and are instantly taken aback by the sheer repugnant ignorance, hate, and lack of judgement these people have so publicly demonstrated. And we should be. The reaction should be disgust. But there is another story here. These people are being caught and held accountable. And that is a glorious bit of progress that should be celebrated by social justice warriors everywhere.
Call me an optimist.
I grew up in a small town, the type of town where everyone knew everyone else. As a kid, whenever I stepped out of line, it seemed there was always an adult nearby to sternly demand “Would you be doing that if your mother was watching!?” Even though I now live halfway across the state from my mother, she is still watching. So is your mother. Thanks to smartphones and social media, everyone’s mother is watching! What a great world to live in.
The sense that some powerful moral authority is watching your every move is what helps most people remain ethical in their day to day interactions with others. Most of us (those who don’t still live with our mothers) call that moral authority our conscious. It is the Jiminy Cricket on our shoulder. This is not a new idea. Two hundred and fifty years ago the great thinker, Adam Smith, called this moral authority, the “impartial spectator.” He said, “We endeavor to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.” When faced with a difficult or potentially immoral decision, we have an imagined conversation with the impartial spectator. What would he think of us?
Not everyone, it would seem, has a functioning impartial spectator or moral conscious to keep them in check. Yet, society has developed to such a point that actual impartial spectators are on every street corner, with their fingers on the record button. The glory of this always on, social media centric, live streaming society we live in is that we are not short of impartial spectators.
So just remember, the next time you think about sharing that racist meme, cat-calling the woman walking down the street, or yelling obscenities at strangers in the park, mother is watching.
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