Abstract
In recent years, neuroscience has been making dramatic progress. The discipline holds great promise but also raises a number of important ethical concerns. Among these is the concern that, some day in the distant future, we will have brain scanners capable of reading our minds, thus making our inner thoughts transparent to others. There are at least two reasons why we might regret our resulting loss of privacy. One is, so the argument goes, that this would undermine our ability to form intimate relations. Another is that the omnipresent gaze of others would render an authentic inner life impossible. I argue that both of these concerns are exaggerated. First, intimacy might flourish through the differential acknowledgement of knowledge as common knowledge; for example, even if I know that both a friend and my taxi driver know that I have kinky sexual fantasies, I might only acknowledge this as common knowledge and, thus, an admissible piece of conversation with my friend, and this differential acknowledgement might be enforced by norms of social interaction. Second, the gaze of others would become much less oppressive if everyone’s inner lives were transparent to everyone else. I also argue that our minds are already partly transparent to others through the use of non-neuroscience-assisted mindreading techniques and, thus, that the latter offer no distinct threat to mind privacy. I offer an additional argument for this conclusion; to wit, that our minds extend beyond our brains.
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Notes
I shall also argue against the presumption expressed in the first sentence in this paragraph.
Most of the available brain scan techniques require the prior cooperation of the subject about to be scanned; for example, by answering questions used to correlate brain states with mind states (Arstila and Scott 2011, p. 208; Gilead 2015, p. 283), as well as cooperation while being scanned, for example, by not moving. To the extent that such cooperation is voluntary, it does not appear to violate any right to privacy.
There are some affinities between my concept of control privacy and what Rössler (2005, p. 9) calls ‘informational privacy’. Both concern control over personal information. However, Rössler’s notion pertains to whether people have (or claim to have) a right to control privacy, whereas control privacy in my sense is a purely descriptive notion. Also, her notion makes no mention of the distinction between individualized and non-individualized evidence, nor of the costs/difficulties involved in exercising (one’s right to) control over personal information about oneself.
Alternatively, one could argue that in order for one to have control over X, it is not necessary that one has control over any Y, which is such that if Y occurs, one has no control over X. There is a sense in which I have control over whether I work on my article on privacy tomorrow, even if I have no control over whether I am hit by a meteor later today, and the facts are such that if I am hit by a meteor today I have no control over whether I work on my article on privacy tomorrow. In the interest of simplicity, I omit using time-indexes, e.g. at t1 X enjoys control over whether Y has individualized evidence for beliefs about M at t2.
This significance typically varies such that in relation to one piece of information I care more about control privacy relative to family and friends than to the state, whereas as far as another piece of information is concerned I care more about control privacy relative to the latter.
This fact becomes relevant in relation to the discussion of intimacy in ‘The Value of Control Privacy: Intimacy and Authenticity’ section.
Thomson believes that the right to privacy can ultimately be reduced to property rights over oneself and external possessions. I believe this is not so (cf. Schoeman 1984, pp. 27–28). However, because my main concern is with the value of privacy, I need not take a stand on Thomson’s reductionist claim.
An anonymous reviewer suggested that content privacy, no less than control privacy, is at stake in relation to brain-reading. I disagree, but, at any rate, my arguments pertaining to why global uses of brain-reading might not pose a threat to intimacy and authenticity apply, mutatis mutandis, to content privacy as well.
Other values allegedly promoted by or requiring privacy include self-respect and self-esteem (DeCew 2000, p. 213).
In the case of unacknowledged dispositions, such as racial bias (see ‘Introduction’), lack of control privacy cannot undermine intimacy because it eliminates one’s option of informing one’s intimates of one’s dispositions. That is not to say, however, that lack of control privacy does not make one less capable of forming intimate relations; for example, if others publicize facts about one’s objectionable biases in a society where such biases are frowned upon. (But perhaps such biases, because always publicly accessible, are much rarer in that scenario.)
This is compatible with the claim that brain-reading technologies are different in the sense that they enable us to access much more private information, quantitatively speaking, than standard mindreading techniques. I assess the relevance of the truth of this claim in my discussion of the global use scenario in the section below.
One reason for this is that the social pressure exerted by strangers is less effective than social pressures exerted by those to whom one is personally related.
The threat does not presuppose that people are always under surveillance. It suffices if they believe that there is always some significant probability that they are, even if, in fact, they never are. This is the lesson of the Panopticon.
Cf. ‘failures of privacy lead to feelings of shame’ that ‘the number of people who feel shame will dramatically increase’ if there will ‘be more and more application fields of fMRI and more and more people whose brains will be scanned’ (Räikkä 2010, pp. 9, 11).
