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  • Why Privacy Isn’t Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability
  • Judith Wagner DeCew (bio)
Why Privacy Isn’t Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability. By Anita Allen. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

In Why Privacy Isn't Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability, Anita Allen offers a thought-provoking examination of an original and timely topic. Accountability for conduct is often thought most relevant for governmental affairs and business enterprises. Allen, well known for her work on privacy, turns her attention in this book to accountability concerns that extend to "private life," the realms and activities where individuals feel "entitled to enjoy a number of states, feelings, thoughts, acts, and relationships for which we owe others no accounting" (1). Contrary to John Stuart Mill's claim in On Liberty that individuals are only accountable to society for actions that affect others, and thus not for "self-regarding" actions, or actions that concern only themselves, Allen argues that there are no truly self-regarding actions (44). On her view, "as individuals, couples, families, and communities we live lives enmeshed in webs of accountability for conduct [and] . . . intimacies relating to sex, health, child rearing, finances, and other matters termed private" (2). According to Allen, this accountability is pervasive, a common expectation, imperative, and even an obligation, and it can extend to persons with whom we have personal ties as well as to those with whom we do not. The most extreme form of accountability is legal liability to sanction. Other forms of accountability expect us as individuals "to report, explain, justify, and otherwise answer to others for the choices we make about our own lives" (4).

Allen reiterates the importance of privacy concerns that have become more prominent in law, ethics, and public policy debates. She repeats her own emphasis on the positive value of privacy and her defense of privacy in spite of criticisms that privacy protection interferes with public safety, public health, law enforcement, group interests, civic virtues, and enhanced security necessary in an age of terrorism. Allen insists she is not "switching sides" but is instead arguing that "although privacy is important, accountability is important too" and that "robust regard for privacy does not eliminate the desirability of many forms of official and unofficial accountability" (7). Her goals are to emphasize the importance of accountability in ordinary personal life and also to show "how a preeminently liberal, democratic society accommodates the competing demands of vital privacy and vital accountability" (11). [End Page 227] Some readers will be most interested in the early theoretical sections of the book that focus on the nature, grounds, and functions of accountability; the value of accountability when it enhances one's status as a moral agent; and the ways accountability can be arbitrary, unjust, oppressive, and humiliating. Allen characterizes accountability broadly, "as a matter of actual and felt imperatives, including obligations, duties, and responsibilities" (17). For Allen there are five modes of accountability: reporting, explaining, justifying acts and omissions, submitting to sanctions, and maintaining reliable patterns of behavior. The grounds of obligations to be accountable to others include consent, reliance, dependency, and, at times, public need (21). Accountability functions to enable and limit power, to enable and limit responsibility, and to foster intimacy and solidarity (26). The determination of when one is accountable and to whom is based on social context and changing norms, and one may have a duty to be accountable to individuals as well as to family or groups.

Among staunch defenders of privacy, almost none would defend privacy as absolute. Critics of privacy, particularly feminists, have urged more accountability for private life to expose violence against women and other abuse. Allen makes it clear that accountability for private and personal information and activities predates the feminism of the 1960s (36–37). Yet if accountability in private realms is important and pervasive, then the question arises whether accountability will destroy privacy, leading to a loss of peace of mind and a collapse of individual rights. Allen does not believe this will be so, and proceeds to analyze the need for personal accountability in private realms using a wealth of real-world examples.

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