ducksanddrakes

At The Philosopher’s Magazine, Mike LaBossiere is following a story that is preoccupying slightly less philosophical magazines nowadays:

The recent media frenzy over the Tiger Woods‘ affair(s) raises numerous issues of philosophical concern. The one that I will focus on is the matter of the extent of our right to know about what goes on in the lives of others.

The objective is welcome.  LaBossiere seeks a way to keep the congress between privacy and publicity at a reasonable smolder, to help us all act like adults again.

But I’m doubtful about LaBossiere’s decision to use the language of “rights” to keep this party polite.  In this post, I’ll pressure this framework.  Of course there are plenty of reasons why a rights-based approach is attractive – it’s orderly, it’s predictable, it’s familiar – but as a matter of strategy my belief is that it will not provide the result that we want because it is too individualized in its mechanism to combat prurient fascination in media stories like the Tiger Woods scandal.

It is, after all, a frenzy.  And frenzies don’t yield to the nonchalance in which LaBossiere’s  framework is optimal.  Instead, I hate to say, we may need something larger and more amorphous, like good manners.

Let’s look at LaBossiere’s exploration. He begins by asking how we can balance the public’s right to know against the right to privacy.  The first move is to borrow from Mill’s account of liberty, which is rooted in the belief that one can only legitimately interfere in the liberty of another in order to prevent harm.

It can be argued by analogy that the same sort of principle can be applied to what people have a right to know about others. To be specific, a person has the right to know something about another person if not knowing this would be harmful to the person. For example, a person has a right to know if the babysitter she is considering hiring is a pedophile or not.

In the Tiger Woods case it is obvious that this sort of principle would not provide the public with a right to know what is going on in his life. This is because what he did or did not do does not harm the public, although people obviously find it of great interest.

This account hinges on two issues. First of all, we’d need to come to an agreement about the meaning of “harm.”  Second, we must sort out which deeds belong to the category of harm – even for powerful politicians, there must be deeds that do not have the potential to hurt the public, and remain beyond the ambit of the public’s right to know.

Bracketing those two problems, the underlying principle seems okay.  However  …

While the principle of harm does seem to be a reasonable basis for such a right, it might seem to be rather limited. After all, intuitively it would seem that people have a right to know things even when these things are not a matter of harm.

So much for Mill.  See, we can’t pattern our account of privacy rights using our account of liberty because the result gives privacy enormous default advantage that it might not require or merit.  What’s more, even if we had a hard and fast definition of harm, the burden of proof makes the plan unworkable: the public would need to know about a deed in order to decide whether or not that deed meets a test of harm and therefore needs to be known by the public.

I’m exhausted already.  Perhaps, rather than considering two competing types of rights – privacy and public knowledge – we should just concentrate on the former.

Time for a second proposal:

Another possible foundation for such a right is that people can give such a right to others. For example, when someone intentionally and knowingly provides another person with access to information then they have provided that person with the right to know. For example, if someone posts pictures of her drunken adventures on Facebook and has allowed her friends to view her photos, then she has granted them the right to know about said drunken adventures. As another example, a person can provide others with such a right because of their profession or the relationship they establish with that person.For example, if someone hires a lawyer, then that person gains a right to know about facts relevant to this professional relationship. As another example, when people enter into a relationship, then specific sorts of relationships provide a right to know. As a specific example, when two people are dating then they would seem to have a right to know certain things about each other that go beyond those that might be a cause of harm.

That’s a lot of examples.   In this framework, privacy is forfeited in quasi-contracts.  You want a Facebook account, a lawyer, a boyfriend?  Sign here and we’ll shave off part of your preexisting peace and tranquility.  This proposal surely mirrors the real world: we give away aspects of our privacy all the time, and this relinquishment has become a part of our economy and indeed our way of life.  LaBossiere’s account also has suppleness – not every act surrenders all privacy.  One’s privacy is not a whole picture to be stolen, but a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces can be bartered for other goods and privileges.

