Ferraris on Privacy

Few can agree on what privacy is, and several accounts are skeptical about the very concept. In Mobilitazione Totale (2015), Maurizio Ferraris argues that most people in the world place no value on discretion concerning themselves and do not cherish their own privacy. Seen from their perspective, there is nothing special or valuable about privacy. Although he does not articulate a detailed thesis on the topic, what we see of Ferraris’s view of privacy may align with a number of scholars who present skeptical conceptions of privacy. Among these is Judith Jarvis Thomson (1975), who argues that there is no right to privacy. In her view, when we speak of privacy, we are referring to a complex set of rights and values that can be reduced to property rights and rights to bodily security. Thomson holds that the right to privacy is merely a derivative cluster of other rights. In this contribution, I explore Ferraris’s view on privacy. In the first part I provide a possible articulation of Ferraris’s concept of privacy. In the second part I explore whether this concept might contribute to critiques of privacy as a right, and to the increasing challenges posed to privacy in an age of rapid technological advancement.