Lloyd L. Weinreb

The Right to Privacy

The question that I address in this paper is whether there is a right to privacy. It is not the question whether in the United States there is a legal right to privacy or, more particularly, a constitutional right to privacy. There are any number of ordinary legal rights and specific constitutional rights that might be so described, and the U.S. Supreme Court has referred also to a generic “right to privacy” that is implicit in the U.S. Constitution. Nor is the question that I address whether persons have a moral claim to privacy that others ought to respect. I assume that in many circumstances, respecting a persons claim to privacy is productive of the good and, if so, that the claim ought to be respected. Rather, my question is whether persons have a right to privacy not dependent on positive law, such that it ought ordinarily to be respected without regard to the consequences, good or bad, simply because it is right.

Recent Criticism of Natural Law Theory

A noteworthy feature of contemporary philosophy in the English-speaking world and beyond is a reawakening of interest in practical reason. The willingness to take reasons for action seriously in descriptive and prescriptive jurisprudence, as well as in political philosophy and ethics, has been a mark of many notable philosophical achievements over the past three decades. In jurisprudence, the works of H. L. A. Hart, Joseph Raz, and Ronald Dworkin certainly come to mind. In political philosophy, one immediately thinks of the competing theories of justice developed by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. In ethics, a long list of contributions would only begin with those of Alan Donagan, Alan Gewirth, Philippa Foot, David Wiggins, and John McDowell. The revival of interest in practical reason has brought in its wake renewed philosophical attention to theories of natural law. Long relegated to merely historical interest (at least outside of Roman Catholic intellectual circles), natural law theory is once again a competitor in contemporary philosophical debates about law, politics, and morals. What this means, for one thing, is that the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, Francisco Suarez,

What are Civil Rights

For all the discussion and debate about civil rights, it is striking how little attention is given initially to the question of what civil rights are. There is no well-understood principle of inclusion or exclusion that defines the category. Nor is there an agreed list of civil rights, except perhaps a very short, avowedly nonexhaustive one, with rather imprecise entries. Yet, if the extension of the category of civil rights is uncertain, its significance is not. All agree that it is a principal task of government to protect civil rights, so much so, indeed, that a failure to protect them usually is regarded as outweighing substantial achievements of other kinds. But a right does not count as a civil right just because it is valuable or valued. Some of the rights most often asserted as civil rights reflect practical interests of their possessors considerably less than other actual or potential rights not so identified. In the United States, familiar legal doctrine provides a shortcut to the specification of civil rights. They are whatever is embraced by the provisions of the federal Civil Rights Acts: the right to vote, fair housing, equal employment opportunity, and so forth. That path, however, is not adequate for the present purpose. For the most part, the statutes refer explicitly or implicitly to federal constitutional rights, and the collective reference to them as civil rights is unexplained. The bases of the constitutional rights are too various to be a reliable guide to an independently designated category of civil rights.

Natural Law and Justice.

Introduction I. Natural Law 1. Kosmos 2. The Law of Nature 3. The Law of the State 4. Natural Law without Nature II. Justice 5. Liberty 6. Equality 7. Justice 8. Justice and Natural Law Notes Index