In the preceding chapter, I situated the prospects for social freedom in the domain of a certain social structure. This same structure, I claimed, invokes practices of privacy and group pressures to ensure the integrity of the various associations through which people become free social agents. The chapter ended with a speculative discussion of the social dynamics that would give rise to the kinds of groups that can enable social freedom to emerge as a value.

One immediate implication is that the practice of privacy (of the expressive-role sort) evolves only in certain historical contexts. I suggested that this sort of privacy evolves only when there is a high degree of social and economic specialization, when this specialization liberates individuals from dependence on any group, and where social welfare and security come to depend as much on individual initiative as on cultural rigidity. I illustrate in the present chapter that there is a considerable body of evidence – controversial, theoretical, and speculative though much of it is – to the effect that privacy as a social category emerges only under these conditions. If this claim can be sustained, it means that moral character and the way social life is morally experienced are historically conditioned. To the extent that our moral character is historically conditioned, then, as I argued in Chapter 5, a fundamental presupposition of current moral theory – that human nature is revealed rationally, not historically – is wrong.