They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance.
What's funny is that you could talk to any number of law enforcement officials who believe that the moral failing is on the cryptography community for not providing a "backdoor" into encrypted communications. Or to restate, "Please, Apple, think of the children!"
Morality is, unfortunately, subjective. Part of the argument is in convincing your opponent that your morality is superior to theirs. Or, perhaps, that their stance violates their own sense of morality.
Yes, that is certainly a tension here. I think it's easier to think of the paper as two broadly different subparts.
The first part is: "regardless of what you think, if something you do rearranges power, then it will become political". This is more a statement of fact than anything else.
The second part is: "now that I hope to have convinced you that crypto is necessarily political, here's the moral stance I would prefer for you to follow."
Morality is subjective at the edges. We all share a common morality, otherwise our society would not function. Most of the common morality is captured by laws.
I completely agree with you that law enforcement officers will see it that way. I posit that that is a matter of limited perspective. They see backdoors as a means to catch criminals, and do not consider the implications for surveillance, democracy and freedom at all.
This paper is not aimed at them, it is aimed at the cryptographers, who could hopefully more easily understand that perspective.
I agree. The opinion of law enforcement is irrelevant in the sense that we should not defer authority on the matter to them. Law enforcement might similarly have thoughts on how to run the judicial branch or alter the Constitution so as to better "catch criminals" (or some other excuse), yet that is no reason to grant them it.
Law enforcement will naturally seek to expand their power by any means available to them, in the same way that various branches of government or political parties will. Hence we have separation of powers.
Genuine question: What do people who believe this use as their reason for refraining from harming others for personal gain? I understand that simple intuitive preferences against seeing others suffer will often work, but what do you do about instances where either the rewards of screwing someone over are very great or where your intuition tells you that you would get a lot of pleasure from seeing someone in pain?
I know that I don't really have anything to support my belief that there exists an objective morality which is hard-to-determine.
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." The Categorical Imperative and its weaker brethren like the Golden Rule are remarkably widespread.
> What do people who believe this use as their reason for refraining from harming others for personal gain?
This is an interesting and deep question! The game theory of life. I don't know the answer or if there is a clear answer, but I imagine there's generally a lot of risk involved in harming others for personal gain, and basic fear of individual or group retaliation (either mob or police) is a significant deterrent.
As I get older I've come to believe less and less that morality is subjective. I believe the NAP or non-aggression principle is as close to objective, universally-preferable morality as it gets. Certainly some people have other senses of morality, but they cannot be universally-preferable.
They don't mean "subjective" as in "determined by arbitrary selfish choice," they mean "not resolvable in objective, axiomatic, universal ways."
If you "believe" there's an objective morality, isn't that just another subjective position? You can't justify it, so why don't you abandon the notion and go with your selfish whims?
It's a flawed dichotomy. Morality is in your perception like how you know to respect other people's personal spheres. It's not based on rule based rationality or some axiomatic selfishness.
If you want to sleep well at night, you refrain from screwing people over in terrible ways. Probably you screw people over to the extent that you can get away with it in a moral-cultural sense, unless you're particularly saintly.
Recognizing that other people have different opinions than you doesn't stop you from preferring or advocating your own. Objective morality is nice to the extent that you can have an intellectual discussion and come to a resolution. More often you just fight it out.
Because people are not pure rational creatures. Most decisions are governed by emotion, and most people have empathy, so harming others directly is abhorrent. The rest is post-hoc justification.
> What's funny is that you could talk to any number of law enforcement officials who believe that the moral failing is on the cryptography community for not providing a "backdoor" into encrypted communications.
There were also any number of people who justified the use of the Atomic Bomb because it lessened the predicted number of losses incurred in the Pacific theater of war. This didn't stop the creators of the bomb from believing it was still better to opt for peace instead of it's continued use to lessen the total number of casualties in future wars.
Universality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with morality.
If I want to kill all other people and I successfully kill everyone but myself, my preference has become universal but fulfilling that preference has not become any more moral.
Personally, I don't think morality is all that subjective, but more an emergent property of community identity. (Thus is inherently shared rather than inherently personal). I would way that Morality is, fortunately, relative.
As a foundation for morality it does, violation of a universal principle being an immoral act. Your hypothetical situation depends on the dimension of time, I'd say that universality has no such constraint: the concept of a perfect circle exists regardless of a physical example ever having existed.
> Your hypothetical situation depends on the dimension of time
So do you include the future and the past? If you include the future it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine the universality of a principle. If you don't include the future, that means that it is possible for the universality of a principle to change. Then As soon as one person is born who doesn't share a principle, the moral character of that principle vanishes?
I'm not what point you are trying to make by bringing in the concept of the perfect circle. I don't see at all how this relates to morality. The concept of a perfect circle is not universally shared currently, and certainly isn't historically shared universally. Even if that concept were universal, it would not make imperfect circles immoral.
Yes. I think the point of confusion is around "universality". I'm not talking about a unanimous agreement on preference between people born and unborn, I'm talking about attributes that define kindness (the set theory kind, not the Disney princess kind). I was hoping to make that clear with the perfect circle bit, but I wasn't aware of contention on the issue... pretend I said square, I'm pretty sure that is a safe universal definition. I have no opinion on the morality of geometry, but all squares share universal attributes. All humans share universal attributes as well, by way of biological imperatives - life is preferable to death, all things being equal and outside of coercion.
If "life is preferable to death" were a universal attribute of all humans resulting from a biological imperative, no one would ever choose to end their life. I suspect any other proposed "universal attribute" -- at least one that take the form of a universal preference -- will fail to correspond with reality in the same way.
I don't think it covers any cases of voluntary suicide not motivated by percieved impacts on others, irrespective of mental illness. Unless you define coercion so broadly that the whole statement becomes meaningless.
