In a group of 50 then you have a point but people didn't stay in that same group of 50 for their entire life. Tribes would form and dissipate. Some tribes were nomadic and would move while others not so much. Dunbar's number is the hard limit of nature determining how many relationships we can maintain without help. Even in the past, to say people didn't keep secrets is not honest, as even when people were naked, if they wanted to keep something secret they simply did not speak about it and it would be secret.
We didn't have sensors everywhere. We didn't have Google. We didn't have social network platforms allowing people to go beyond Dunbar's number. We didn't have the "global village" effect, because when you moved across town you literally could start over back then, unlike today. People also being human tend to be forgetful, and what you did wrong last year or the year before will eventually be lost in time, but not today.
I've read people who claim to be subjectivists in books, but in real life I've never met a philosopher who claimed to be one.
There is no objective right and wrong. There is right for me and right for you, wrong for me and wrong for you, based on what each of us determine we value. We don't necessarily value the same things so we can never have an objective sense of right and wrong. We also don't have the same to lose, so even if we had the same sense of right and wrong, we don't share the same risks in our decisions.
That's how our intelligence evolved. It's not like we needed to communicate with other animals. We needed to know what others were doing, so that we could safeguard our interests, and make sure no one is one-upping us, much like Dan's post says.
I need to know only enough to protect myself. I don't nor does my brain have the capacity to know everything about anyone. The idea of sizing a person up, or determining if someone is a threat, is legitimate, but it's not about radical transparency because there really are only a few specific questions that need to be answered in order to do a risk assessment, and not an analysis of someone's entire life.
Even if we do need that kind of analysis, such as for a background check, why would you assume human beings are capable of doing it fairly, without bias, and without abuse? Do you have faith in the crowd not to misuse the information they discover to ruin lives, to damage people psychologically?
I think that's just because they haven't really thought about it. Among people who have thought about it, you'll rarely find it, just like you'll never find scientists who don't believe in evolution, save a few coo-coo ones.
We aren't debating evolution. We are debating the fact that when you have total transparency you create merely another hierarchy. We are debating the fact that in my opinion there is no objective right and wrong, because if there were then everyone would know exactly what to do to have their behavior always match up to the expectations of public sentiment. The fact is, almost no one is able to do this, and no one can do it without help. Politicians rely on data scientists, polls and other tools to figure out which behaviors to adopt, what to say to maintain their public image, etc, and what you and others propose is to make everyone live like these politicians.
No I do not promote student relativism. The ethics I believe in is called consequentialism where the individual has the goal of protecting themselves from the least desirable consequences while pursuing the most desirable consequences at all times. Because values are subjective rather than universal it is not possible for me to tell you what you should do without knowing what consequence you are seeking to produce.