In my post on why mass surveillance is not normal, I referenced how the Wikipedia page for the Nothing to hide argument labels the argument as a “logical fallacy.” On October 19th, user Gratecznik edited the Wikipedia page to remove the “logical fallacy” text. I am here to prove that the “Nothing to hide” argument is indeed a logical fallacy and go through some arguments against it.
The “Nothing to hide” argument is an intuitive but misleading argument, stating that if a person has done nothing unethical, unlawful, immoral, etc., then there is no reason to hide any of their actions or information. However, this argument has been well covered already and debunked many times (here is one example).
Besides the cost of what it takes for someone to never hide anything, there are many reasons why a person may not want to share information about themselves, even if no misconduct has taken place. The “Nothing to hide” argument intuitively (but not explicitly) assumes that those whom you share your information with will handle it with care and not falsely use it against you. Unfortunately, that is not how it currently works in the real world.
You don’t get to make the rules on what is and is not deemed unlawful. Something you do may be ethical or moral, but unlawful and could cost you if you aren’t able to hide those actions. For example, whistleblowers try to expose government misconduct. That is an ethical and moral goal, but it does not align with government interests. Therefor, if the whistleblower is not able to hide their actions, they will have reason to fear the government or other parties. The whistleblower has something to hide, even though it is not unethical or immoral.
You are likely not a whistleblower, so you have nothing to hide, right? As stated before, you don’t get to make the rules on what is and is not deemed unlawful. Anything you say or do could be used against you. Having a certain religion or viewpoint may be legal now, but if one day those become outlawed, you will have wished you hid it.
Just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean it is justified to share everything. Privacy is a basic human right (at least until someone edits Wikipedia to say otherwise), so you shouldn’t be forced to trust whoever just because you have nothing to hide.
For completeness, here is a proof that the “Nothing to hide” argument is a logical fallacy by using propositional calculus:
Let p be the proposition “I have nothing to hide”
Let q be the proposition “I should not be concerned about surveillance”
You can represent the “Nothing to hide” argument as follows:
p → q
I will be providing a proof by counterexample. Suppose p is true, but q is false (i.e. “I have nothing to hide” and “I am concerned about surveillance”):
p ∧ ¬q
Someone may have nothing to hide, but still be concerned about the state of surveillance. Since that is a viable scenario, we can conclude that the “Nothing to hide” argument is invalid (a logical fallacy).
I know someone is going to try to rip that proof apart. If anyone is an editor on Wikipedia, please revert the edit that removed the “logical fallacy” text, as it provides a very easy and direct way for people to cite that the “Nothing to hide” argument is false.
Thanks for reading!
- The 8232 Project
This is where your proof falls apart. It follows from nothing you’ve established and relies on context outside of our proof, which does not work with propositional logic. Another commenter goes into a bit more detail with some pre-defined axioms; with the right axioms you can wave away anything. However you have to agree on your axioms to begin with (this is the foundation of things like non-Euclidean geometry; choose to accept normally unacceptable axioms).
A rigorous proof using propositional calculus would have to start with the definitions of what things are, what hiding means, what surveillance is, how it relates to hiding, and slowly work your way to showing, based on the definitions and lemmas you’ve built along the way, how this actually works. Understanding how to build arithmetic from the Peano Axioms is a good foundation.
However, by attempting to represent this conversation in formal logic, we fall prey to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which means something beyond the axioms in our system has to be based on faith. This arguably leads us back to the beginning, where “nothing to hide” and “state surveillance” fall under personal preference.
Please note that I think “nothing to hide” is bullshit always and do not support heavy surveillance. I like the discussion you’ve started.
Sure you can always infinitely define what is behind but I don’t think it is relevant here or you couldn’t do any moral logic.
The two axioms I assumed are A1 a proven fact and A2 the very defintion of having something to hide. It is enough for this specific problem.
