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Privacy and Human Nature

Ira Singer
Department of Philosophy Hofstra University

1. Intrusiveness, Harm, and Dignity

Violation of information privacy is a growth industry. (By "information privacy," I mean, roughly, one's right to control access to certain kinds of information about oneself.) In some cases, it is clear what the harm is that licenses the use of the derogatory term "violation." For instance:

(a) When information about Smith's juvenile crime record becomes available to a potential employer, that information costs Smith, now a mature law-abiding person, a job.
(b) When the information that Smith has purchased a good deal of wine lately is made available to the company providing her automobile insurance, her insurance rates increase. (Perhaps she herself drinks little of the wine, but instead brings a bottle as a gift whenever friends invite her to dinner. In any case, she was given no fair warning that the details of her transaction would be made known to third parties.)
(c) When the information about Smith's visit to a web site on gardening (she was, suppose, helping answer a friend's question about how to make roses thrive) circulates, she is inundated with gardening catalogs, and telephone and email solicitations regarding gardening purchases, none of which interest her and all of which rob her of time.

Yet, in other cases, the harm done by the "violation" seems trivial, and readily outweighed by the benefits; or it is not at all clear what the harm could be. For instance:

(d) When Robinson's web-surfing habits dictate the contents of banner advertising, banner advertising that would in any case be before her eyes, but that now more often conveys content useful or interesting to her, how is she worse off than she would otherwise be? Or consider an even more attenuated case:

(e) Information about Robinson is used in a purely demographic fashion, that is only to discover or strengthen correlations among the various groups that she belongs to, for generalized marketing purposes. Such a use of Robinson's information has no direct focussed consequences for her; moreover the indirect consequences for her, insofar as she is a member of various correlated groups, can again be seen as benefits, for she will be less likely to hear about products and services that do not interest her, and more likely to hear about products and services that do interest her.

In case (a), Smith loses employment; in case (b), she loses money; in case (c), she loses time. In cases (d) and (e), Robinson loses none of these things. Perhaps it would be nicer, more polite, to explain to her exactly how information collected about her would be used, and to get her explicit permission for every such use of every piece of information. But wouldn't the seeking of permission itself be intrusive and time-wasting? When privacy is lost with ease and with no ill consequences, why is that loss a violation to be lamented and prevented--or, at least, a loss such that it must be weighed carefully in the balance against whatever is to be gained?

Much of the current literature advocating information privacy speaks of concrete harm individuals suffer as a result of violations of privacy, as in cases (a), (b), and (c). (See, for instance, Garfinkel 2000 and Rosen 2000.) But much of the literature also mentions, briefly but tellingly, the intangible losses of dignity, autonomy, and respect that we suffer when privacy is violated--again, see Garfinkel and Rosen for numerous examples. (Note carefully that such lamentations about intangible losses don't imply that privacy must never be violated, as Etzioni 1999 rightly points out. We are all familiar with the need to sacrifice a bit of dignity in return for other goods; for instance, we pass through metal detectors and answer questions about the provenance of our luggage in order to increase the odds of safe air travel. Deepening and broadening our sense of privacy's value does not by itself constitute an argument that privacy must prevail in any given case.) The distinctively philosophical literature on privacy sometimes amplifies these Kantian notes, speaking of the way in which violations of privacy can create a manipulative context that fails to respect people as rational choosers (Benn 1971); or, in somewhat different arguments, the philosophical literature emphasizes the importance of privacy to creating intimacy (Rachels 1975), or the need for a context of care in order for self-revelation to be consistent with respect (Reiman 1976).

Increasing manipulativeness, decreasing intimacy, and self-revelation in a dehumanizing context, all sound like substantial harms. But do the apparently trivial intrusions perpetrated in cases (d) and (e) really do such damage? If so, how? The point is that these intrusions do damage, first of all, by means of violation of principle, which need not constitute concrete harm; and, second, that an accumulation of such intrusions does what we might call moral and conceptual damage, which will eventually have a powerful practical effect. The suggestion I want to make is that, at least in our present technological and social context, even apparently "trivial" and "harmless" violations of privacy depend on a reductive and unappealing picture of human nature, and promote the diminishment of human nature in accord with the picture.

