Being Unaccountable: Privacy, Self, and Society

Abstract

It is surprising how hard it can be to explain what privacy is for. If pressed, most of us tend to describe what it does—it’s for keeping out of sight, say, or controlling personal information. It is not easy to put into words what is valuable about being obscure to others, to say nothing of being obscure to oneself. Nevertheless, practices of concealment and disclosure structure much of our everyday lives, and even the most profound knowledge of oneself or another owes its depth to a chiaroscuro of insight and ignorance. This ordinary uncertainty is reflected in philosophical debates about the nature and value of privacy. My dissertation seeks to clear up some of these debates with a historical and philosophical analysis, and by giving my own account of how being obscure to others and to oneself is an aspect of healthy agency, a life well lived, and, perhaps unexpectedly, a self well known. This is a philosophy of privacy that begins in historical analysis. I look to the formative moment for our moral ideas about privacy in order to draw out a puzzle about the language of privacy invasion, which in turn reveals a picture of human agency and alienation that grounds my own account. Then I turn to contemporary controversies over the right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, and the value of being a stranger to argue that these rights and practices derive their value from an interest in being unaccountable. My argument for being unaccountable has two parts. The first builds on work in moral philosophy and the philosophy of action to argue that experiences of the disintegration of personal identity are necessary for agency. The basic idea is that to be accountable for ourselves in the sense of understanding that our lives are up to us, as well as in the sense of moral responsibility, the disintegrity of personality is just as important as its opposite. The conditions of privacy and stranger relations, among other things, are necessary for the experience of healthy disintegrity to obtain. Moral and legal rights to privacy, being forgotten, and being a stranger are rights to the availability of those conditions. This view has significant consequences for our understanding of rights related to privacy. And it stands in stark opposition to the predominant way of thinking about privacy today, which understands its value as having primarily to do with maintaining the integrity of one or several public personae. The other part of my argument goes beyond questions of action and practical rationality to argue that being unaccountable is a good in itself, independent of its relation to agency. So it is also an argument for the value of privacy on its own. Human beings have a fundamental interest, I claim, in relating to themselves and others without resolving the self-contradictions and tensions inherent in agency, and without seeking to pin down what is ineffable in human experience. There are aspects of life and self-understanding that diminish or disappear altogether when put into words, interpreted, and constrained by the logic of propositional knowledge; they can be known and lived with, but resist the translation to information. The value to well-being of this sort of unaccountability supports a substantive ethic of privacy that gives reasons not only to protect against violations, but also to guard against the constant attention to publicity that we invite into our lives via social media and mobile technology. If we lose this view of privacy’s value, I argue, we will be without an important set of moral and political concepts, as well as a fuller, riskier sense of human life and flourishing.