Page 12 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

PREFACE xi

Although only a very small number of philosophers and public intellectu-
als formally adopt the communitarian label, there are strong communitar-
ian elements in the Old and New Testaments, in Islam’s concept of “shura,”
in Confucianism, in Catholic social thought, in moderate conservative
thought (e.g., Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”), and in democratic social-
ism (e.g., Fabianism). In short, communitarian elements can be found in
most religious and secular belief systems.
The term “communitarian” was first used in the 1840s to refer to those
who experimented with unusually communal lifestyles. It was rarely used
in the generations that followed. In the 1980s, the term became associated
with the work of a small group of political philosophers who argued for the
importance of a shared formulation of the good, as opposed to the liberal
position that each individual should define the good for himself or herself. 1
In 1990, a group composed of academics and public leaders called
“responsive communitarians” formulated a platform that contained a pub-
2
lic philosophy. (More recently, the term “liberal communitarian” is more
often used to refer to the same line of thinking.) This group’s main thesis is
that people face two major sources of normativity—individual rights and
the common good—neither of which should be a priori privileged over
the other. Liberal communitarians hold that all societies must heed the
moral claims of two core values: the dignity of the individual, which is the
foundation of individual rights, and the importance of the common good.
These communitarians believe that societies tend to tilt toward one core
value or the other and need to be pulled toward a balanced center to make a
good society. Thus, Japan is depicted as strongly dedicated to the common
good but in need of strengthening the rights of women, minorities, and the
disabled; meanwhile, the United States under President Ronald Reagan—
and the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—was
diagnosed as too individualistic.
Throughout this volume, this line of thinking is applied to the standing
of privacy versus the common good. It raises questions such as whether, in
a particular era (e.g., post-9/11) and a particular country (in this volume,
the United States), security as a common good has unduly undermined the
right to privacy, and what markers or criteria one should employ to deter-
mine where the proper balance rests. (For a detailed theoretical analysis of
the liberal communitarian approach to privacy, see Chapter 7.)
The question of balance is then explored by examining two US National
Security Agency (NSA) programs (Chapter 9) and the police use of DNA
profiles (Chapter 10). The NSA’s programs provide a fine way to exam-
ine the issues at hand. One’s evaluation of them depends a great deal on
the weight one accords the common good involved, namely protecting
the homeland from terrorism and other security threats; on the extent to