infonet-economy

This paper shows that the problem of treating people as equals in a world marked by deep-seated and, often, recalcitrant inequalities has implications for the way we approach the provision of security and justice. On the one hand, it means that racial profiling will generally be unjustified even when it might promote collective interests in security, on the other, it means that we should strive to create racially mixed juries, even in cases where defendant and alleged-victim are of the same race. The paper examines a recent report on race and jury trials in the United Kingdom and concludes that, despite the author s claims that all-white juries are fair, the data shows the complex ways in which racial differences are translated into unjustified and arbitrary inequalities. Hence, it concludes, racially mixed juries are desirable, and sometimes necessary for justice, though probably not sufficient.

This book explores the Janus-faced features of privacy, and looks at their implications for the control of personal information, for sexual and reproductive freedom, and for democratic politics. It asks what, if anything, is wrong with asking women to get licenses in order to get pregnant and have children, given that pregnancy and childbirth can seriously damage your health. It considers whether employers should be able to monitor the friendships and financial affairs of employees, and whether we are entitled to know whenever someone rich, famous or powerful has cancer, or has had an adulterous affair. It considers whether we are entitled to privacy in public and, if so, what this might mean for the use of CCTV cameras, the treatment of the homeless, and the provision of public facilities such as parks, libraries and lavatories. Above all, the books seeks to understand whether and, if so, why privacy is valuable in a democratic society, and what implications privacy has for the ways we see and treat each other. The ideas about privacy we have inherited from the past are marked by beliefs about what is desirable, realistic and possible which predate democratic government and, in some cases, predate constitutional government as well. Hence, this book argues, although privacy is an important democratic value, we can only realise that value if we use democratic ideas about the freedom, equality, security and rights of individuals to guide our understanding of privacy.

Three Problems make ethical life difficult for us, and explain the importance of an ‘ethics review’ of scientific research. The first is that we lack a table of weights and measures which would enable us to evaluate the relative importance of our different values and rights - such as rights to life and liberty. The second is that we lack a dictionary which can tell us what ‘life’ and ‘liberty’ mean, given than these words can have rather different senses, and which one we chose may well affect our conclusions about the value of research or of different public policies. Finally, we have no handbook, which tells us what to do when our values and rights conflict. Worse still, it is not as though we can wave some magic wand and make these problems vanish, nor can we make them go away by ‘trying harder’, ‘being less selfish’, or ‘more sensitive’ or ‘reading more’. Hence, the aim of this talk is to clarify the nature of these three problems, their significance for ethical review, and the ways in which a democratic approach to ethics might help us to address them.

The association of privacy with the shameful explains much of the ambivalence surrounding privacy. In particular, the idea that privacy is only valuable if you have shameful secrets to hide makes it seem that privacy is without value if you care about people's freedom and equality. At best, it seems, privacy protects hypocrisy and arbitrary social conventions which wrongly make us ashamed of our feelings, desires, beliefs, ideas and experiences. At worst, privacy enables people to hide behaviour that is deceptive, manipulative, exploitative and coercive – in short, behaviour that is immoral and, quite possibly, also illegal. In either case, it is hard to see what value privacy could have if one values democratic government, which is associated with freedom of expression and with ideals of transparency and publicity in the justification and use of power. The aim of this paper is to question this familiar, and intuitive, perception of privacy. I will do this by arguing that the fact that privacy protects people from shame is an important reason to value it if we care about democratic government. As we will see, privacy does not only protect the shameful – there are many forms of expression which are perfectly desirable, valuable and democratic which, nonetheless, require privacy for their development and full realisation. Still, it is important not to confuse the shameful with the immoral, the unjust or the illegal, or to suppose that privacy protection for acts which are shameful must threaten, rather than protect, our ability to see and treat each other as equals.