In November 1985, Senator Dale Bumpers first offered an amendment intended to prohibit foreign aid activities that would encourage export of agricultural commodities from developing countries. The bill stressed competition for world markets between potential exporters from the developing world and U.S. farmers. The amendment (No. 1129) reads, in part,

A similar version, now commonly referred to as the Bumpers Amendment, was reintroduced in May 1986 and has become law. In Bumpers's words, the act is to “prevent American tax dollars from being used to help foreign countries who are trying to take our export markets.”

The potential consequences of this law are far reaching. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) is required to suspend research and implementation projects that could enable poor foreign farmers to increase commercial production of commodities such as meat, maize, or wheat that are exported from the United States, and also of commodities such as palm oil that are not produced for export in the United States, but may substitute for U.S. commodities.

Our understanding of privacy and the role it plays in structuring social freedom is the focus of this book. Obscuring our view of these concepts are confidence in a narrow notion of rationality and a corresponding denigration of culture and conforming tendencies in the properly formed moral consciousness. Evidence of this confidence and denigration appears in the preceding two chapters.

In those chapters, I illustrate the pervasiveness, if not the overall dominance, of a view of how moral judgment relates to cultural norms. According to that picture, cultural norms have no moral authority and only coincidental relevance. Independent validation of a norm is construed narrowly to require that one employ the principle of articulated rationality with reference to that norm. As I explained, this principle has two elements: (1) that one is not in a proper state vis-à-vis one's beliefs and values unless one is in possession of a rational defense of these principles and (2) that reference to what one's culture or community accepts is not part of a rational defense. The individual is judged competent to find compelling reasons of the right sort on which to construct a moral outlook. For the outlook to be successfully grounded, it should appeal to an individual with no preexisting allegiance to a community norm as such. For us to express our nature fully, we must renounce any appeal to how the cultures around us influence us.

The main focus of this book has been on the intersection of some topics surprisingly scantily represented in the standard moral philosophy literature: the social and cognitive psychology of human judgment, social freedom, and the general structure of moral judgment in private life. Inquiry in any one of these areas provides counterpoints to some widely accepted principles of moral theory. Their combination suggests that the way philosophers have framed issues for theoretical discussion may obscure rather than clarify some key pieces of the moral picture.

In exploring a role for privacy in the social context, we have come to see it as a means of regulating the amount of social control afforded individuals within associations, both public and private. Trying to understand why both individuals and associations need a social control mechanism like privacy, we came to realize some important truths about both individuals and groups.

About individuals we realized that the sort of independence, cognitive and motivational, that is presupposed in much moral theorizing is radically misguided. The prospect and the desirability of people's coming to a moral stance independent of cultural influence were called into question. The prospect and the desirability of people's forming judgments without reference to what those around them think about the issues and without reference to what others would think about those people were they to disregard the influence of those others came to seem not the humanizing and liberating force so often represented in abstract moral theorizing.

Since Hobbes (1651), social contract theories have presumed that individuals unbound by obligations and constraints of government would, or rationally should, abandon some personal liberties in exchange for certain guarantees and benefits that can be secured only by enforceable schemes of mutual cooperation. The philosophical basis for competitiveness sentiments can be found in the implicit themes of the social contract argument. Contract theorists make the implicit assumption that benefits accrue primarily to contracting parties. Rational self-interest is the primary motivation for entering the social contract, so the benefits of entering the contract must outweigh the costs for each individual. One can imagine situations in which external effects of the contract benefit third parties, but the Bumpers case involves intentional action to benefit foreigners at the expense of citizens. Although the state's responsibility to protect economic interests from foreign threats is uncertain, the social contract cannot plausibly be understood to permit state intervention on behalf of foreign competitors unless significant state interests are at stake.

The plausibility of social contract arguments in political theory comes from their analogy to standard personal contracts in which parties consent to be bound by terms and conditions. The presumption is that parties so agree because they perceive a mutual benefit in making the contract. There may, to be sure, be cases where parties contract for services that will benefit others indirectly, as when the services one contracts from a house painter so beautify the neighborhood that others reap aesthetic benefits, or even increased property values.

