Anita Allen

This chapter argues that employee and professional confidentiality rules coerce silence, generally for good purposes. Confidentiality is an arena of justified information privacy coercion. Keeping appropriate silences has been recognized as a challenging goal of personal virtue since Aristotle. When employees and professionals obtain knowledge of others in the course of their work, they incur ethical responsibility to comply with a complex set of civility rules, including those of confidentiality. Rules of silence are spelled out in ethical codes and are enacted into law. The people who manage corporations are duty bound to maintain trade secrets and to not disclose information that may lead to trading on insider information. The laws of confidentiality for health care professionals are open to criticism but are generally popular. The laws that require confidentiality of lawyers are also open to criticism, and are somewhat less popular. Many people are ambivalent about the adversary system that enables lawyers to profit handsomely from keeping the secrets of despicable criminals. Financial incentives exist for voluntarily assuming difficult legal burdens of silence. Payment for secrecy is not the whole story of why confidentiality is justly coerced. The larger story involves dignity and respect for moral agency, moral autonomy and the welfare of citizens of liberal democracies. Laws that demand confidence-keeping of professionals (lawyers, doctors, corporate insiders) are generally popular -- that is, they are generally applauded by the public and embraced by practitioners in the field along with experts who study the field.

This chapter argues that anti-nudity laws may be reasonable responses to danger and degradation, but in the 21st century, all such laws merit suspicion as illiberal impediments to personal choice. Laws requiring nude dancers to cover-up are an instructive area of problematic, unpopular coerced privacy. The regulation of nude dancing in the United States and Canada reflects a continuing role for a particular vision of modesty as a human virtue. Laws restricting nudism and requiring adult entertainers to cover their nipples and genitalia impose an unpopular privacy on their supposed principal beneficiaries—the nudity-lovers and entertainers themselves. These sometimes curious regulations reflect ambivalent religious and moral values at play. The laws are resented by philosophical nudists and targeted club owners and dancers eager to maximize profits who also believe the constitution is on their side. US policymakers have coerced sexual modesty through laws demanding concealment of eroticized regions of male and female bodies. As might be expected of a free society, the coercion is restrained. But the coercion is ambiguously motivated by concerns about harm and morals, peculiarly limited to the pasty and G. String requirements. In Canada, whose nude-dancing jurisprudence is also considered, no-touching laws, set the limit of decency. Government should try to protect women's free modesty choices, limiting prohibitions to situations of extreme degradation and demonstrable risk of harm. Modesty mandates requiring ought to be reluctant and rare.

This chapter defends a sceptical perspective on “racial privacy,’ and explores the grounds policymakers can and should rely on for declining to coerce a form of arguably sensitive data. Informational privacy receives protection in contemporary US law through a large volume of constitutional, statutory and common law rules. However "racial" information received little legal protection. This has always been true in the US. Far from banning racial identification and data collection out of regard for privacy, US legislation requires classification by race. It is required through the decennial census; and it is required by federal labour and employment regulations. A California referendum to ban racial data collection failed. Too many Californians were convinced that the capacity to collect information about race was essential to protect civil rights and health. Race is well recognized in the European Union as a category of "sensitive" information. The same is not true in the US although race can be a socially sensitive subject matter, and the concept of racial privacy does make rare appearances in US case law. But racial privacy requirements remain absent from the massive, main body of information privacy law. The treatment of race as a private matter is impractical given the ease with which what Americans think of as a person's "race" can be discerned from their physical appearance. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the group association rights. In NAACP v. Alabama, the Supreme Court held that the membership list of a civil rights group need not be released to state government. While the creation of a racial privacy right in the United States makes little sense, the continued recognition of the right of persons of all races to privately associate contributes to racial justice.

