Our understanding of privacy and the role it plays in structuring social freedom is the focus of this book. Obscuring our view of these concepts are confidence in a narrow notion of rationality and a corresponding denigration of culture and conforming tendencies in the properly formed moral consciousness. Evidence of this confidence and denigration appears in the preceding two chapters.

In those chapters, I illustrate the pervasiveness, if not the overall dominance, of a view of how moral judgment relates to cultural norms. According to that picture, cultural norms have no moral authority and only coincidental relevance. Independent validation of a norm is construed narrowly to require that one employ the principle of articulated rationality with reference to that norm. As I explained, this principle has two elements: (1) that one is not in a proper state vis-à-vis one's beliefs and values unless one is in possession of a rational defense of these principles and (2) that reference to what one's culture or community accepts is not part of a rational defense. The individual is judged competent to find compelling reasons of the right sort on which to construct a moral outlook. For the outlook to be successfully grounded, it should appeal to an individual with no preexisting allegiance to a community norm as such. For us to express our nature fully, we must renounce any appeal to how the cultures around us influence us.