Politics, Big Data and Opacity Respect
Carl A. Fox · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2020
In his chapter, Fox argues that citizens deserve “opacity respect” in which the state withholds from peering into citizens’ lives to determine their capacities, for good or ill. Governments should assume that we are rational agents, barring certain obvious exceptions such as infants and people who are mentally incapacitated, in the same way that we assume this of each other. To dig deeper, without permission, is to undermine human dignity and that which renders us equal as humans, thereby forming a foundation of the democratic ideology.