With recent US federal data-protection statutes in mind, along with the climate of indifference to privacy suggested by self-revelatory patterns of online conduct and high-tech personal archiving, this Chapter argues that liberals need to think about privacy in a new way. Privacy should be thought of as a partly inalienable, foundational good. Informational privacy meets deep needs, whose satisfaction cannot be left to pure, unregulated choice. The tendency and the willingness to throw away privacy are troubling. The value of privacy is not just the opportunity for optional privacy states, but the experience of privacy and the habits of respect for privacy it constitutes. Since the 1970’s when they first began to analyze privacy in earnest, philosophers have linked the experience of privacy with dignity, autonomy, civility and intimacy. They linked it also to repose, self-expression, creativity, reflection. They tied it to the preservation of unique preferences and distinct traditions. The argument that privacy is a right whose normative basis is respect for persons opens the door to the further argument that privacy is also potentially a d uty. To respect oneself may require taking into account the way in which one’s personality and life enterprises could be affected by decisions to dispense with foundational goods that are damaged when one decides to flaunt, expose, and share, rather than to reserve, conceal and keep. The idea that some forms of respecting privacy reflect what Robert Post (citing Erving Goffman and Jeffrey Reiman) called “civility norms” of deference and demeanour similar illuminate why privacy duties and privacy duties of self-care make sense. Helen Nissenbaum’s analysis of privacy by reference to norms of the appropriateness specific behaviours and the distribution of certain information in social and cultural context has similar implications. If people are completely morally and legally free to pick and choose the privacy states they will enter, they are potentially deprived of highly valued states that promote their and their fellows vital interests. We need to restrain choice, if not by law, then somehow. Respect for privacy rights and the ascription of privacy duties must both be a part of a society’s formative project for shaping citizens. Liberals agree that there is something wrong with being watched and investigate d all the time. As Daniel Solove argues, surveillance can lead to “self-censorship and inhibition". Surveillance is a form of social control. Like surveillance, dispensing with one’s privacy is yielding to social control, and that that impacts freedom, too. Realizing this, the notion that some privacy should not be optional, waivable, or alienable should have instant credibility. But the liberal ideal becomes an ironic joke in a society in which people freely choose to be always in others’ lines of sight, much as it is a joke in a society in which they freely chose domination.

This chapter argues that privacy is a ‘foundational’ good to which the United States and similar nations should have a substantive commitment as they do to personal freedom and equality. Foundational goods are the resources typical persons will need as bases for self-respect and to enjoy core liberties. For the sake of foundational goods, including physical and informational privacy, liberal societies properly educate, incentivize, nudge, and where necessary, coerce.People should be taught to value others' privacy and their own. When people abandon privacies typically needed for self-respect, reputation, confidential relationships and other forms of flourishing, it is time to consider mandating the privacy that is unwanted or to which people have become indifferent. Because both opportunities for privacy and the actual experience of privacy are vitally important, privacy cannot be left solely to the realm of waiver-eligible free choices. Not all privacy rights are best considered alienable. We need to extend debates -- common in feminist literatures -- about balancing freedom from unwanted rights of privacy on the one hand with duties of privacy on the other. Privacy theorists should add to their routine agendas contextual explorations of the extent to which varied forms of privacy are legitimately imposed by law even in the face of unwelcoming targets and beneficiaries. A central question for privacy scholars is this: when is coercing privacy by state mandate required by background political ideals, and when does coercing privacy contradict background ideals? While coercing privacy is highly desirable from a liberal democratic point of view, it is also potentially dangerous. Ultimately society must constrain the power to mandate privacy, not only to promote ideals of responsible freedom, but also to promote ideals of responsible government.

This chapter argues that coercive, paternalistic regulations are warranted to address indifference to privacy and data protection concerns spawned by internet and web use; but that even such laws aimed at young children raise serious practical and fairness concerns, pointing to roles for non-legal normative solutions. An analysis of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act suggests that paternalistic legislation aimed at older teens and young adults could be justified on grounds friendly to liberal political theory. For mature adults the web is a place to work, socialize and do business. Travel arrangements and shopping for consumer goods takes place online. Many people do virtually all of their banking and bill paying online. They assume common ethics, data security, privacy policies, and laws protect their financial privacy. Internet and web users of all ages give away vast quantities of personal information to internet service providers, website operators, social networking companions and the general public. They give away some of this data intentionally. It often appears that internet/web users are indifferent to privacy. It very least, they over-rely on others’ good will, on posted privacy notices, and on unstable assumptions of trust, reciprocity and civility. Governments readily protects from inadvertent access to adult-themed spam email; and punishes data breaches, identity theft and computer hacking. There may be broader protective roles for public regulation if internet/web users continue to allow others seriously to exploit or harm them and if they make choices that threaten their future flourishing as free moral agents. Voluntary conduct online is exposing data to third-party wrongs and is eroding the public’s taste both for privacy and modest self-restraint. Public regulators could in theory enact strong laws targeting website operators and internet service providers, aimed at benefitting internet/web users. They could even make laws targeting users themselves with strong duties of self-care. It appears that only very strongly coercive measures and censorship could fully protect children and adults. Such measures would be flatly inconsistent with western liberalism. Yet some coercive regulation is possible and justifiable, even though important tasks relating to promoting privacy values are arguably best left to non-coercive schemes and non-government sectors. To address problems of lost privacy resulting from internet/web use, policymakers in EU countries have made their populations the beneficiaries of weakly coercive privacy and data-protection legislation. In the US the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a major federal statute which prohibits websites from collecting personal information from children under the age of 13. COPPA is the best example of a willingness to enact paternalistic privacy statutes. COPPA is a case study in justified and unjustified state paternalism in the face of unpopular privacy. The Harriton High School scandal, in which Lower Merion, Pennsylvania public school officials admitted remotely activating school-issued laptop webcams capable of spying on teenagers in their homes, reveals that public authorities can be dangerously reckless with the privacy of youth. Still, assessing COPPA reveals that paternalistic liberty and opportunity-promoting legislation aimed at children, teens and adults is warranted under liberalism.