In this chapter I will assess whether criminal laws against the recreational use of drugs (LAD) are justifiable on paternalistic grounds. In other words, I will evaluate attempts to defend or reject LAD solely because of the harm drugs cause to adult users themselves, quite apart from the harm they cause to nonusers. In Chapter 1,1 proposed that the strengths and weaknesses of the case for LAD are best revealed by distinguishing the harm drugs cause to users from the harm they cause to others. I explore the separate issue of whether LAD can be justified by a “harm to others” rationale in Chapter 3.

With increasing frequency, drug prohibitionists have cited so-called moral harms to users in support of LAD. After conceding that a cost-benefit analysis is inconclusive, James Q. Wilson maintains that “the moral reason for attempting to discourage drug use is that the heavy consumption of certain drugs is destructive of human character … The dignity, autonomy, and productivity of many users, already impaired by other problems, is destroyed.” In citing this rationale for the prohibition of illegal substances, Wilson echoes the sentiments of former drug czar William Bennett: “Drug use - especially heavy drug use - destroys human character. It destroys dignity and autonomy, it burns away the sense of responsibility, it subverts productivity, it makes a mockery of virtue.”

We saw in our discussion of Mill that reasoning in general and moral reasoning in particular were individuated and distrustful of culture. Culture lulled one into accepting as inevitable principles that should be challenged. Because only one's own reasoning is to be trusted, each person has the responsibility of constructing morality. Otherwise people just “parrot” received truths and betray their own nature. (Nothing comparable with Euclid's Elements is available to guide one on social and moral matters.)

This approach to moral reasoning generates a problem of how one is connected with other people. Any connection has to be constructed from within the theory rather than taken as a given. The process of constructing whatever connection is there strongly disposes, if not forces, the person to seek an answer in terms that in the first instance appeal to individualized values. Culture and connections with others, if valuable, are valuable because of what they offer the individual. Relations with others thereby theoretically are relegated to a dependent or secondary importance.

As it did in the case of Mill, this approach disposes one to regard social pressures as inappropriate and rationally corrupting. This disposition in turn promotes misunderstanding the role of privacy in the regulation of life and in its relationship to social freedom. Mill, recall, treated regard for a person's privacy as diminishing a person's opportunities for critical and helpful assessment by others in self-regarding domains of life.

Philosophical analysis of hunger as a moral issue has roots in antiquity and figures in discussions of ethics and political philosophy throughout the roughly 3,000-year history of recorded philosophical thinking. The twentieth century, however, is a special case. When hunger and food policy became important political issues in the 1970s, the basis for contemplating hunger as a moral issue was reinvented, almost totally. The aim here is not to recover the past, but to examine the moral analysis of food policy that began to emerge about 20 years ago and to assess its relevance to the policy problems that are the primary topic of Chapters 1–5. Because the recent philosophical analysis of food policy arose in conjunction with a broad technical and political debate over the causes of world hunger and the prospects for eliminating hunger worldwide, the last 30 years of popular and philosophical writing on the moral issues in food policy can be referred to as the world hunger literature.

There is one general reason why most world hunger literature is inapplicable to the competitiveness issues raised by the Bumpers Amendment. Most authors that will be discussed here do not consider the political mandate for official aid philosophically important. The creation of organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) is not taken up in the existing philosophical literature. The preceding chapters, however, focus almost exclusively on the philosophical problems that arise in attempting to specify and defend AID's mandate.

In this chapter, I introduce the notion of a ‘sphere of life’ as a category of moral analysis, particularly helpful in thinking about privacy. The notion is implicit in what we have already covered. To prepare for this, some review is in order. In Chapter 1, we saw several aspects of personality and intimacy that are protected by institutions and practices of privacy. These include the following: (1) insulation of personal relationships from accountability for social or global ends and norms, (2) protection of individuals from unconditioned exposure of central emotional vulnerabilities, and (3) encouragement of emotional investment in potentially self-expressive roles and relationships.

In Chapter 6, the overall role of privacy was elaborated in social-evolutionary terms. The more vulnerable to extinction one's community, the more extensive will be the range of expected solidarity and interdependence. As expected solidarity and interdependence increase, social pressure increases as well.

As social survival becomes secure, and as flourishing becomes feasible, tolerance for deliberate change increases and, with it, reliance on individual innovation. Functionally focused associations emerge and replace all-embracing associative communities. Individuals become less dependent on the all-embracing community and more dependent on clusters of functionally focused associations. This change deracinates the prospect of monolithic social hegemony.

