ONCE MORE INTO THE MORAL MAZE

The autumn series of The Moral Maze has just begun. Last night was a debate on the morality of taxation. And, from the summer series, here are audios of the programmes in which I took part:

Does celebrity activism make the world a better place? 20 April 2011

What are the boundaries of privacy? 11 April 2011

Sexualization and Slut Walks 18 May 2011

Should science define morality? 1 June 2011

FOR PRIVACY. AGAINST PRIVACY LAWS

In my previous posts on gossip and on l’affair dsk I made two main points with respect to privacy, injunctions and censorship. First, that privacy is a valued asset and a civilized society should know the distinction between the public sphere and the private realm. Second, that censorship and legal constraints on reporting are not useful ways of maintaining that distinction, either from a pragmatic point of view or as a matter of principle. I think that the farce over Twitter, the Sunday Herald, parliamentary privilege and the Premiership footballer (OK, Ryan Giggs) has validated both these points.

The entitlement to privacy is an essential quality of civilized life. This is as true of DSK, Fred the Shred and Ryan Giggs as it is of you and me.  What footballers and bankers and politicians get up to in bed is a matter for them, their lovers and their friends and family.  Public figures should be judged primarily on their public actions and principles, not by their bedroom antics and private predilections. Poking into intimate aspects of people’s lives and pretending that this constitutes ‘news’ degrades journalism, coarsens our culture, and potentially tears apart lives.

But the rise and rise of gossip cannot simply be laid at the door of the tabloids nor even of everyone’s fave hate media corporation.

THE OUTRAGE OF EQUAL TREATMENT BEFORE THE LAW

The sight of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a man so rich that he wears $7000 dollar suits, a man so powerful that he could make or break countries with a single policy, being forced to sit in a New York courtroom, handcuffed, unshaven, disheveled and mute has inevitably unleashed a torrent of comment on both sides of the Atlantic.

There has, of course, been a large element of schadenfreude in the response, malicious glee at seeing a powerful figure cut down to size. Anglo-American commentators especially have relished the fall of a haughty, Gallic champagne socialist seemingly unable to keep his pants up. There has also been, in some circles, a rush to convict DSK before a shred of evidence has been laid before a court.

There has also, however, been genuine shock and, particularly in France, bewilderment, even outrage, at the treatment meted out to DSK. ‘Nothing’, the French philosopher, and leading public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy wrote, ‘permits the entire world to revel in the spectacle, this morning, of this handcuffed figure, his features blurred by 30 hours of detention and questioning, but still proud.’

INVASION OF PRIVACY WE SHOULD TRULY WORRY ABOUT

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, a seminal account of the CIA, extraordinary rendition and torture, has an interview in the New Yorker with Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who is about to be tried for violating the Espionage Act by leaking to a journalist secret documents about America’s covert surveillance of its own citizens. Drake, as Mayer puts it, is effectively being charged with being ‘an enemy of the state’. But it’s a state that, as Drake argues and as Mayer fleshes out, is out of control in its desire and capacity to spy upon its citizens. What has been created, in the words of one of Mayer’s interviewees, is a ‘national surveillance state’:

GOSSIP, PRIVACY AND CENSORSHIP

‘What gives a journalist the right to know whom you slept with last night?’ That was a question posed by my fellow panelist Clifford Longley to Gavin Millar QC on this week’s The Moral Maze which explored the limits of privacy and free speech. Millar avoided answering the question. But the answer is not as straightforward as many might imagine. Certainly a journalist has no ‘right’ to know with whom I slept.  But (unless he uses illegal methods such as, say, hacking into my phone) neither do I have the ‘right’, in my view, to stop him finding out and gossiping about it, even in a national newspaper, however distasteful and embarrassing that may be for me.

Of course, I am pretty safe from lenses and mikes of News of the World hacks. Many politicians and celebrities clearly are not.  The fact that newspapers, and newspaper readers, seem so obsessed by the sex lives, drinking habits, and party antics, of footballers and actors and pop stars reveals something unpleasant about our culture. But it doesn’t mean that such prurient interest should be a matter for the law. And therein lies one of the problems with the current debate about privacy: it confuses the recognition that something is odious or distasteful with the belief that therefore it should be censored.