Moral blindness in Victoria: The right to privacy trumping the right to life 
Posted By Mirko Bagaric on April 22nd, 2007
Human rights documents erode human flourishing because they don’t provide a hierarchy of rights and minor (often illusory) rights end up trumping important rights. Welcome to Victoria 2007.
The so-called right to privacy has become so bloated that it is endangering the right to life of Victorians. In the latest scandal, the Heath Department omitted to tell police the identities of a number of HIV positive men that were suspected of deliberately trying to infect people with AIDS.
One of the men, Michael Neal, has been committed to stand trial for allegedly trying to infect a number of men with the deadly disease. The failure of the Heath Department to act appropriately in relation to these matters become too hot to handle for the State government. It is one of the reasons the government has given for sacking the chief health officer.
In reality the blame for this decision, rests totally with the government. For the past few years our confused government has been talking up the notion of human rights, at the expense of the common good.
This culminated in the Charter of Human Rights, which commenced at the start of this year and resulted in Victorian becoming the first state in Australia to adopt a bill of rights. Talking pride of place in the Charter is the right to privacy (section 13).
Even prior to the commencement of the Charter, the right to privacy was harming Victorians. It was being used as a shield by some of the most depraved people in Victoria to continue going about harming some of the most vulnerable members of the community.
In late 2005, the right to privacy was invoked to prevent the residents of Sunbury getting confirmation that there was a serial phedophile living in their midst. Shortly after this, a tribunal held that a convicted criminal’s privacy prevented his mug shots being displayed publicly. More recently, police refused to release the full list of prior convictions of suspected double murderer John Watkins – even after he was shot dead by police!
The only guaranteed outcome from the Victorian bill of rights is that it will result in the interests of the socially disadvantaged being further eroded. It can be no other way. Under Victorian’s new system, community defining decisions relating to the core values that we want to live by are taken from the people and given to judges.
The main problem with this is that the only people who have the money to go to court and defend their rights are the rich and powerful, who are already overdosing on them.
Moreover, the strongest defenders of rights are civil libertarians. They suffer from moral shortsightedness. Their moral horizons stop and start with themselves and the person immediately before them. Their moral compass is permanently frozen in an inward position and hence is incapable of giving weight to adverse consequences that stem from their fanatical adherence to fictitious abstract notions called rights.
Humans don’t need an limitless array of rights to flourish. What we need is a transparent moral framework within which difficult choices can be made, where the interests of one person conflict with that of another.
Within that framework, each person’s interests must count equally and the ultimate aim must be to maximise human well-being and eliminate suffering. This framework cannot remain neutral to the difference between guilt and innocence and must rank the interests of the innocent above those that imperial the safety of the community.
As far as human flourishing is concerned, if you want to know what interests are important and how to rank human interests the answer is simple. It is a matter of biology and sociology, not misguided social and legal engineering. To attain any degree of flourishing we need the right to life, physical integrity, liberty, food and water, shelter, property and access to good health care and education. After that it is time to speak of responsibilities and the common good.
So where does privacy rank in the hierarchy of important concerns? About last. How worried do you reckon people in third world countries who are struggling with the necessities of life are about their privacy? The question seems stupid. But it is important because it underlines the fact that privacy is simply a middle class invention by people who have got nothing else to worry about.
Normally they would have every right to continue living in their moral fog, but they’ve overstepped their bounds when their confusion permeates the impressionable, reflexive minds of some law-makers and results in innocent people being killed or put at risk.
The right to privacy is the adult equivalent of Santa Claus and unicorns. No one has yet been able to identify where the right to privacy comes from and why we need it.
In fact the empirical evidence shows that the right to privacy is destructive of our well-being. It prevents us attaining things that really matter, such as safety and security and makes us paranoid of one another.
For communities to operate effectively individuals need to build attachments to one and another. This can only occur in circumstances where we have information about each other.
We are afraid of what we don’t know. Information promotes understanding and acceptance. The world would be a much improved place if we all knew each others strengths and weaknesses; dreams and fears. We would see just how similar we actually are. Acquisition of this knowledge is retarded by the Trojan horse that is the right to privacy.
In the end a strong right to privacy is nothing more than a request for secrecy – which is the refuge of the guilty, paranoid and misguided; none of whom should be heeded in sorting through the moral priorities of the community. These priorities start and end with achieving good outcomes.
A version of this was published in The Age on 22 April 2007.