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Continued from here.
Maybe I am just asking the wrong people, but whenever I ask contemporaries who - thanks to the state - clearly enjoy (a) protection of their privacy and (b) security against criminal victimisation, they find it difficult to (ad a) explain why privacy deserves to be protected and (ad b) what the difference is between "the Mafia" and the state, i.e. the difference between an institution that violates (a) and (b) and an institution that ensures (a) and (b) are not being violated.
I offer my explanation why privacy is important and deserves to be defended in
P019 Crux of the Privacy Debate from 07/08/2013
Let me add in the context of discussing the significance of politics in securing freedom that politics is the opposite of privacy and as such plays a role in dividing the human ambit into areas where transparency is demanded and those where it is precluded.
We need public action (see the second post below in that) in order to guarantee privacy. That is to say, though the opposite of public activity, privacy is a public good and as such requires people to step outside of their private sphere to institute and defend the right to be left alone.
Again, we see that the libertarian story line breaks off too soon in assuming that privacy happens by being left alone. It does not. We have to interfere with one another in order to trace the borderlines beyond which people cannot tread on us.
[I]n Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novella "Traps," which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers in a mock-trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "An altogether minor matter," replies the prosecutor. "A crime can always be found."The source.
In a free society any grown-up individual has rights that delineate her protected private domain, within which she can do as she pleases, unless she violates the same freedom of another person. Part of that protected domain and hence part of the bundle of rights that define this domain is the individual's ability to bar others from access to some of her thoughts, words, actions, activities, plans, knowledge and information etc.If this aspect of a human being's ability to shape her liberty is no longer respected, the person 's private sphere can be arbitrarily encroached upon, rendering it effectively a matter of alien or public concern, judgement, and - ultimately - tutelage.Across the board divulgement à la I-have-nothing-to-hide amounts to giving carte blanche to an unspecified public, effectively enabling it to crowd out the decision making power of an individual in her own affairs.If a person loses her ability to exclude others from those segments of her legitimate private sphere that she cares to shut off, she is critically hindered in acting on her own assessment of chances and risks, or her own tactical and strategic planning, and is open to interference by forces who may have an informational advantage over her and whose powers and intentions she does not know, especially those powers and intentions that enable them to make her a means to their ends, unwittingly and against her will.
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P020 Elementary Errors of Anarchism from 07/20/1013
Though they may be used to protect privacy, rights are public creatures. Rights are not innate features of the individual; they are not a private matter or a natural possession of the individual at all. Rights are about as public as it gets. This is what anarchists, crypto-anarchists, and libertarians do not understand. In fact, they propagate the opposite position.
Rights are political products, resulting from political processes.
Having consequences for other people, rights are by nature relational, i.e. they define relations between human beings. Whether rights are defined rather asymmetrically to favour the power-holder or whether an effort is made to be more inclusive and considerate in defining duties and entitlements, rights are always nodes in a wide and complicated web that relates people to people. How people react to these relations and how they think about them is pivotal in determining the nature and quality of rights. In short: rights are thoroughly political. After all, one of the most salient aspects of politics is captured by the insight that it is the human occupation that seeks to establish what is valid and what is illegitimate behaviour in a community. See also my A Note on Social Justice.
The mesh of personal rights is a living organism that man is incessantly in the process of bringing about in ever new shapes, not only but often consciously and to a purpose [...]What is true of the economic dealings of man, namely that there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs, as Thomas Sowell puts it, also holds good for law and other manifestations of moral conduct: perfect and final solutions are hardly to be expected, one may rather hope for a give and take leading to compromises that are generally or preponderantly viewed as admissible and reasonable. [...]Living on my own on a remote island, my right of absolute self-ownership may entail that I play tennis at midnight using a ball serving machine. However, the right of absolute self-ownership evaporates the moment I am joined by a neighbour – who himself once lived alone on a remote island, enjoying as part of his absolute right of self-ownership the ability to sleep soundly and undisturbed at midnight.At least one of the two will have to put up with restrictions to his rights that used to be uncontested by anyone and absolute; perhaps even both will accept restraints, if they agree to a trade-off of mutual concessions.(Law ...] is concessional law – as I prefer to call it in contradistinction to the law of absolute self-ownership -, [... for law is ...] an instrument for regulating social relations, [it is] relational [...] rather than ... monadic [...]
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Continued here.
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