Volume 25, Issue 1, Spring 2011
Edmund Wall
Pages 69-85
Privacy and the Moral Right to Personal Autonomy
I argue that the moral right to privacy is the moral right to consent to access by others to one’s personal information. Although this thesis is relatively simple and already implicit in considerations about privacy, it has, nevertheless, been overlooked by philosophers. In the paper, I present and defend my account of the moral right to privacy, respond to possible objections to it, and attempt to show its advantages over two recent accounts: one by Steve Matthews and the other by Adam Moore. I also offer reasons to think that my account can be assimilated into a broad range of fundamental ethical approaches (i.e., a variety of consequentialist,
deontological, and natural law approaches). Given the number and variety of such approaches, however, I can only attempt to make a prima facie case for the adaptability of the proposed account.