In this situation, there is an asymmetry of power that would not exist in the global scenario—the state, and only the state, can choose whose private conversations to broadcast. One can object to such power asymmetries even if one does not object to the lack of privacy as such, and my concern here is with the latter objection.
Some think that ‘naked exposure itself… is disqualifying’ (Nagel 1998, p. 4; cf. Rachels 1975, p. 325); that is, it is disqualifying, even if that which is exposed is nothing to be ashamed of, such as photos of a public figure excreting or a married couple having sex. I agree, but I think that this fact largely reflects how we are often ashamed of something that is nothing to be ashamed about and it is difficult to tell if such shame would persist if everyone were subjected to ‘naked exposure’.
Velleman thinks that the basis of shame is that one’s standing as a self-presenting agent is compromised (cf. Rössler 2005, p. 116). Pace Velleman, full transparency is compatible with such standing, even if all facts about one’s mental life are out in the open. After all, such facts are in need of interpretation and one can have the capacity to interpret oneself in ways that convince others. Similarly, you and I might know all the sentences that comprise a poem, and yet you might have the capacity to convince me about the correctness of a certain view of what it means.
An anonymous reviewer suggested an interesting related hypothesis: that we do not feel less shame for having more shameful episodes in our mental lives exposed, but that ‘shame fatigue’ sets in at some point such that the marginal increase in distress that comes from having one additional shameful episode exposed declines. However, this hypothesis is one which is independent of my present point, which rests on an assumption about how shame is affected by the comparative standing of the subject of shame and the standing of others in relation to whom this person experiences shame.
To defend the claim that we have insufficient reason to embrace the strong connection view, it suffices that the present argument is only approximately sound. An argument is approximately sound when one or more of its premises are false, but, in a sense which is hard to specify, is or are ‘close to being true’, e.g. premise 1 is approximately true, when full transparency can threaten authenticity even if it does not lead to shame, but rarely does so.
‘p’ is not common knowledge between X and Y just because it is true that ‘X knows that p’ and true that ‘Y knows that p’. Further conditions must be satisfied for something to be common knowledge in my sense, such as that ‘X knows that Y knows that p and vice versa’ and ‘X signals to Y that in their interactions they are permitted to state, reason on the basis of etc. p and vice versa’ and so on and so forth. I do not offer a definition of common knowledge here, in the belief that the cases to which I appeal are taxonomically unproblematic.
Reiman (1976, pp. 33, 34; cf. Rössler 2005, p. 131) argues that access to personal information is neither necessary nor sufficient for intimacy, since sharing information without a context of caring, such as the professional relation that a client has to his psychoanalyst, is not intimate: ‘What matters is who cares about [personal information about me] and to whom I care to reveal it’ (Reiman 1976, p. 34). I only argue that access to personal information is not necessary for intimacy and, pace Reiman, it is possible to reveal information to someone who cares about one even if one does not have an intimate relationship with that person, perhaps because one simply passes on the information but is unwilling to accept it as common knowledge between oneself and the recipient.
Katharina Hadjimatheou objected that norms about admissible topics for conversation could not form the basis for intimate relations between parents and children, and that stressed-out parents sometimes entertain thoughts or feelings, the publicity of which would threaten intimacy between them. I see considerable force in this challenge. One response would be to restrict the scope of my claim to intimacy between adults. Another response would be to concede that while full transparency would change the nature of the child-parent relationship, we romanticize children if we think that intimate child–adult relations could not survive full transparency.
The same might be true of individual cases where privacy norms are respected, cf. (Lever 2012, 209).
Rachels (1975, p. 329) contends that ‘because our ability to control who has access to us, and knows what about us, allows us to maintain the variety of relationships with other people that we want to have, it is… one of the most important reasons why we value privacy’. The related claim that privacy is valuable for reasons with respect to maintaining the relevant variety of relationship is false if we can maintain the same variety of relationship through differentiating between people in terms of which pieces of personal information we accept as common knowledge. Note, incidentally, that Rachels wavers between thinking that, say, confiding is essential to friendship and thinking that confiding differentially to friends and non-friends is essential to friendship. Reiman (1976, p. 32) focuses on the latter claim, characterizing it as ‘both compelling and hauntingly distasteful’.
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Acknowledgements
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference July 2, 2016, Queens University Belfast. I thank members of the audience on that occasion—especially Suzanne Burri, Ian Carter, Katharina Hadjimatheou, Massimo Renzo, Fabian Schuppert—and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
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Lippert-Rasmussen, K. Brain Privacy, Intimacy, and Authenticity: Why a Complete Lack of the Former Might Undermine Neither of the Latter!. Res Publica 23, 227–244 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9344-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9344-z