Do you have a right to a secret?

Everything in this library is supposed to be answerable. This one is different: it is a question about what should not be answerable, and children have a strong instinct about it before they can defend it.

There is a difference that matters and is easy to miss, and Sissela Bok made it the centre of her book. Keeping something back is not the same act as putting something false in its place. Both hide, and they are not equally wrong. Someone who says “that is private” has done something different from someone who invents a reason. Most arguments about secrets run into trouble by treating the two as one thing.

Then there is the case that makes the whole question hard: the secret that is harming someone. A promise to keep quiet, or a private fear, that a child is carrying alone. Almost everyone agrees those should be told — to someone — and the difficulty is that the person best placed to tell is the one who was asked to keep it.

Which is why the useful version of this for a child is not a rule but a distinction they can carry: secrets about things are usually yours to keep, secrets about harm are not, and the second kind is exactly the kind you should not be handling on your own. That is a line worth being able to say out loud, because it is hard to see clearly while you are inside it.

Try it

Write four things in a list: one you would tell anyone, one you would tell a friend, one you would tell nobody, and one that should be told even if you did not want to. The fourth is the hard one.

What do you think?

Do you think there is a right answer to this question?

Yes, I think soNo — and here's whyI'm not sure yet

Talk about it

• Is keeping a secret the same as lying?
• Should a secret that hurts someone be kept?
• Who decides what counts as private?

Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make

• If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to worry about.

  Everybody has things they keep back that are not wrong: a surprise, an illness, a private grief, a plan. Nothing-to-hide would require giving those up too, which is why almost nobody actually lives that way.

• Secrets let people do harm unnoticed.

  True, which is why the rule is not 'secrets are bad' but 'some secrets should be given up' — and the question is who gets to decide which, and what stops them deciding everything.

• Children shouldn't keep secrets from their parents.

  Then a child has nobody to test difficult thoughts on, and learns that the only way to have privacy is to become better at hiding. What people usually mean is: not secrets that hide harm.

What other philosophers think

• Sissela BokDistinguished secrecy from lying: keeping something back is not the same as planting something false, and a society with no secrecy at all is not one you would want to live in.
• Jean-Jacques RousseauConfessed things in his Confessions that nobody had asked about, then admitted he was also hiding others — a demonstration that self-disclosure is selective too.
• Samuel Warren and Louis BrandeisArgued in 1890 that privacy is a right in its own terms, not just a way of hiding wrongdoing — the argument that built modern privacy law.

If you want to go further

• Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation — Sissela Bok1982. The book that separates secrecy from lying properly.
• The Right to Privacy — Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis1890 law review article, and the founding document of privacy as a right.

Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.