Reading Monk’s Wittgenstein I was struck by how cruel a fate it is to be buried with obloquy in the grave of a footnote.

I think that you rely on a non sequiter to make your argument. You hold that “there are serious moral issues concerning making details of other people’s lives public,” and use this to justify your lack of worry at the UK High Court granting an injunction against the publication of a book making public the details of someone’s life.

The non sequiter is your jump from pointing out the immorality of releasing (purportedly embarassing) information about someone in a book to your (admittedly tentative) conclusion that the government is justified in preventing such behavior. Regardless of how exactly morality is connected to just laws/just government action (a contentious and complicated philosophical issue to be sure!), it is at least clear that every act of immorality ought not result in government sanctions/intervention.

For instance, it is clearly wrong for me to promise to a friend of mine that I will meet him for dinner tomorrow night and then deliberately not show up at the agreed time/place just to get a kick out of seeing what a sucker my friend is. But do we want to pass laws against breaking promises (in situations where life/liberty/property are not hazarded by the promise breaking)? I should hope not.

Any way, we ought not hold those who wish to preserve their liberty of expression accountable for providing justification for their liberty not being infringed upon by the government. The burden of proof lies with those who want to restrict liberty, not with those who wish to exercise it. If correct, this view would support the liberal contention that liberty ought only be restricted when we can demonstrate a real harm that would come from a certain speech act (such as loss of life, liberty, property, as would result, say, from yelling “fire in a crowded theater). When someone merely prefers that a certain act of speech be restricted (because it would be merely embarassing or uncomfortable for the person who is being spoken of), they ought to have no legally recognized claim on the would-be speaker.

We must differentiate: Works of literature from works of mere biographical interest, and what kind of person’s life is made public.
First: If the person whose life is made public against her will is herself a person of public interest (a “celebrity”), she may have her share in the benefits as in the letdowns of this status. But if she is an unknown person with no public standing, her personal interest seem to me to carry much more weight.
Second: you have to take into account not only freedom of expression but freedom of art. This is much more difficult (morally too) because some details of the person’s life in question may well be recognizable, others may be distorted, others may be not from her life at all.
In any case it is a severe breach of confidence if the writer has had a close personal relationship to the person turned into literary material, for it is part of the unspoken agreement of such a relationship that we don’t make use of each other.

There’s a well known case in the literary world: famous Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1929-1973) who once lived with equally famous Swiss writer Max Frisch. Bachmann recognized herself in one of the fictional figures in one of Frischs book. Being used made her mentally ill.

The non sequiter is your jump from pointing out the immorality of releasing (purportedly embarassing) information about someone in a book to your (admittedly tentative) conclusion that the government is justified in preventing such behavior.

ej, I made no such non sequiter! In fact, I was explicilty agnostic about what the law should be:

I’m not sure where the law should draw the line and can see that it must err on the side of free expression.

This is a good discussion so far, but please don’t ascribe views to me I did not express.

After re-reading your post, I see that you do remain agnostic about when the law should and should not infringe upon free speech. However, if that is the view you wish to convey in this article, I am a bit confused about what you are trying to do with this article.

The article is called “Does Privacy Trump Free Expression,” and it begins with a discussion of the courts limiting someone’s freedom of speech. You write that you are not worried about this action by the courts, saying ” ‘Freedom of speech’ is indeed very important, but it seems to me there are serious moral issues concerning making details of other people’s lives public.”

After that you claim agnosticism about what the law should be, but claim that we should have “more moral sympathy” for those whose privacy is violated by others’ speech.

My question is, what does the first part of your article have to do with the second part? It does appear that in the paragraph beginning with “I’m not so worried,” you are trying to take a stance not merely on the morality of exposing someone’s private life in a book, but on whether the courts ought to be able to meddle in such affairs. After all, if you don’t make the leap from moral to legal, what sense would it make to base whether you are worried by the court’s action on morality?

“You write that you are not worried about this action by the courts…”

I actually said, “I’m not so worried,” comparing myself to others I’d just quoted, who thought it was terrible. That is a comment on the legal situation, true, but a very limited, tentative one.
The point of the post was to question some of what seemed to be taken for granted and provide some grounds for that questioning. And just because I distinguish the morality from the legality, that doesn’t mean I think the two are totally unrelated: hence the relation of the first part to the second.
I really don’t want to go into further discussion on what exactly I meant or said. I think it’s clear enough. Further comments should be about what is right or should be lawful, not the details of my post.

One aspect of this that I think is interesting is the question of who owns the facts about person X or person X’s life. At first blush it seems obvious that person X does, or at least ought to be thought to. Your life is your business, mine is mine, hers is hers, etc. But on second blush it looks more complicated, in the sense that we all own (’own’) our own stories or worldviews or narratives of self, and those are made up partly of facts (what we take to be facts) about other people. We influence each other, we affect each other; part of the fabric of our mental worlds is woven from our interactions with other people. In that sense, the effect of a privacy injunction seems like a more profound blockage of freedom than a mere ‘no you can’t peddle gossip about your famous friend without her permission.’ It seems like an interference with the ability to think one’s own thoughts and then write about them.

In other words one can imagine someone wanting to write a memoir or a rumination in which the influence of another person is fundamentally important, is woven into the entire subject, is a large part of what created the thoughts and ideas and ruminations the writer wants to write about. Those ideas do (it seems to me) belong to the person who wants to write about them - even though they are about someone else.

Which is not to say that I don’t think there’s anything to worry about in the privacy issue, because I do.

Yes indeed. I would imagine that considerations like these will influence judges when they are deciding whether freedom of privacy or of expression trumps the other in any given case. Which is why I can’t see that this particular judgement is a blow against freedom of speech in general. It’s simply a judgement that in this case, the public interest or self-expression cases aren’t strong enough. That may be the wrong judgement, but the principle that it is made by balancing these competing claims seems fair. Unless you want to argue that freedom of speech always trumps privacy. But does anyone really think that? It seems that we all accept that there are things we should not be allowed to say about other people just because we want to. There has to be more of a case than that.

“But does anyone really think that?”

Yes. Over here, especially (in the US). It’s often an unargued unqualifiable close-the-eyes imperative - freedom of speech always trumps pretty much everything. Considerations, competing goods, tensions just don’t come into it. It can be a tad frustrating…

People like that should be locked up!

snicker