Privacy: Essentially Contested, a Family Resemblance Concept, or a Family of Conceptions?

Abstract

The status of the concept of privacy is disputed. In this paper I consider arguments by Daniel Solove, that privacy is a family resemblance concept (in the sense of Wittgenstein, and by Deirdre Mulligan et al that it is an essentially contested concept (in the sense of Gallie). I argue that, although there are good reasons for taking it as a family resemblance concept, that this only explains agreement, not disagreement. Hence the theory will not serve Solove's purposes, and is rather consistent with agreement. Similar considerations suggest that privacy is not a normative concept, and hence that it is cannot be essentially contested. I argue instead that there are multiple conceptions of privacy, and furthermore disagreement about privacy are explained by the existence of parallel conversations about privacy that take place at 7 levels.