I don’t see how Gödel’s theorems are useful since they say that a given system of actions is either incomplete or inconsistent. With these two axioms it’s hardly inconsistent and we don’t care about it being incomplete since we only have one theorem to prove
This is some BS. What the OP haplessly tries to say is simply modus ponens. What Gödel are you talking about.
I’m not sure how you prove by negation in this case just via modus ponens. Care to enlighten me? I opened with something that doesn’t follow so that would be a great place to start.
Give me a consistent formal system with a list of theorems to prove OP’s conjecture and I’ll show you how we have gaps in the system. My analytic philosophy is pretty rusty; I think there are a few 20th century folks you can start from for this.
In modus ponens you have four cases:
Here, A is “Having sth to hide”, and B “Caring about encryption”. Obviously case b says that although people having something to hide seek out encrypted methods of communication, it is logically accepted that there might be other reasons, even unknown. A more silly example is this: the grass is wet does not necessarily means it has rained. There might be other reasons. But this does not mean that rain does not make the grass wet.
To sum up, the OP could have just said that. It does not change anything anyway. You can’t beat a propaganda apparatus with this “fallacy talk”.
You made the same leap that OP did.
No, it’s not. That’s what I’m calling out. This doesn’t follow from A or B and requires further definition. While you’re using to explain case b, OP tried to use it to explain case c. In both cases, you are assuming some sort of framework that allows you to build these truth tables from real life. That’s where my ask for a consistent formal system comes from.
In your case b, we have not(I have something to hide) and (I am not concerned about surveillance). Since OP is not saying that the two are necessary and sufficient, we don’t really care. However, in your case c, where we have I have nothing to hide and not(I am not concerned about surveillance), both of you say we are logically allowed to force that to make sense. It’s now an axiom that A and not B cannot be; it has not come from within our proof or our formal system. We waved our hands and said there’s no way for that to happen. Remember, we started with the assumption we could prove A -> B by negation, not that A -> B was guaranteed.
If you’ll notice my last paragraph in my first post basically says the same thing your last paragraph says.
Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia
Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia
How so?
It is rather that the fact that people who do have something to hide will probably use encryption cannot be refuted by an instance of someone using encryption without having something to hide.
This is textbook modus ponens, sorry if you find that disturbing.
This is unproductive and eventually relativistic. I can’t fathom how you dare bring advanced topics of math/logic fundamentals in a discussion like this. We are talking the kind of stuff that takes 200 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2, and why it is not correct, or absolute. What is the purpose of that level of meta in a discussion about flipping privacy?
OP said that, given A and B, they would prove A -> B via negation, meaning the truth table you built does not yet exist and must be proved.
OP is not trying to use language, OP is trying to use propositional calculus. Using language unattached to propositional calculus is meaningless in this context.
No, it’s not. Textbook modus ponens is when you are given A -> B. We are given A and B and are trying to prove A -> B. Never in any of my reading have I ever seen someone say “We want to prove A -> B ergo given A and B, A -> B.” I mean, had I graded symbolic logic papers, I probably would have because it’s a textbook mistake to write a proof that just has the conclusion with none of the work. As the in group, we may assume A -> B in this situation; OP was taking some new tools they’ve picked up and applying them to something OP appears passionate about to prove our assumptions.
I was responding to OP. Why are you getting mad at me instead of getting mad at OP? OP brought propositional logic to a relativistic conversation. My goal was show why that’s a bad idea. You have proven my point incredibly well.
Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia
Still failing to see that we aren’t proving A -> B, but getting its truth value within a proof.
I think your goal was the equivalent of what any postmodernist does in deconstructing any given field:
By the same coin, all the other logical fallacies go out of the window, together with boolean logic and what have you. Even the valid ones.
Reread OP. All you did was provide a truth table that is necessary but not sufficient. Given A and given B, with literally nothing else, prove A -> B.
Now this is a logical fallacy. While many might agree it’s a proper response to Quine or Kripke, I think it’s just kinda sad. Good luck!