The Irrelevance of a Moral Right to Privacy for Biomedical Moral Enhancement
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BRIEF COMMUNICATION
The Irrelevance of a Moral Right to Privacy for Biomedical Moral Enhancement Ingmar Persson & Julian Savulescu
Received: 12 March 2016 / Accepted: 21 May 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017
Abstract In opposition to what we claimed in Unfit for the Future, Jan Christoph Bublitz argues that people have a right to privacy which stands in the way of the use of biomedical moral enhancement. We reply that it is not clear that he has understood what we mean by a right to privacy, that we were speaking of moral and not a legal right to privacy, and that we take a moral right to privacy to be a right against others that they don’t acquire (and sustain) certain (true) beliefs about us. This is compatible with the fact that the means they use to acquire beliefs about us, or the use to which they put these beliefs could violate our moral (or legal) rights. Once these points are taken on board, it becomes clear that the existence of a right to privacy is irrelevant to biomedical moral enhancement which consists in changing us rather than simply acquiring information about us. Keywords Biomedical moral enhancement . Moral enhancement . Right to privacy
I. Persson : J. Savulescu (*) Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Savulescu Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia J. Savulescu Melbourne Law School, Melbourne, Australia
Jan Christoph Bublitz’ critical discussion1 of our book Unfit for the Future2 provides us with a welcome opportunity to emphasize and expand on certain aspects of our views, in particular on whether there is a moral right to privacy. There are two points we wish to emphasize right at the outset. First, as Bublitz notes, we are denying the existence of a moral right to privacy, not that there might be legal rights to privacy. Now, legal rights in an interesting sense aren’t simply ‘those that happen to be written in statutes and legal text books’, as he suggests (2); they are rather such stated rights that are morally justifiable, though not necessarily by reference to moral rights, but perhaps by reference to the common good. We explicitly acknowledge that there may be such legal rights to privacy (Unfit, 5, 55). This will be illustrated below. The second point is that we take your (moral) right to privacy to be a right against others that they don’t acquire (and sustain) certain (true) beliefs about you. This is compatible with the fact that ‘the means they use to acquire beliefs about you, or the use to which they put these beliefs… could violate your rights’ (Unfit, 53). Turning to Bublitz’ criticisms with these points in mind, we find that he hasn’t properly taken them on board. As counter-examples to our denial of a moral right to privacy he cites systematically following someone around which ‘many legal systems outlaw as stalking’, and gawking at ‘a woman who, because of some unfortunate event, lies naked and helpless on the street’ (5). Now, in 1 ‘Saving the Wor
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