Law and the Philosophy of Privacy (original) (raw)
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The Introduction shows that privacy can be conceptualised in terms of seclusion and solitude, anonymity and confidentiality, intimacy and domesticity, so that it is unnecessary to agree on a definition of privacy in order to analyse it philosophically. It shows that democratic theory and practice provide a set of working assumptions about what is valuable and right, equal and unequal, free and unfree which enable us to distinguish privacy from other values, and to resolve those disagreements about its nature and value which are, in fact, resolvable by some combination of theory and practice.
Privacy: Restrictions and Decisions
American Philosophical Association Newletter on Philosophy and Law, 2013
The American Philosophical Association. A Symposium on the work of Anita L. Allen. A. Introduction Anita Allen's Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society was one of the first books to try to work out a feminist perspective on privacy, given long-standing feminist doubts and ambivalences about its effects on women. 1 In contrast to a philosophical literature which largely ignored feminist concerns with privacy, Allen set out to consider privacy from an explicitly feminist perspective, drawing on philosophical and American legal debates in order to do so. The result was a highly readable book, which provided an excellent survey of competing attempts to describe the nature and value of privacy, and a helpful account of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Arguing that feminists should revise, not reject, privacy, Allen showed that the ability to restrict unwanted access to our bodies and thoughts is essential to freedom for women, as for men. I discovered Allen's book as a graduate student at MIT, working on what I called 'A democratic conception of privacy', in response to feminist criticism of privacy. Allen's guided tour through competing ways of defining privacy saved me from drowning in an overwhelming, and rather bewildering, literature, whose consequences for feminist concerns were rarely clear. Allen's frank defence of abortion rights from a privacy perspective was also welcome, with its recognition that children necessarily eat into parental time and will do so even if parenting occurs on a more sexually egalitarian basis than at present. Above all, I admired, and continue to admire, Allen's treatment of privacy for women in public, with its sensitive and thoughtful effort to understand why, and how,
Protecting the Genetic Self from Biometric Threats
This chapter examines not only the history of the term privacy but also its international recognition as a fully protected right. Given the wide array of definitions of privacy, it can be said that the term seeks its identity. Depending on time and space, this right has had various traits, beyond the obstacles of a strict definition. The aspects or features of the term are those that lead to the necessity of its international recognition and protection, especially in the present digital and technological environment, where its foundation is reconsidered and internationally protected in an effective way.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy, 2017
The right to privacy seems to occupy an entirely natural place within the structure of human rights; for many years now there has been an established jurisprudence on the right to privacy coming from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. At the same time, there have been fundamental conceptual (Thomson, Geuss) and normative (McKinnon) criticisms of the right to privacy. Against these critics, I argue, first, that it is possible to articulate a systematic normative conception of privacy, which explains and supports a general right to privacy; and second, that the right to privacy lies at the very heart of a human right to freedom and autonomy. Without reference to a right to privacy, many other rights to freedom are not realizable. I first develop a normative conception of privacy and its different dimensions, and in a second step take a closer look at the jurisprudence of the ECHR by considering some examples, in order to understand what role the right to privacy plays in the Court's decisions. The right to privacy, far from being reducible to other rights or detrimental to the rights and needs of women, occupies a central place on the list of human rights.
There is widespread disagreement about the terms in which privacy ought to be defined and consequently about the scope of the concept. It is said to lack coherence, leading some to question its value for practical reasoning. In this essay I argue that disagreement about privacy is, at least in part, a manifestation of disagreement about more general moral-political values that the concept of privacy is invoked to serve. Commitment to these values will lead not only to differing views on the value of privacy, but also as to the terms in which it ought to be defined. Locating accounts of privacy in political theory will e