Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood

Abstract

Intimacy is the sharing of information about one&s;s actions, beliefs or emotions, which one does not share with all, and which one has the right not to share with anyone. Privacy creates the moral capital which we spend in friendship and love. The relationship between privacy and personhood is a twofold one. First, the social ritual of privacy seems to be an essential ingredient in the process by which "persons" are created out of prepersonal infants. Secondly, the social ritual of privacy confirms, and demonstrates respect for, the personhood of already developed persons. The right to privacy, then, protects the individual&s;s interest in becoming, being, and remaining a person. It is thus a right which all human individuals possess–even those in solitary confinement. That social practices which penetrate "the private reserve of the individual" are effective means to mortify the inmate&s;s self–that is, literally, to kill it off–suggests that privacy is essential to the creation and maintenance of selves.