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Control and Benefit Are Morally Owed to the Source
Richard A. Wright
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Reframing the Issues
- 3. The “High Cost to Industry” Defense
- 3.1 Raw Materials as a Cost of Doing Business
- 3.2 The Cost of Correcting Past Inequities as a Cost of Doing Business
- 3.3 Originator Control of Materials as a Feature of Doing Business
- 4. The “Private” is “Public” Defense
- 4.1 Private Information and “Voluntary” Release
- 4.2 Private Information in the “Public” Domain
- 4.3 Autonomy as the Basis for Understanding Privacy
- 5. Toward a Resolution
- 6. Concluding Thoughts
Autonomy as the Basis for Understanding
The key to working on the privacy problem is not to ask
“How much regulation do we want?” but “What should be the
moral basis for resolving the problem?” Ware has suggested the principle
of justice, through the concept of equity. I would like to suggest that
justice must be supplemented by autonomy as well. For autonomy is a fundamental
principle of ethics without which justice would have only a formal, no
practical, development.
The primary aspect of autonomy is the recognition that a competent individual
has primal authority over him/herself. In short, s/he is considered to
be self-determining. The agreed limitation to this self-determination
is the notion of harm, such that my right to act as I wish must not harm
another. This may appear problematic when the industry claims harm by
not being allowed to continue business as usual. However, note that such
a claim requires ignoring the fact that the industry already has the information,
and received it illicitly. Thus individuals have a counter claim that
they have previously been harmed by the industry. Granted, as Ware has
indicated, clearly defining “harm” is problematic. The key,
however, will be the recognition that the definition, to be legitimate,
must come from the individual, not the industry. For the industry would,
of course, wish to define “harm” in their best interests, which
is inappropriate to the primacy position of the individual. To do otherwise
is to inappropriately continue the industry advantage.
The interface of privacy and autonomy occurs in the recognition that one
of the autonomous decisions each of us reserves to ourselves is the determination
of what we allow others to know about us. This notion is rooted in fundamental
metaphysical considerations about the nature of personhood, exemplified
by Wasserstrom and others. What must be kept in mind is that degradation
of privacy is a degradation of respect for persons and a diminution of
their status as autonomous beings. In fact, it makes no sense to say,
as we do in tort law, for example, that no one may access my body without
my consent, if information about my body is not similarly protected.
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