Prelude to Politics (14) -- Politics Guarantor of Privacy & Political Nature of Rights -- An Emerging Thread of Arguments

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Continued from here.

Politics (7) - Politics (18):

(13):

• politics is the opposite of privacy

• the ultimate purpose of politics is privacy - more specifically: a world in which public and private realms are appropriately apportioned

• the public world is only as good as the privacy it respects

• 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

• 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

• privacy is the whole purpose of politics in a free society

• if people are not to be serfs of the authorities but instead ought to command a certain independence vis-à-vis any authority including any person illicitly behaving or threatening to unwarrantably behave like an authority, then they must have a protected sphere in which their independence can mature and be meaningfully acted upon

• the independence of a private person (privacy) is the basis of freedom and a civil society

• it is not an unconditional independence but one that, in its qualified form, is inalienable in a free society

• politics is needed to negotiate the borders between the public and the private realms  

• 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 the bundle of rights that define this protected 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 powers and intentions that enable them to make her a means to their ends, unwittingly and against her will 

And now to rights:

• 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 

• rights are about as public as it gets

 

• 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, politics is the human occupation that seeks to establish what is valid and what is illegitimate behaviour in a community

Continued here.