Individuals experience variable, and to some extent voluntary, sets of involvements that collectively satisfy personal and group needs. Freedom of association evolves as centralized authority degenerates. Individuals as well as groups are liberated to pursue local goals not entirely structured by global community goals.

Thus far I have provided reasons to doubt that criminal laws against the use of recreational drugs (LAD) are justified in their full generality, that is, that recreational drug use should be totally prohibited. My conclusion is incompatible with the way drugs are treated under federal law today. Except for a handful of exemptions, most notably for alcohol and tobacco, the Controlled Substances Act punishes the recreational use of drugs altogether. State law is only slightly more permissive. Eleven states have decriminalized the use and possession of small amounts of marijuana, although they continue to treat it as a noncriminal violation resembling a parking or speeding ticket. Alaska has recently ended its more radical experiment with the removal of all penalties for the private use of marijuana. Apart from these few exceptions, the recreational use of drugs is a criminal offense. Recreational drug use is not permitted under some circumstances, in some places, at some times, by some persons.

In this chapter, I will assume that my arguments from Chapters 2 and 3 are sound and that harm either to drug users or to others does not justify LAD in its full generality. The arguments in favor of a moral right to use drugs recreationally are more persuasive than the arguments against such a right. Respect for moral rights requires that recreational drug use should be decriminalized. This word means different things to different people. The core meaning is that punishment should not be imposed for recreational drug use. LAD should be repealed or, at the very least, unenforced.

THE WAR ON DRUGS

For a period of sixteen months from 1989-1990, a majority of Americans identified drugs as our nation's greatest concern, surpassing crime, the environment, taxes, the homeless, education, and the deficit. War in the Middle East temporarily focused attention elsewhere. But President George Bush promised to restore the problem to its “number one” status “when the international situation has calmed down.” According to William Bennett, America's first “drug czar,” “drugs remain ... our gravest domestic problem.”

So great is the problem perceived to be that the public has enthusiastically responded to the latest call for a “war on drugs.” This declaration of war is not new. The military metaphor has dominated thought about drug policy ever since Richard Nixon became the first president to declare war on drugs.

The war metaphor is, of course, an exaggeration; the resources mobilized against drugs are not comparable to efforts during wartime. The costs of enforcing criminal laws against the recreational use of drugs (henceforth shortened to “laws against drugs,” or LAD) are modest by comparison to our military budget, even when we are officially at peace. Still, by any measure, a massive effort is under way to attempt to eliminate illegal drug use in our society. This effort is built on a broad, if not an especially deep, social consensus.

In this chapter, I explain privacy's role in sustaining social freedom. To prepare for that explanation, I first discuss the importance of social control for societies and associations of various sorts and sizes. I then develop an account of social freedom, and end with a discussion of privacy's role in counterbalancing social control mechanisms.

As argued in the past several chapters, there is ample reason to change our conception of moral rationality. The principle of articulated rationality is not well suited to reveal the nature of moral understanding or moral being. The principle's contempt of culture and of our susceptibility to socializing pressures and influences makes it an inappropriate standard for human practices. We are not rational beings in the senses that moral theories often stress: We are not rational in the sense of being primarily or exclusively motivated to further our self-interest independent of all else. We see ourselves as social beings whose stake lies in life with others. We are not rational in the sense that how others do things, how our culture does things, is irrelevant to legitimization. Customary practices are a legitimizing ground. We are not rational in the sense that we should be confident that our own judgment, when not supported by others, is a valid basis for action or judgment. We are not rational in the sense that we need no more motivation for judging or acting than is provided by having an abstract belief that something is right or wrong.

In reviewing the popular literature on hunger and development, one is struck by the repeated use of the term “myth.” The word appears prominently in the title of two widely read books by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, and is a important term of analysis in books or articles by James Sellers (1976), Thomas T. Poleman (1977), Jean Mayer (1979), Nick Eberstadt (1980), and Gigi M. Berardi (1985). Within the context of a literature that also includes multiple references to “misleading metaphors,” and to “false bad news,” not to mention seemingly countless titles that promise “the reality,” the word “myth” is simply used to denote false or even foolish beliefs. Although food policy authors do not all agree on what is myth and what is fact, they all seem to share the belief that failure to grasp the facts underlies the confusion and disagreement over food policy. This failure is relevant to the philosophical literature on famine and hunger, for philosophically trained authors have exhibited an astonishing ability to display ignorance of easily obtainable information on food availability. As much philosophical writing on food policy is premised on false beliefs about the world food situation, policy analysts have found it easy to ignore.

