Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

PRIVACY, PRIVACIES AND BASIC NEEDS

PRIVACY, PRIVACIES AND BASIC NEEDS Privacy has achieved an almost unique position and significance in contemporary social life and debate. It is popularly claimed as a human right of citizens, a universal obligation of governments, agencies and corporations, a basic need for all social intercourse, and most recently, a prized virtue in various mission statements and ethics codes. Privacy is perhaps the most high profile public ethics issue today, almost an obsession in individualistic cultures and liberal politics, tagged on as preface or afterword to practically every official and quasi‐official document, piously acknowledged at the beginning of all automated call‐centre messages. Privacy has quickly become one of the sacred causes of modernity, but as a consequence the value of the idea and efforts to protect or promote it have actually been reduced. Privacy is now losing clout through being so scrupulously invoked by those we depend upon but do not fully trust. What is privacy and what role should privacy play in our moral and social thinking? In this article I suggest that there are at least five different senses of privacy and that the weight these are given in contemporary social discourse and political policy is often inverse to their actual importance. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Heythrop Journal Wiley

PRIVACY, PRIVACIES AND BASIC NEEDS

The Heythrop Journal , Volume 51 (2) – Jan 1, 2010

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/privacy-privacies-and-basic-needs-VutabeW7cM

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Wiley Subscription Services
ISSN
0018-1196
eISSN
1468-2265
DOI
10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00552.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Privacy has achieved an almost unique position and significance in contemporary social life and debate. It is popularly claimed as a human right of citizens, a universal obligation of governments, agencies and corporations, a basic need for all social intercourse, and most recently, a prized virtue in various mission statements and ethics codes. Privacy is perhaps the most high profile public ethics issue today, almost an obsession in individualistic cultures and liberal politics, tagged on as preface or afterword to practically every official and quasi‐official document, piously acknowledged at the beginning of all automated call‐centre messages. Privacy has quickly become one of the sacred causes of modernity, but as a consequence the value of the idea and efforts to protect or promote it have actually been reduced. Privacy is now losing clout through being so scrupulously invoked by those we depend upon but do not fully trust. What is privacy and what role should privacy play in our moral and social thinking? In this article I suggest that there are at least five different senses of privacy and that the weight these are given in contemporary social discourse and political policy is often inverse to their actual importance.

Journal

The Heythrop JournalWiley

Published: Jan 1, 2010

There are no references for this article.