3 ms·
Well your scenario is obviously playing out to be true, this doesn’t mean that we need to degrade privacy on all fronts. It’s reasonable to me that someone migh
by zwkrt 6y ago
Well your scenario is obviously playing out to be true, this doesn’t mean that we need to degrade privacy on all fronts. It’s reasonable to me that someone might have to disclose that they have a communicable disease yet still have privacy in the vast majority of areas of their life. Heck, before the pandemic this was already the case; you can be prosecuted in many countries for the intentional (or intentionally undisclosed) transmission of HIV.
Talk about privacy reminds me of Wittgenstein’s Philisophical Investigations, in which he expounds that we get into so much conceptual trouble when we try to use words like “truth” in the abstract instead of looking at cases where people actually say that word. Privacy is not a single right or a single action, it is an umbrella term for hundreds of unrelated things. Privacy means totally different things in the following scenarios:
- at the doctors office
- at a nude beach
- in a changing room
- between neighbors
- among parents and children
- a “private person” (i.e. someone who doesn’t share their thoughts readily)
- private enterprise
- woopwoop 6y agoThe last one is different from the rest, but not in a way that is especially relevant I think. No one is confusing the private sector with a right to privacy. The rest seem to me to have an obvious common thread, and it should be possible to make arguments general to all of them even if there are meaningful specific differences. The question is when are you willing to declare it illegal to disclose facts about another person, because in some sense that person owns facts about themselves. When are you willing to declare it utterly socially unacceptable? I'm willing to accept that there may be cases where the answers to these questions differ, but there should be principles common to all scenarios.