The politics that precipitated the law limiting U.S. development assistance to competitors of U.S. agriculture mix private interest with philosophical principle. The principle appeals to the social contract tradition of political thought, but the argument that would establish such an appeal is absent from the public record. There is little point in bemoaning the lack of rigor and attention to detail in American political rhetoric. Most advocates of the Bumpers Amendment undoubtedly thought that they had made their case clearly enough, and eventual passage of the law afforded them some practical satisfaction. Philosophical justification has always presumed a higher standard, however. Critique of the case for the Bumpers Amendment must be preceded by a careful statement of the argument in its behalf.

POLITICAL PRINCIPLE AND PRIVATE INTEREST

In Chapter 2, the argument for the Bumpers Amendment is broken down into two distinct themes. The first implies an interest argument, asserting that U.S. foreign agricultural assistance programs are in conflict with the interests of U.S. farmers, and appealing to the Representationalist Thesis as its justifying philosophical principle. The second is a principled argument making the same factual claim, but appealing to a version of social contract theory to show that the use of public funds to aid foreign producers at the expense of U.S. citizens is an inappropriate application of the budgetary authority of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID).

A growing literature discusses the beliefs and perceptions of key actors and interest groups that supported the Bumpers Amendment. The theme that emerges most clearly is a critique of the effect that foreign agricultural assistance is perceived to have on U.S. farm exports. Although an extensive discussion of the economic arguments that have been assembled to form this critique is not germane to the philosophical point under review, these arguments are sometimes offered in direct response to the interest argument proposed in Chapter 3, and are, in turn, relevant to more Hobbesian readings of social contract theory. What is more, these economic arguments represent the predominant response to the Bumpers Amendment and to the sentiments that spurred it along. They provide a convincing case for concluding that the agricultural interests enlisted in support of the law would ultimately be thwarted were it to be enforced. The Linking Thesis (LT) (discussed in Chapter 1) is clearly relevant to such an argument. Although this conclusion should clearly provoke curiosity among farm groups, the dominance of economic arguments has the unintended effect of implying that the interest considerations of U.S. agriculture are the crucial test for setting international agriculture assistance policy. This is not, however, the intent of the LT argument. Such an implication must be resisted, if a justified development assistance policy is to be found.

I have described several difficulties that plague attempts to justify criminal laws against the recreational use of drugs (LAD) on paternalistic grounds, that is, because drugs are harmful to adults who use them. Some philosophers will have become impatient with this extended discussion. They may regard paternalistic arguments on behalf of LAD as quite beside the point. They may have little sympathy for paternalism in general, especially when it is “strong.” Even if they tolerate a limited extent of paternalism, I hope to have shown that a paternalistic defense of LAD is not compelling. Many philosophers believe that a more plausible justification for LAD is that the recreational use of drugs is harmful to others, that is, to nonusers. They will insist that the main defect with my attempt to draw analogies between drug use and other dangerous recreational pursuits such as skiing and mountain climbing is that these latter activities pose insignificant risks of harm to nonparticipants. In this chapter, I will explore this rationale for total prohibition of the recreational use of drugs by adults.

The “harm principle,” as it has come to be called, enjoys a privileged status in criminal law theory. Unlike paternalists, defenders of the harm principle need not struggle with the legitimacy of their rationale for legal intervention. No one (except anarchists) doubts that the criminal law should prohibit persons from causing harm to others.

There is a puzzle connected with my treatment of privacy that I feel obliged to explore. In the process of exploring the puzzle, we shall have an opportunity to see how privacy interacts with another social category, though one that seems to be at cross-purposes with privacy. I have been arguing that privacy, in one of its important and characteristic roles, insulates people from inappropriate manifestations of social pressure. (Whether a manifestation of social pressure is “inappropriate” is socially and historically variable.) Gossip involves bothering with parts of a person's life that are characteristically none of one's business and introduces an indirect form of social pressure that privacy norms would seem designed to exclude. In contrast to violations of privacy, gossip, though not directed to the individual discussed, does precisely what it would be rude to do directly to the person: discuss what is none of someone's business. Furthermore, gossip gives informational access to an individual in apparent violation of that individual's private domain. In a culture where people know that others gossip, the very social pressure from which we think it is privacy's role to insulate a person is unleashed, though in an attenuated form.