08 February 2015

Property and Privacy

'Privacy, Private Property and Collective Property' by Annabelle Lever in (2012) 21(1) The Good Society 47-60 comments
In this paper I respond to Judith Thomson’s claim [in 'The Right to Privacy' in (1975) 4 Philosophy and Public Affairs] that privacy is just private property in disguise and draw out their significance for contemporary arguments for property-owning democracy. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing. However, privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. Hence, claims to privacy cannot be reduced to claims to property-ownership, as Judith Thomson contends.
Lever states -
In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to form families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than being obliged to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. 
However, Rawls never makes his views about privacy explicit, or relate them to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his belief that justice as fairness can reconcile the claims of liberty and equality. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality.
In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership.