We tend to think of privacy as a right. No one can go snooping through our bedroom, our email, or our medical records. Lke all rights, it enables us to live our lives free from arbitrary intervention. And this is all well and good. We should be able to carve out spaces for ourselves free from social peeping toms, internet hackers, the feds, and corporate bureaucrats.
But we have largely forgotten that privacy is also an obligation that makes moral claims on us. Privacy is necessary to achieve the common good of public morality. Consenting adults may have the right to have sex in their bedroom, but they also have an obligation to have sex in their bedroom rather than, say, my front lawn. We respect a right to privacy and close the door when someone pees, but we also punish someone who engages in public urination. There are certain things that we are obligated to keep private.
So much of our culture today obliterates this obligation. You have the right to keep your private parts private, but you also have an obligation to keep them private. The amount of cleavage, semi-nudity and baggy jeans showing underwear out there is staggering. If fundamentalist Islamic requirements that women cover themselves are one end of the spectrum, then we are completely on the other end. We need to reach some middle ground between the burqa and the my-daughter-is-a-prostitute Halloween costume.
You have the right to your own private life and to experience your relationships without snoops and gossips, but you also have an obligation to keep them private. What people are willing to put out there for public consumption - from the mundane to the titillating - is astonishing. The texts, the tweets, the social networking! The combination of exhibitionism and narcissism has exploded the traditional notion of not airing your dirty linen in public. Sexting? Do people really not know that this is wrong? We are breaking down important social spaces of privacy and thus undermining public morality.
And then there is reality TV. Amatuer porn sites. You Tube. Confessional talk shows. Webcams in our homes. Public breast feeding. Yes, even blogs. So much of our culture consists of publicizing private acts. We are pre-occupied with ourselves. We no longer seem to recognize an obligation to keep private things private. We no longer think of the common good or how our actions either contribute to or undermine the common good.
How far can our rights of self-expression go? Can we still say that public nudity is wrong? Public defecation? Sex in public? In these situations I presume we will recognize that such action harms public morality and undermines the common good. We do have an obligation to each other to keep private things private, and in such cases we are justified in using the state to punish individuals who do not live up to that obligation.
But we also have an obligation to keep private things private even when our failure to do so does not bring the cops to our door. We really do not need to see pictures of you getting wasted last night. We really do not need to see your cleavage or your underwear. Not only will honoring this obligation of privacy lead to more dignified lives. But we may actually spend part of our days thinking about something other than telling the world what happened to us that day. We may actually think about our other obligations to our fellow citizens and how to contribute to the common good.