This chapter argues that modesty attire, covering up, is a kind of privacy-seeking that liberal states should tolerate but not impose. As defined by philosophers, general modesty is a tendency to avoid exaggerating or calling attention to one's virtues, material assets and accomplishments. Bodily modesty is a disposition to cloak or conceal the body, especially its eroticized zones. Both kinds of modesty have been described in philosophical literatures as virtues akin to humility, with both inherent and utilitarian value. In the United States modesty attire is worn by many, including Muslim, Amish, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish women. The modesty attire worn by Muslim women and girls has become a source of controversy in nations around the world. The hijab, niqab and burqa are received as symbols of Islamic extremism and the oppression. Liberalism would seem to call for tolerating modesty attire women wear for religious or political reasons, especially the former. Yet the secularism that is deeply rooted in French liberalism, and preferred by some Americans, has led to calls for bans on the wearing of modesty attire by Muslims in public places or encounters with public authorities. Undressing Muslim girls from the neck up is a poor and an illiberal way to create a unified society. US constitutional law severely constrains the ability of the state to require a woman to remove a headscarf or face covering. A ban on the hijab in schools could not survive constitutional scrutiny. US women have experienced rejections of modesty attire modesty in workplaces, and in connection with state issued drivers licenses, jail visits, and courtroom appearances. The law should strictly scrutinize efforts to restrict modesty attire worn for religious purposes.

This book argues that we have things we should hide. The book of Matthew from the Christian Bible, exhorts us to hide our goodness‐‐hide our charity, our prayerfulness and our piety. But why? Where is the shame in virtue? If we are going to do what goodness or virtue demands, why not reap the reputational benefits of letting others know? There can be virtue in modesty, seclusion and confidentiality. There can be safety in limiting access to one’s personal information and electronic communications. We should live some of our lives in private, some in public; and that there is often a role for government in requiring us to live this way. Privacy is too important to be left entirely to chance and fleeting taste. We need laws that require government to leave us alone. We need laws that require government help us make sure that others leave us alone. And we also need government to help us preserve forms of privacy that are important to our lives but to which we may be unwisely indifferent. We may be unwisely indifferent because we are young, or because we are busy, or because, we are unfamiliar with the risks of data collection, sharing and storage that come with the technology we enjoy without understanding. The recoil at the spectre of paternalism can be nearly instinctive for political liberals. But the modest paternalism defended here is consistent with, and indeed required by a robust, liberalism appreciative of the respects in which unchecked loses of privacy can render one nearly a slave to unforgiving masters.

This chapter argues that states of seclusion can sometimes amount to coerced unpopular privacy, giving rise to concerns about the legitimacy. Western societies once imposed unwanted, pathological seclusion on modern women, but have moved significantly beyond the worst of the unhappy hausfrau state. Attention properly shifts to other, still highly vulnerable groups of men, women and children forced into seclusion, isolation and confinement. Government imposes unwanted seclusion on women and men who are put away because they have broken the law, gotten sick, or become insane. Unwanted seclusion, whether it is a super Max prison cell, a mental hospital or quarantine, can be lonely and isolating in ways that philosophers like on Hannah Arendt helped us understand,. It can also be cruel and inhumane in ways countless lawyers and many psychologists illuminate it. The traditional feminist critique of domestic seclusion invites the discourse of "freedom and servitude" into the assessment of unpopular seclusion of all sorts. It counsels penetrating supposed havens for signs of hell, whose tortures and violence, degree of autonomy or incessant interruption government may have the capacity and authority to abate.

Love is a rich topic for recent moral philosophers, theologians, writers and social justice activists. Yet, normative concepts of love embedded in modern law are seldom closely examined by legal theorists. This article is the first to illustrate that the concept of unconditional love plays significant roles across diverse areas of the positive law. Relying on a stipulated ethical understanding of unconditional love as a durable, constant, loyal, faithful, generous and self-sacrificing love, I demonstrate that, for better or worse, law can serve unconditional love’s paramount demands. Significant categories of contemporary legal regulation are explicable to the communities bound by them because the evocative notion that some familial love is and ought to be ‘unconditional’ is socially pervasive. I do not advocate for the problematic concept of unconditional love but demonstrate that the law embeds it in two ways. One way is by affording opportunities for individuals voluntarily to exercise the felt imperatives of unconditional love (eg through prison visitation rights and spousal testimonial privileges). The other is by imposing duties of unconditional love that may run strongly counter to individuals’ choices and preferences (eg by restricting access to safe abortion and requiring parental support of adult children). I suggest that derelict and gender-biased governments may shun their own social welfare responsibilities by imposing on private individuals caregiving duties that bespeak unconditional love. Attention to the powerful unconditional love concepts embedded throughout the law can foster an improved understanding of the norms and politics of marriage and family governance.

