In the last few months as I’ve traveled on airplanes, trains, and buses here and overseas, I’ve been party to the unrestrained intimacies of perfect strangers. As a helpless bystander to other people’s high-decibel, one-sided cell phone calls, I’ve been scorched by expletives, strangled by inanities, and seared by complaints. I’ve overheard a high-tech sales manager excoriating the stupidities of his boss, a medical executive from Toronto trying to hire a part-time dentist, a soldier from California bidding his girlfriend goodbye as he shipped out overseas, an executive fending off questions from her mother about a misfired job offer, and a teenager railing about the geeks, jerks, and wimps in her life.

I should be, then, the perfect buyer for a cell phone jammer. These pocket-sized electronic devices emit radio signals that block cell phone connections within, typically, a 30-foot radius. Annoyed by the interminable loquacity of a nearby cell-bellower? Just press the button on your pocket jammer. The offending phone, overwhelmed by competing signals from your little box, drops the call, leaving the flummoxed user stabbing at now-dead keys in a futile effort to reconnect. Within seconds, a blissful silence reigns — and the victim, thinking it’s just a dead spot, never knows what’s happened.

But there’s a problem: The devices are illegal in the United States. Because they broadcast on frequencies purchased by cell phone companies exclusively for their customers’ use, they are subject to the Communications Act of 1934, which prohibits people from “willfully or maliciously interfering with the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized” to operate. Also prohibited is the “manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless transmissions.”

Yet jammers are flooding into the United States. You can easily find them for sale on the Web. There’s one disguised as a pack of Marlboros and another made to look like a small cell phone. Some blast out only the U.S. frequencies, while others take down European phones as well. Some are as cheap as $50, while others approach $1,000. They’ve already built up a subculture of commentary on blogs and in the news media, where you’ll find extensive explanations about how they work, which are the best, why the French government has licensed them in certain environments (like restaurants and concert halls), and how the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which has oversight in this area, has yet to level any fines for their use.

What are we to make of the ethics of all this? Am I alone in thinking of travel not as a wasteland to be endured between destinations but as a positive, useful, productive space for reflection, reading, and writing? Am I wrong to prefer a glorious stillness over the half-life of invasive gossip? Do I have as much right to an unpolluted soundscape as to a smoke-free atmosphere? Given a human anatomy that can close eyes but not ears, must I simply suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous conversations? Or should I, like Hamlet, “take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them” — by pushing that little button in my pocket?

My answer to Hamlet is no, but not for the obvious reasons. It’s not simply that the devices currently are illegal, though that’s a powerful reason for eschewing jammers. Nor is it simply that jammers produce indiscriminate punishment, disabling every nearby phone and perhaps preventing emergency messages from getting through. Even if I could target my jammer onto a sole suspect, do I have the moral right to fight the invasive by invading someone else’s world?

No, the reason I won’t join the jammers is that the problem is not in the technology but in ourselves. The point is not what’s filling the external atmosphere, but what’s absent from the ethical consciousness. What we’re seeing is the convergence of three trends in our culture: a sense of self-importance oblivious to the consideration of others, a fear of solitude that equates it with emptiness, and a collapse of the dignity of the private.

Why do these trends raise ethics issues? Because each centers on the core moral value of respect. Inconsiderateness is a lack of respect for others. A fear of emptiness is a lack of respect for thought, reflection, and inner peace. And a refusal to separate the private from the public — to babble away about anything and everything without concern for who may be listening — invites a moral nudity that betrays a lack of self-respect.

Bottom line? We won’t correct invasive cell-phoning through jammer vigilantes. Nor, given the impossibility of legislating morality, will we do it through laws. Our recourse lies in ethics. As with so many new technologies, the devices enter the market before the ethics enters our hearts. Needed is a ringing, clear code of cell phone ethics — subscribed to by corporate executives, adopted by the professions, taught in the schools, promoted by the media. More than a list of don’ts, this code needs to encourage positive behavior, rooted in values that already are in place.

I’ve already written the opener: “As a responsible cell phone user, I promise to….” Now all we need are five or 10 crisp bullet-points. Email me your suggestions. Let’s see whether, by thinking together, we can begin building a code of cell phone ethics that someday will make a difference.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics