Privacy, Autonomy, and Self-Concept

Abstract

TN our age of electronic surveillance, centralized * data banks, and computerized solicitation, the topic of privacy is eliciting a good deal of attention. But what exactly is the value of privacy, of freedom from surveillance or information-gathering? The view I shall argue for here is that privacy is a necessary condition for something of basic value? the development of an autonomous self. Autonomy requires a conception of self for which privacy is indispensable. As necessary to the development of autonomous people, privacy is more than just con? tingently good. While it surely does secure us from misuse or abuse of information about us, its value goes beyond such contingencies. On the other hand, privacy does not seem to be intrinsically good. It is difficult to articulate what is good about privacy without connecting it to other, more basic, goods.1 The view proposed here, then, sees privacy as more than contingently good but not quite valuable in itself. Defense of the claim that privacy is necessary for autonomy turns on exhibiting the role of privacy in the formation of self-concept. A concept of self as empowered to determine one's life, it will be argued, is requisite to acting autonomously. And privacy is needed for such a self-concept to develop. Following this, moral and social dimen? sions of autonomy in our self-concept will be shown to depend upon privacy. The discussion will con? clude with the implications of this account of the value of privacy for the difference between actual and perceived privacy. Since the view offered here involves related causal claims its ultimate vindication will require empirical support.2 I will, in fact, cite some evi? dence as well as professional conjecture to buttress my claims; however, the evidence is far from con? clusive. Most studies are of situations which include variables besides privacy (so, the effects on autonomy could be overdetermined) and we lack repeated studies for sufficiently similar condi tions. A satisfactory rejection of my view, how? ever, would require more than empirical counter? examples (such as people growing up with little privacy but lots of autonomy). What would also be needed is an alternative account of how autonomy does indeed develop in these unprivate circumstances. This would involve a rival moral psychology with perhaps its own philosophical analysis of self-concept.3 Although the scope of this paper does not permit wading through the host of subtleties and qualifica? tions that define different senses of privacy, some rough and ready notion needs to be offered, if only to avoid certain confusions and objections. Privacy includes some control over some information about

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 80 citations exist upstream.