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Privacy as a Matter of Taste and Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Alexander Rosenberg
Alexander Rosenberg
Affiliation:
Philosophy, The University of Georgia
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Extract

Privacy is something we all want. We seek privacy to prevent others from securing information about us that is immediately embarrassing, and so causes us pain but not material loss. We also value privacy for strategic reasons in order to prevent others from imposing material and perhaps psychic costs upon us. I use the expression “securing information” so that it covers everything from the immediate sensory data that a voyeur acquires to the financial data a rival may acquire about our businesses. In the degenerate case of the Peeping Tom's invasion of our privacy, suffering is caused just by the voyeur's having acquired the information, even if nothing is ever done with it beyond the voyeur's recalling it from time to time. In all other cases, privacy prevents others from imposing costs or harms on us in ways that require that they secure information about us.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 68 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2000

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References

1 Gerstein, Robert, “Privacy and Self-Incrimination,” in Schoeman, Ferdinand David, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 252.Google Scholar

2 Fried, Charles, “Privacy,”Google Scholar in Schoeman, , ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, 205.Google Scholar

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13 Ibid., 272.

14 Ibid., 286–87.

15 Ibid., 280.

16 Ibid., 278.

17 Ibid., 282.

18 Ibid., 285–86.

19 Ibid., 287.

20 Ibid., 282.

21 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 47–66.Google Scholar

22 Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928)Google Scholar (Brandeis, J., dissenting). Thus, the criticism advanced by William A. Parent, for instance, that Brandeis unwarrantably assimilated privacy to the more general right to be let alone, seems mistaken. Brandeis rightly saw that a privacy protection was the most effective way of ensuring “the most comprehensive of rights.” See Parent, William A., “Privacy, Morality, and the Law,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 271.Google Scholar

23 See, for example, Gostin, Larry, “Genetic Discrimination: The Use of Genetically Based Diagnostic and Prognostic Tests by Employers and Insurers,” American Journal of Law and Medicine 109, nos. 1 and 2 (1991): 135Google Scholar; and Pokorski, Robert J., “Use of Genetic Information by Private Insurers,” in Murphy, Timothy F. and Lappé, Marc A., eds., Justice and the Human Genome Project (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 103.Google Scholar

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25 Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)Google Scholar, reprinted in Beauchamp, Tom L. and Walters, LeRoy, eds., Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994), 313.Google Scholar

26 For extensive comments and criticism of previous drafts, I owe thanks to Clark Wolfe, Roberta Berry, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Ellen Frankel Paul.