The Public-Private Ethical Distinction in Our Economy

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." Thus declared Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. In the context of this statement, the private-public distinction is employed not in politicoeconomic terms (which are, however, derivative), but in an individual, ethical sense, pertaining to the objectively correct atmosphere which one should experience in and away from the company of other men.

Any rational treatise, including this one, will undertake a definition of terms prior conducting their analysis. Public undertakings include any information shared or activities undertaken in the presence or with the assistance of others who do not necessarily possess a specific or proximate relationship to the person conducting said undertakings. The specificity or such relationship, non-existent in the case of public undertakings, is contained in its relation to the activity/information which the individual is disclosing. Contacting one's trusted doctor in regard to an intimate physical disorder is not public exposure of the matter. Speaking about it to colleagues at work with whom one exchanges only twenty casual words a week, is.

Private undertakings, in contrast, include that information or activity which the individual either keeps exclusively to himself, or shares with individuals whose closed council or assistance he seeks; that is, he does not expect the matter to be known or intruded into by any persons in whom he did not confide. When one goes about the aforementioned doctor's visit, he does not expect his colleagues at work to learn of the nature of the problem discussed between him and the physician. It subsequently becomes the moral task of all parties involved in this closed realm of privacy not to expand its bounds beyond the limit decreed by mutual and unanimous will.