Why Privacy Is Important Rhetorical Analysis

In his essay, “Why privacy is important,” James Rachels argues that in order to “maintain the variety of social relationships with other people that we want to have,” privacy must be thought of as a crucial to our lives (292). However, Rachels disregards the context, and most importantly, our true motives in sharing, and thus offers a less compelling argument. Rachels believes that accounting for the value of privacy simply by looking at specific, unusual circumstances fails to demonstrate the importance of privacy in ordinary situations; hence, he chooses to focus on common cases where privacy is relevant. From this approach, he determines that we value privacy because the amount of privacy that we might have with a person essentially defines the relationship. From there, he specifies that, “our relationships with other people determine, in large part how, how we act toward them and how they behave toward us. Moreover there are different patterns of behavior associated with different relationships” (293). Indeed, we do not act toward our mother the way we do
He discusses, for example, certain bonds of affections that are expected in a friendships where we feel comfortable enough to show “sides of our personalities which we would not tell or show to just anyone” (294). In some cases, Rachels notes, we may assume that we are closer friends with someone than we actually are, his example being a person who discovers that one of his good friends loves to write, but neglected to share this. Rachels believes that this principle can be applied in a more general sense, for people have “a conception of the kind and degree of knowledge concerning one another which it is appropriate for them to have” (294). Nevertheless, as Rachels points out, behavioral norms are flexible, and may vary from person to person, time-period to time-period and culture to