Please provide a single example of when "all things being equal and outside of coercion" (using your extremely broad definition of 'coercion') a human made a choice to live rather than die.
Or is your 'universal attribute' some sort of 'ideal' that doesn't actually ever happen and thus is completely useless for defining the set of 'human' and 'not human', let alone 'moral' and 'immoral'.
Sure, you woke up and didn't kill yourself. As did most every human being that has ever existed, because humans don't do that outside of very strange circumstances that are out of their control.
I don't think that existence is subjective, so universal preference either exists or it doesn't. It has been a long time since I've sat in a philosophy class though, so I'd welcome a correction.
Whether a preference is universal is sufficiently impractical to ascertain with certainty (especially since you have said you want to include the preferences of people in the past), such that any belief about the existence of any universal preferences is inherently subjective.
I'm not talking about whimsical preference, I'm talking about group membership defining attributes - preferences that make one a human being and that every other human has or will share. And yes, this would define a human being even in a world were no human ever existed or will exist.
So... you are talking about preferences that 'define a human being', but then those preferences are only tautologically universal (since you are excluding any possible exception). This seems absurd.
So if I were to tell you that I really did prefer to be a slave you would say I am not human? You are excluding as 'human' any individual who are not capable of understanding the concept of 'ownership'. Do you seriously believe that babies and the severely mentally handicapped are not human?
If you are operating with such a divergent notion of 'human' (and thus 'morality', 'universal' and 'preference') then there is no point in having any further discussion with you or considering anything you have to say.
Nope, exceptions get their own subclass. Babies would be baby-humans, the mentally ill would be - well you get the idea. These classes are actually a predictable reality given an accurate definition of "human being", a component of the whole. Imagine a dependency graph, with the edge cases as leaf nodes. So the definition of human isn't related to a single entity, or the averaging of the qualities of the entire population - it is related to the attributes that give rise to the entire structure - seed values. Again, this has nothing to do with time, so "give rise to" is more like a logical conclusion than a sequence of events.
You should be aware that there's a significant risk you'll have to turn every single human who ever lived into its own class, and even then you'll run into the Halting problem while trying to identify each case of each classification.
You won't end up with any single seed values you can match any given instance against, but with multidimensional matrices that represents multidimensional scales.
> Morality is, unfortunately, subjective. Part of the argument is in convincing your opponent that your morality is superior to theirs. Or, perhaps, that their stance violates their own sense of morality.
Why? I can't just live morally and let my "opponent" do what they think is right?
I feel very strongly that people should decide what they think is right and fight for it.
I feel no need to convince other people that my morality is superior to theirs.
> I feel very strongly that people should decide what they think is right and fight for it.
> I feel no need to convince other people that my morality is superior to theirs.
Those two statements are in direct contradiction. Fighting for your morality is convincing others of its superiority. Those two things are the same thing.
They're not entirely the same thing. For example, if you think people have a right to privacy, one way to fight for it is to write cryptographic software, so everybody who already agrees with you can protect themselves. That doesn't require you to convince anyone who disagrees.
If you fight to win (in at least as much as keeping your freedom to encrypt), you will have to convince your government at some point. The topic won't go away and if they care strongly enough you might find yourself in your own private full-on intelligence war, and maybe in prison. At some point tech cannot help you (rubber-hose cryptography).
> Fighting for your morality is convincing others of its superiority.
Unless your morality includes letting others come to their own conclusions about what is right. In that case, trying to convince others that they should let others pick their own morals would be self-contradictory.
In what sense are you fighting for your morality, then? It isn't contradictory to hold that view, but if you hold that view, then inherently you would not fight for it.
When your opponent condones torture, indefinite imprisonment of innocents, war crimes, and genocide, there is little point in having anbopen dialog or argument with them.
There are many people that don't condone those things but still think law enforcement should be able to get into people's computers or read communications with a warrant. It's more nuanced than you would like to believe.
Are you implying that "law enforcement officials" have moral standing, especially in the US? Torture, racism, fraud, corruption, brutality, are what springs to mind, along with a total lack of will to reform. To hell with that.
I would say that it is precisely the moral standing of LEOs that makes the torture, racism, fraud, corruption and brutality so much more egregious of an offense than when committed by any other armed gang.
The lack of will to reform is not total amongst LEOs. The lack of political will to do many seemingly sensible things in this country is a moral failure that every citizen shares.
I suspect that you're right that it is a minority of LEOs that actually abuse their power (possibly a 49% minority, but possibly even as low as 10% or even 1%), but it's clear that there are many more - an overwhelming majority, who actively defend or passively ignore those who do. (I'm sure I only ever see the bad ones, but just about every statement by the Fraternal Order of Police makes me seethe with rage...)
It seems to me there's a tremendous lack of will to reform abuses and criminal acts by LEO. Perhaps not "Total", but so marginally less than "Total" as to be functionally equivalent (in that "not all men" kind of failure to acknowledge reality...).
There's a very strong political will to "reform" torture by the CIA (i.e. stop it), just as there was when the police did it [1]. Racism, fraud, corruption have existed and will continue to exist, and will continue to be fought viciously for many lifetimes to come, both in the US and throughout the world.
Police misconduct is real here and all over the world, as well, and will also continue to be fought. There are no quick fixes, and it's important to be outraged and voice one's outrage when we see it, but let's not give up and paint all LO with one brush, as their existence most certainly contributes a net positive to society.
What's funny is that you could talk to any number of law enforcement officials who believe that the moral failing is on the cryptography community for not providing a "backdoor" into encrypted communications. Or to restate, "Please, Apple, think of the children!"
Morality is, unfortunately, subjective. Part of the argument is in convincing your opponent that your morality is superior to theirs. Or, perhaps, that their stance violates their own sense of morality.