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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