Would you act justly if you could not be seen? Accountability, not virtue, may be doing most of the work.
Plato's Republic, book two. Glaucon's challenge is that the just and unjust man would behave identically given invisibility, and Plato spends the rest of the book trying to answer it.
In practice
- A hotel that stops counting the minibar learns what the count was doing, and the answer arrives in the first month's stock take.
- An expenses system with no audit reveals what the policy was actually achieving, and the answer is usually the audit.
- Standing
- The philosophical root of monitoring, audit, and transparency arguments.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works