More on The Language of Rights
Timothy Sandefur on Aug 1st 2005
Referring to my posts about the language of the “right to privacy,” David Fryman at David’s Blog writes, “What Sandefur should say is that all rights stem from a right to privacy. It’s not a backward construction. The implied right to privacy justifies the 4th Amendment, not the other way around.” Well, yes, that’s a way of putting it. But, of course, this “implied right to privacy” is the foundation for the rights of liberty and property as well. A person has as much a right to be “left alone” to sell his labor or his house or his watch as he has to be secure in his bedroom. These rights of action are all a part of the whole concept of rights to begin with. Life, liberty, and property are temporal instantiations of the same concept: the right to self-ownership. In the present tense, that is the right to life. In the future tense, it’s the right to liberty: the right to do with yourself as you wish into the future. In the past tense, it’s the right to property: the right to be secure in those possessions which you got by trading your liberty. So one could equally say that “the implied right to privacy justifies” every natural right that finds an explicit expression in the Constitution (as well as the Constitution itself, which is simply an instantiation of the right to self-defense).
Filed in The Bench
[...] Regarding the supposed right to privacy, Sandefur writes, I have never liked the phrase “right to privacy.” It is redundant. All rights are a right to privacy… The right to liberty, for example, means the right to do as you please while having others leave you alone. The term “right of privacy” is therefore circular. If it’s a right, then it is of necessity private. He expands a bit on his original posting here. [...]