Journal article
The impossibility of a moral right to privacy
- Abstract:
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This paper clarifies and defends against criticism our argument in Unfit for the Future that there is no moral right to privacy. A right to privacy is conceived as a right that others do not acquire information about us that we reserve for ourselves and selected others. Information acquisition itself is distinguished from the means used to acquire it and the uses to which the information is put. To acquire information is not an action; it is to be caused to be in an internal state. By contrast, means of acquisition and uses of information are actions that can be voluntarily controlled. We can therefore have rights against others that they stay away from certain means and uses but not from information acquisition in itself. An omniscient, omnipotent and omnibeneficient being is not thought to violate a right to privacy because its means and uses of information are morally acceptable.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 673.1KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s12152-022-09500-3
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Neuroethics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 2
- Article number:
- 23
- Publication date:
- 2022-06-28
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-06-08
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1874-5504
- ISSN:
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1874-5490
- Pmid:
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35784396
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1268022
- Local pid:
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pubs:1268022
- Deposit date:
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2025-01-14
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Persson and Savulescu
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2022, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Notes:
- This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number WT203132/Z/16/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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