Too Much Baby - The Ethicist

Many of my friends on Facebook are having babies. Nearly every time I log on, I see (in my news feed) many pictures of these babies, almost to the point of oversharing. Now, I love babies and feel it’s acceptable to post a photo from a holiday gathering or a first picture of a newborn. But when this happens every day from a specific acquaintance, is it a violation of the baby’s privacy? The baby did not sign up for a Facebook account, does not understand the concept of Facebook and obviously was not asked permission to have its pictures on the site. R. D., MANALAPAN, N.J.

On the surface, this question is a little amusing (I like to imagine a humiliated baby sitting at a desktop computer, furiously untagging itself from last week’s piñata party). But it still raises some extremely complicated issues about the concept of personhood, and the problems grow even murkier as a child matures toward adolescence. This being the case, I’m going to stick to the specifics of the question as closely as possible.

A baby obviously has human rights; you can’t kill a baby or sell a baby or deprive a baby of things it needs to survive. A baby is alive, and a baby has a brain. But a baby doesn’t have a mind. It can’t comprehend the existence of itself or the existence of the world or what Facebook represents. Babies don’t get to make decisions about the integrity of their lives because they don’t have the ability to do so: how they dress, when they go to bed and whether they appear on Facebook is not an infringement on their agency, because they don’t have agency. They don’t know what agency is.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated. I’m not saying, “If a human has no idea what’s happening, you can do whatever you want with its image.” Babies are not the only people who can exist in that situation. If your 95-year-old grandpa is in a coma, it would be unethical (and deeply weird) to post daily pictures of his emaciated body on Facebook, even though he would have no awareness of what was happening or what it meant. So what’s the difference? The difference is that — in the best case — that 95-year-old man could theoretically insist that this is not what he wants. He is no longer a fully conscious being, but forces beyond his control robbed him of that consciousness. Ethically, his personhood must still be understood through the potential of his best-possible self. There’s no best case in which a newborn can comprehend the abstraction of privacy. The world’s smartest baby still doesn’t know anything.

But here’s where it gets really complicated: You don’t necessarily need to intellectually understand an act in order for it to be inhumane. If a child is born into oppression, receives no education and trudges through 75 years of hard labor, he or she may die without ever considering the possibility that oppression is anything beyond the normal condition of being alive. Yet this does not mean that the oppressed person was not wronged; it merely means that person was never placed in an opportunity to contemplate a different experience. The potential to recognize this injustice was always there, even if it was never realized.

In the same way, it could be argued that an infant will eventually decide that being broadcast on Facebook in a diaper was a violation of privacy and that the original posting of the photo took advantage of the subject’s inability to think and communicate. But this brings us back to the difference between having a brain and having a mind. The violation of personal privacy doesn’t start until an individual has the ability to understand what the violation means. Until that moment happens, other people — in this case, the individual’s parents — get to make those decisions (and are ethically positioned to do so).

There is a very clear ethical dilemma being dealt with in this article of The Ethicist. Web exposure is a very serious issue, but this is a very specific situation: Should parents be able to freely post and share photographs of infants who are still not able to speak up and give opinions on their own? Looking at it objectively, the ends of the spectrum are either parents wanting to show how incredible and adorable their children are for all their friends, or on the other hand, parents are concerned not only about the willingness that in the future, the infant may disapprove of such exposure, but also a concern of privacy. The Ethicist does not respond with a very clear answer, but rather responds both sides. First, he explores the idea of brain vs. mind. By his definition, a brain is the functioning organ that controls a human being, while a mind actually comprehends life, existence, and so forth. This shows the strong perception the ethicist has on this subject matter, where he differentiates both terms when for some people, they may be the same thing. He then says that since the baby is too young to have a mind, he cannot make decisions, such as whether or not they want their image public on the Internet, in sites such as Facebook. It is then to the discretion of parents to decide for them. He makes the connection that as parents choose babies’ clothes, food, education and everything else, it would be logical for them to also decide whether or not they want to post the photo. On the other hand, the Ethicist describes that oppression is often not visible, but that doesn’t make it any less inhumane. In ToK terms, this has a direct correlation with perception. If something is not perceived, is it still applicable? If a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it, does it still make a sound? This is a very deeply rooted question with arguments on both sides, but in terms of the baby, it is easier to decide upon. Thirdly, The Ethicist explains that posting such photos can be a violation of an infant’s personal privacy, and the parent is thus taking advantage of the lack of “mind” and decision-making of the baby. The Ethicist concludes that the final verdict is up to the parents, and that they should thing of the ethical impact on their choices. In my opinion, I don’t believe it is completely unethical to post photos of your infant on the internet, especially on a relatively “private” website such as Facebook. Of course, things can always go wrong: one example is of parents who posted a video of their children getting surprised that they are going to Disneyland. One of the kids, Lilly, gets very excited, cries, and thanks the parents. On the other hand, the other daughter, Chloe, does not seem to be at all amused and is rather nonchalant about the present. Chloe’s indifferent face became viral, with hundreds of memes making fun of her and photoshopping her face onto different things. The child, although being at an age where she does have a  “mind” of her own, may be very disappointed with her parents’ decisions in the future, because they violated her privacy. It may take a negative toll on her where she did not want such images spread all throughout the internet, making it unethical for her parents to spread her image with such negative connotations, regardless of their original intentions. On the other hand, there is a degree of innocence to this discussion that shouldn’t be ignored. Is it really that wrong to post a picture of your children getting ready for their first day of school? Will such an innocent photo end up ruining their digital footprint? Although there are two sides of the argument, I don’t see the nature of such decisions of being so negative, and as the Ethicist describes, the parent should be able to make the decision of whether or not it is appropriate to post such an image on Facebook and furthermore on the internet.