2. The Sciences and Technologies of Manipulation

The picture of human nature that I want to identify counts us as fundamentally bundles of desires, susceptible of scientific explanation and technological manipulation, but incapable of genuine rationality. This is, of course, usually not the rhetoric of the privacy-violators when they speak with the general public. In such conversations, intrusiveness is justified partly because it provides us with information to make our choices more reasonably, and with the power to realize our choices more effectively. But, insofar as the privacy-violators are in the business of pervasive customized advertising and marketing, their practices belie their rhetoric. For the effectiveness of a sales pitch is often in inverse proportion to its transparency and its cool rationality. More generally, from the practical perspective of the privacy-violators, the reality about us, or at any rate the reality that matters, is the aspect of us subject to precise reductive explanation and technological control.

The seductiveness of the manipulable-bundle-of-desires picture lies in the fact that it is at least a partially correct characterization of us. This claim about partial correctness gets support from the apparently growing efficacy of various sciences and technologies of manipulation. Polling, focus groups, psychological profiles, and targeted marketing are essential tools of contemporary business and politics, and their pervasiveness would be hard to explain if they were not useful techniques. But the power of desire in human life, and the susceptibility of desire to manipulation, are facts not revealed but simply exploited by the developing sciences and technologies of manipulation. Any perceptive observer, either of herself or others, would have to concede that the picture captures some important truths about us.

But part of the truth is not the whole truth; and the deepest problems, both practical and theoretical, unfold when we mistake the part for the whole. The peculiar danger of the manipulable-bundle-of-desires picture is that, when a society sees only those aspects of human nature, it proceeds to reshape human nature to fit the picture, thereby diminishing or excising our capacities of reasoned choice and thoughtful action.

In referring to the sciences and technologies of manipulation, the tools employed in this systematic reduction (or degradation) of human nature, I am gesturing at something that embraces the issue of privacy, but goes beyond that issue. Modern marketing and advertising aim to create, evoke, and magnify desires, and to do so in ways increasingly contemptuous of individual reason as the techniques of these disciplines become increasingly precise and powerful, targeting well-defined groups and playing on their special vulnerabilities. Modern politics is increasingly driven by polling and focus groups, devices that perhaps ideally enable politicians to hear the genuine voice of the people, but that in practice enable a triple manipulation. For politicians who learn what the voting public would like to hear (1) systematically dress up their own views to appeal to those pre-existing desires; (2) seek to strengthen the desires most favorable to their own candidacies, regardless of whether those desires are healthy or pathological; and (3) in some measure drain themselves of genuine content and rid themselves of genuine commitments, becoming ventriloquist's dummies for their own pollsters.

Manipulative tendencies and techniques are not, of course, entirely novel elements in our economic and political lives; and I am certainly not hearkening back to a golden age of perfect autonomy and rationality among consumers and voters. What is striking, I think, is simply the thoroughness, precision, and power of the developing manipulative techniques; and the danger for us, as individuals and as a society, is not that we will go from good to bad, but that we will go from bad to worse, as the perhaps already faint possibilities for autonomous reasoning grow even fainter.

The contemporary assault on privacy, then, occurs in and is an essential part of a generally manipulative context. The context produces a vicious cycle, in something like this way: we human beings are, at least in part, desiring beings, whose desires can be predicted and manipulated. The predictors and manipulators thrive by compiling information about us, both in the aggregate and as distinctive individuals; and part of the work of manipulation is accomplished by providing us with "information" carefully calibrated to accentuate, alter, or redirect our desires. But, by working so determinedly and effectively on our desires, the manipulators both weaken our power of reason, and paint over the alternative picture of us as partly reasoning beings.
In these circumstances, to accept Scott MacNealy's infamous and complacent verdict--"You already have zero privacy, get over it"--is to accept the triumph of a program of practical and theoretical dehumanization, a program that seems all the more insidious because of the baubles it offers us as solace for our lost reason.

3. But Is the Alternative Picture Realistic?

Yet, if we are indeed partly rational agents, in some robust sense of "rational," why is it that we are so thoroughly subject to manipulation? One might well have the sense that the increasing efficacy of the sciences and technologies of manipulation reveals what we have essentially been like all along, tearing away our pleasant illusion of special rational capacity and dignity. Perhaps protecting information privacy only privileges the manipulations already enacted by family, education, and mass culture over the more finely tailored and helpful manipulations of the new economy.

