This book evolved from my effort to relate three areas of personal and professional interest: privacy, social freedom, and human social nature. First is privacy. When I began writing about privacy – at the time, I thought of it as writing about intimacy – I was convinced that there are central domains of human social and moral life that are ill-suited to being characterized by any of the standard competing moral and legal theories. In an early essay, I argued that properly understanding the moral dimensions of parent–child relationships requires us to recognize the limits of both utilitarian and rights-centered autonomy-promoting approaches. I still believe this.

My concern with privacy in this book is not focused primarily on the claims of privacy that can be made against governments. Rather, I aim to understand the dimensions of privacy that arise in our social encounters. I argue that privacy in the contexts of our social relations protects us from social overreaching – limits the control of others over our lives. Understanding how privacy works in the social context is more complicated than understanding how privacy works in the governmental context. One reason for this difference is that immunity from certain forms of social control typically is not a blanket prohibition directed against all others but is selectively directed. Appreciating this difference will provide some insight into the debate over whether so-called life-choice issues–issues of birth control, including abortion; sexual orientation; use of recreational drugs; and so forth–are properly categorized as autonomy or privacy issues.