That’s what makes the case of Woods so interesting, because his puzzle pieces do seem to be traded all in one go, to everybody:

Tiger Woods went beyond being a gold professional and became a professional endorser of products ranging from razor blades to cars. In one commercial, the public was even invited in to see him reading a bedtime story to his child. As such, he was clearly establishing a relationship with the public that went beyond being a just a guy who swings a club.

In such a role he crafted a reputation and image in the course of establishing a relationship with the public. The idea was, of course, that the public should trust his endorsements because he presented himself as the sort of person who could be trusted. After all, such endorsements presume the establishment of trust. While getting such endorsements depended on him being a great golfer, they also depended on him having a good reputation and a certain sort of image. As such, the image presented is a critical part of the relationship as well.

By entering into such a relationship based on trust Woods thus gave the public a right to know about what lies behind that carefully crafted image. After all, he was using his image and reputation to sell products and the public would thus have a right to know whether the image and reputation were legitimate or not.

As such, when he allegedly engaged in behavior that seems to directly contradict that crafted image, then the public had a right to know whether the claims against him are true or not.

In this sense, the scandal represents an exacerbated example of the kind of ordinary surrender made by anyone with the temerity to swipe a debit card or send an email that contains a product keyword.

While we may have arrived at an interesting philosophical truth about the meaning of celebrity, there are still at least two points about this last move that cast doubt on the aptness of the overall approach.

First, notice that LaBossiere’s argument only works if a scandal involves just one person.  Tiger’s Gatorade contract may surrender his quiet life, but it does not surrender the privacy of Tiger’s children, Elin Nordegren, Rachel Uchitel, Jamie Grubbs, Kalika Moquin, Cori Rist, Jamie Jungers, Mindy Lawton, Holly Sampson, Joslyn James, Loredana Jolie, unnamed mistresses 10, 11 and 12, Julie Postle or Theresa Rogers.  Some of the mistresses have surrendered their privacy as a result of the scandal, sure.  But if a significant portion of the other characters in the drama are not willing to sell out, how can we tell the story?  A media frenzy requires casts of thousands to make it unfold in a way that is suitably frenetic, so a model that is based on individual celebrities giving away their rights to the public eye will not be helpful so long as the rights of everyone else involved have equal moral force.  In short, this isn’t just Tiger’s story, so it isn’t just his privacy, and that complicates matters enormously.

Second, LaBossiere’s excellent account of celebrity makes me think that a possession other than privacy is at stake.  When a spokesperson endorses a product, not only does that product gain stature, but so does the spokesperson.  To be a spokesperson is to transform public admiration into authority to make recommendation.  The act is creative, but not stable.  Although Woods’ accomplishments helped achieve adulation, that adulation does not actually belong to him.  Woods is not only relinquishing his rights, he is also neglecting a public property that is only entrusted to him: The Idea of Tiger.  Woods’ privacy may be beside the point, because he is managing a set of feelings within the minds of fans that aggregate into a projection.  Nobody cares about what Woods has done to his family; people care about what he has done to our faith in him.

What do my apprehensions have in common?  Both emphasize that there are more stakeholders and stakes involved than a rights-based approach can economically manage.  We need something bigger than that.  In fact, we have been misunderstanding the question all along.  The Woods scandal thrives not in the absence of a common account of rights, but rather in the absence of a common etiquette.  It’s not about bad justice,  but about bad manners.  We cannot slake our desire to be disgusted, or perhaps envious, of Woods’ excesses.  That’s not a desire that a more rigorous framework for establishing privacy rights will moderate.

Do we even want it to?  There is a nice symmetry between Woods’ prurient behavior and our prurient interest.  The whole process can result in a cleansing to relieve the tedium and reinforce the everyday middle-class values on which the weekly-magazine industry depends.  In that sense, the Woods scandal may not just breech the wall between public knowledge and private life, but also brace the stories that we tell about it.