The Value of Privacy

I. Introduction.

1. Discourses on privacy.

2. Privacy: conceptual clarifications.

3. The framework of liberal democracy.

4. Cultural differences: autonomy and authenticity.

5. A comment on the method.

6. Privacy and autonomy: the line of argument.

II. Equal Freedom, Equal Privacy.

On the Critique of the Liberal Tradition.

1. Head or heart: contradictions in the liberal concept of privacy.

2. The feminist critique.

3. Three classics of liberal thought: Locke, Mill and Rawls.

4. Equality and difference between the sexes.

Parenthesis: On the debate over equality and difference.

5. Equal freedom, equal privacy.

III. Freedom, Privacy and Autonomy.

1. Introduction.

2. A general concept of freedom.

3. Freedom and autonomy.

Authenticity and identification.

Parenthesis: On the concept of authenticity.

The genesis of desires and autonomy as habitus.

Goals and projects.

4. Why do we value privacy?.

5. Privacy and autonomy.

IV. The Three Dimensions of Privacy.

1. Decisional privacy: scope for action and decisions.

1.1. Private matters and freedom for decisions.

Parenthesis: abortion and the right to decisional privacy (Roe vs. Wade).

1.2. Decisional privacy and autonomy (1): the communitarian critique.

1.3. Decisional privacy and autonomy (2): the feminist critique.

1.4. What sort of freedom is protected by privacy?.

2. Informational privacy: limits to knowledge.

2.1. Expectations: what do other people know about me?.

2.2. Informational privacy and unspecified others: the Panopticon.

2.3. Informational privacy and specified others: collusions, friendships and intimate relations.

2.4. Expectations, knowledge, autonomy.

3. Local privacy: the private home.

3.1. The refuge of privacy.

3.2. A room of one's own: self-invention, self-presentation and autonomy.

3.3. Privacy and the family: love and justice.

V. Interfaces: Public and Private.

1. Interfaces and ambivalences.

2. Exposure: the staging of privacy in the public realm.

3. Concealment: the protection of the public realm from private matters.

4. The private and the public person: dissonant identities