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Spinoza, Feminism and Privacy: Exploring an Immanent Ethics of Privacy

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Abstract

In this article I explore the usefulness of Spinoza’s ethics for feminism by considering ways in which it allows feminists to rethink privacy. I draw upon some of Spinoza’s central ideas to address the following question: when should information be classed as private and when should it be communicated? This is a question that is considered by the common law courts. Attempts to find a moral underpinning for such a tortious action against invasions of privacy have tended to draw upon Kant’s categorical imperative. In contrast, I want to consider how Spinoza provides an immanent ethics that reconfigures how privacy is understood.

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Notes

  1. A few examples include: Allen (1988, 2011), Pateman (1989a), Okin (1989), MacKinnon (1989), Landes (1998), Elshtain (1981), Gavison (1980), Cohen (1992, 2002), Goldfarb (2000), Higgins (1999), Rössler (2004, 2005), Scott and Keates (2004), Richardson (2011, 2012, 2014).

  2. State v Rhodes (1868) 61 N.C. (Phil. Law) 453; as cited in Siegel (1996, 2154), Siegel's emphasis added.

  3. Campbell v Mirror Group Newspapers [2004] UKHL 22.

  4. Both Floridi and Spinoza are useful for thinking about privacy and its relation to ontology and conceptions of self (Richardson, forthcoming). There is insufficient space here to compare these approaches.

  5. Ethics II, P13.

  6. Unlike the later Kantian view which sharply distinguished between the faculties of reason and understanding, Spinoza sees the two as basically synonymous, and not a faculty.

  7. Ethics 4: P.35, C. 1.

  8. Ethics, V P.10 S.

  9. In a fascinating interview Gatens has an original re-reading of Spinoza in which there is a position in between Spinoza’s first two stages of knowledge, i.e. part of the imagination comes closer to reason. She also argues that better fictions are necessary because we cannot form adequate knowledge of the social body as a whole. I cannot do justice to these arguments in this paper but think that they raise important issues in the area of philosophy of information as well as Spinozist studies. She also situates this move within the context of re-thinking ideology, with which I agree (James et al. 2000).

  10. For an analysis of the relationship between imagination in Spinozist thought and Cornell’s psychoanalytic reading of the imaginary see James (2002). Nothing rests upon James’ argument here.

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Monash, Building 12, Clayton Campus, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Janice Richardson

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Richardson, J. Spinoza, Feminism and Privacy: Exploring an Immanent Ethics of Privacy. Fem Leg Stud 22, 225–241 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-014-9271-3

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