Certainly our rational capacity can seem elusive both in practice and in theory. But elusiveness by itself is not proof of illusion. Moreover, from one perspective, in practice our rational capacity is not so elusive after all, but is engaged in some measure whenever we deliberate seriously and with a measure of independence. As for theory, many disparate philosophers seem to unite about the claim that human beings have some ability to combat, govern, or at least modify desire actively, and in the light of reason. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant come readily to mind here; but even Hume, who wholeheartedly believes that we are part of nature, and who infamously proclaims reason to be the slave of passion, insists that broad experience and careful reflection on that experience can re-shape our passions in healthy ways.

This is not the proper occasion for entering into the details of the vast and contentious philosophical debate about the compatibility, or incompatibility, of nature and norms. What I want to suggest here is only that whether nature and norms can co-exist is the theoretical and principled issue at stake behind the current contest over information privacy, and that the detailed description of rational agency, as well as a defense of our capacity for such agency, is intimately bound up with the practical and political struggles around privacy. Metaphysics properly and sensitively conceived is here, as I suspect it is elsewhere, intimately bound up with practice, rather than a flight from it. And suspect metaphysics is intimately bound up with suspect practice: A reductive and dehumanizing metaphysical account of the person supports, and is supported by, a set of reductive and dehumanizing practices.

I do not want to downplay the difficulties of understanding human beings as partly rational beings located within nature. I do want to note that violations of information privacy play a crucial role in a system that (1) supposes this theoretical difficulty about reason's place in nature to be insuperable, and (2) increases the practical difficulty of exercising the power of reason in our deliberations.

4. Avoiding the Kingdom of Means

My aim in this essay has been to give some substance to the sense that even "trivial" and "harmless" violations of privacy have weighty and harmful implications, implications that must be balanced against any goods that require intrusiveness (much more so, then, against any goods that intrusiveness merely facilitates). My suggestion has been that such violations, in their present technological context at least, flow from a partial and degrading conception of human nature, and contribute to re-shaping reality to fit the conception better. There can be no more effective way to undercut rational agency than to render it, by slow degrees, unrealized and inconceivable. (However, perhaps having to defend rational agency against a deep and dire threat leads to better understanding and appreciation of rational agency and its value; in this respect, perhaps the saving power does grow along with the danger.) That is why the battle for privacy, and the connected battles against the sciences and technologies of manipulation, have urgency even with respect to small matters, and even where we can detect no tangible harm resulting from intrusiveness and manipulation.

I intend to be making a realistic and moderate, rather than a utopian, point. For instance, I'm perfectly ready to concede that some degree of manipulation is probably the price of admission to organized society: The Kantian Kingdom of Ends, where everyone always acts in a way manifesting both respect for others and self-respect, is probably an unrealizable ideal. But saying that much does nothing to vindicate the increasing prevalence and efficacy of manipulation, or to lessen the repulsion we ought to feel about a society where each of us constantly has a customized virtual sophist whispering in her ear. (It is difficult enough to avoid, or to unmask, flesh-and-blood general-purpose sophists!) If the Kingdom of Ends is unrealizable, the realization of its nightmarish opposite, the Kingdom of Means, is frighteningly imaginable. (By the phrase "Kingdom of Means," I want to suggest a realm where one form of equality has been preserved: we are all manipulators as well as the ones manipulated. But a universalizing of disrespect is cold comfort to those with any Kantian moral intuitions.) The practical task, as I see it, is to make sure that manipulation stays within reasonable bounds; the theoretical task is to preserve a picture of human nature such that there are alternatives to manipulating people. That is, if we cannot create the Kingdom of Ends, perhaps we can at least avoid the Kingdom of Means.

References

Benn, Stanley I. 1971. "Privacy, Freedom, and Respect for Persons." Reprinted in Schoeman 1984.

Etzioni, Amitai. 1999. The Limits of Privacy. New York: Basic Books.

Garfinkel, Simson. 2000. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Rachels, James. 1975. "Why Privacy is Important." Reprinted in Schoeman 1984.

Reiman, Jeffrey. 1976. "Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood." Reprinted in Schoeman 1984.

Rosen, Jeffrey. 2000. The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. New York: Random House.

Schoeman, Ferdinand, ed. 1984. Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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