W. A. Parent

A new definition of privacy for the law

The paper begins with a defence of a new definition of privacy as the absence of undocumented personal knowledge. In the middle section, I criticise alternative accounts of privacy. Finally, I show how my definition can be worked into contemporary American Law.

Fried on Rights and Moral Personality

it is to everyones advantage in a co-op for the co-op to work, that is, for all members to act on the cooperation principle. This is a welcome result for cooperators, becaue it is a common objection to the viability of co-ops that they are pie-in-the-sky undertakings which require an unrealistic idealism from their members. This objection, it appears, is simply mistaken. This is not to say that co-ops are always and everywhere the advantageous thing for utility maximizers. For a co-op to motivate an individual utility maximizer it must be the case that the agent can do better by cooperating than by going it alone. It seems fair to say that this will not always be the case. However, it also seems fair to say that, especially for individuals who are disadvantaged relative to the rest of society and whose labor has little market value, cooperatives may often offer mutually advantageous defensive undertakings which decrease their relative social disadvantage. In any case the picture of a society composed of many interlocking cooperative undertakings is intriguing in its own right. To argue that co-ops motivate individual utility maximizers to act cooperatively out of prudence is not to mount a justification of the cooperative principle. Like the utilitarian principle, it may be defensible in its own right, but I have ignored that question here. It is clear that agents directly motivated by the principle of cooperation will differ from agents motivated to adopt the principle out of prudence. True cooperators will share the virtue of solidarity, while prudentially motivated cooperators will not. The difference comes to this: True cooperators will cooperate even in the absence of procedures for detecting noncooperators, whereas prudential cooperators will not.