Karen Meyer-Seitz

The privacy-as-non-interference conception (PANIC) proposed here provides an adequate conceptualization of privacy by offering a fresh perspective on privacy that shifts the focus from the act of sharing personal information to the consequences that arise once the information becomes accessible to others. This perspective aligns with our common social practices and our intuitive understanding of privacy. Essentially, PANIC asserts that an individual’s privacy is diminished only when others interfere with specific aspects of their life in a manner that restricts their ability to organize and live their life according to their own choices. This represents a fundamental shift from traditional privacy conceptions that emphasize secrecy or control and place the burden of protecting one’s privacy primarily on the individual. Instead, PANIC suggests that the primary responsibility for safeguarding an individual’s privacy lies with others or society as a whole.

In this paper, we set out to inquire into how exactly testimony is and should be placed within the framework of virtue epistemology, and more specifically within Ernest Sosa’s exposition and defense thereof. We begin this inquiry (in Sect. 3.2) by formulating conditions of adequacy that can be extracted from recent criticisms of virtue epistemological approaches more generally. In Sect. 3.3, we reconstruct two branches of Sosa’s treatment of testimony, with respect to which we point out problems of inner coherence and compatibility. We won’t stop there but then go on to see first (in Sect. 3.4) whether and, if so, how the two branches can be balanced out within the architecture of Sosa’s theory of knowledge. And second (in Sect. 3.5), we offer and outline a more comprehensive account that solves not just the problems formulated at the outset, but also a number of problems identified along the way.