ABSTRACT
The question of what someone would do if he or she were invisible has been a recurring theme from Plato’s tale of Gyges’ ring to Paul Verhoeven’s movie Hollow Man (2000). Both Gyges and the main character of the movie, scientist Sebastian Caine, seem to prove the truth of John Locke’s words from the seventeenth century: ‘View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports of men set at liberty from punishment and censure’ (Locke 1971, I: ii, 9). Locke’s belief that man has no innate moral principles made him value something that we today would call a conventional ethic: people generally behave well, but mainly because they are sensitive to peer pressure and concerned about how their behaviour might look in the eyes of others. This visibility that conventional ethics depends on is also its Achilles heel: morality is potentially reduced to a matter of not being caught.