If feminism has taken a stance toward privacy, the stance is ambivalence. Conceptions of privacy have been central to many critiques of what feminists term the “liberal” and “patriarchical” dimensions of Western societies. Just how privacy has been central to feminism is a worthwhile subject of inquiry. Interestingly, conceptions of privacy have functioned within feminist thought both as targets and as tools of critique. Some feminists target privacy for condemnation as a barrier to female liberation, while others embrace it as a tool of female liberation.

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in a city newspaper is like a slave in bondage? I argue that the jurisprudence of Pavesich need not be troubling. Pavesich’s natural law argument was supplemented by several positive law arguments. The positive law arguments were a strong enough basis for finding a right to privacy in the common law, as indeed Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had previously argued. The observation that the Pavesich court’s natural law argument ran alongside positivistic arguments suggests that the arresting, high-toned natural law and slavery appeals in Pavesich are inessential rhetorical throwaways. But I maintain that the natural law argument and slavery analogy features of Judge Andrew Jackson Cobb’s opinion extolling the “liberty of privacy” are (1) of critical importance to a full contextual understanding of the decision and (2) illuminate the contemporary case for recognizing invasions of privacy as civil injuries to freedom and self-determination. One can poke holes in the logic of Thomas Aquinas and John Locke as scholars have done for centuries. But one can as easily choose to celebrate the spirit of the natural law tradition. The natural law tradition represents efforts rhetorically, rationally, and intuitively to derive principles of justice and goodness from basic facts about human characteristics, needs, and desires, where otherwise binding sovereign law may fall short.

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to this author, may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, she argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover's kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate inalienable, liberty-promoting privacies for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. The eight chapters of this book are reflections on public regulation of privacy at home; isolation and confinement for punitive and health reasons; religious modesty attire; erotic nudity; workplace and professional confidentiality; racial privacy; online transactions; social networking; and the collection, use and storage of electronic data.

Toward situating philosophical collaborations with government and Non‐Governmental Organizations (NGOs), the author distinguishes two definitional uses of the term “public philosophy”: a “shared vision” definition and a “professional activity” definition. As varied examples of work with NGOs, she offer her work with three women's health organizations, a mental health law group, a privacy advocacy group, and a national academy. The author then offer her work with NIH, a national bioethics commission, and state court judges as examples of work with state and federal government. Genetic privacy was understood as a key ethical and legal issue to arise in anticipation of the complete mapping of the human genome.

Umjetnica i analitička stručnjakinja za Kantovu filozofiju, Adrian Piper, s pravom je opisana kao "jedna od najvažnijih i najutjecajnijih kulturnih figura našeg vremena". Nagrađivani rad instalacije i participativne izvedbene umjetnosti, Probable Trust Registry: Rules of the Game #1-3, implicitno postavlja filozofska pitanja od interesa za kontraktualističku filozofiju i njenu kritiku, uključujući mogućnost izvršenja istinske moralno obvezujuće posvećenosti iskrenosti, autentičnosti i poštovanja samoga sebe putem umjetničke instalacije. Posebno za publiku koja se blisko identificira s njenim iskustvima, Piperina umjetnost, poput drugih važnih umjetničkih djela, ima snažan katalizatorski etički potencijal. Motivirana divljenjem prema umjetnici i percipiranom konfliktnom odnosu obojenih (tj. ne-bijelih) žena i konvencionalnih diskursa moralne solidarnosti, nudim tri različita načina za razumijevanje Piperinog Probable Trust Registryja. Predlažem da se Piperino misaono izazovno umjetničko djelo, koje se implicitno oslanja na Johna Rawlsa i Charlesa Millsa, može tumačiti kao poziv njenoj publici da se slože s odabirom pravila koja, između ostalog, prihvaćaju univerzalne moralne imperative, predviđaju budući moralni integritet ili se zaklinju u moralni integritet.

It has become increasingly difficult for individuals to exercise meaningful control over the personal data they disclose to companies or to understand and track the ways in which that data is exchanged and used. These developments have led to an emerging consensus that existing privacy and data protection laws offer individuals insufficient protections against harms stemming from current data practices. However, an effective and ethically justified way forward remains elusive. To inform policy in this area, we propose the Ethical Data Practices framework. The framework outlines six principles relevant to the collection and use of personal data—minimizing harm, fairly distributing benefits and burdens, respecting autonomy, transparency, accountability, and inclusion—and translates these principles into action-guiding practical imperatives for companies that process personal data. In addition to informing policy, the practical imperatives can be voluntarily adopted by companies to promote ethical data practices.