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The Right to Be Left Alone Is the Right to Be No One
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18452 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
4,617 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
In his article “Privacy and Liberal Legal Culture,” Professor Hittinger offers an excellent analysis of the cultural elements that led the Supreme Court to develop a generalized, rather than case-specific, right to privacy - a development that has no adequate basis in the Constitution.
The “right to be left alone,” however, is counter-productive as a generalized doctrine, a fault that can be attributed to its abstract treatment of freedom of choice. It fails to come to terms with the complex interrelationships between self and society that make the concept of individual choice meaningful. Hence, rather than supporting, it undermines, and in extremis would dissolve, that individual autonomy and human freedom it attempts to serve. In effect, it would serve no one, for the self - the subject of ethical discourse - that freedom serves would be minimized.
The doctrine of the “right to be left alone” is dangerously seductive because we tend to restrict our attention to the many instances of freedom of choice that enhance human life in our society. There are clear and convincing reasons to support the “right to be left alone” with some limits, and those limits are less restrictive in a pluralistic society such as ours than in a more culturally homogeneous society.
The rules that governed a more parochial America - for instance, the criminal adultery law under which a Wisconsin married woman was recently convicted - cannot be imposed without social warfare on contemporary Americans. Because such rules remain important to such important institutions as the family, we must rely on social sanctions to preserve institutional strength. However, we threaten these and other vital institutions gravely if we transform the “right to be left alone” into a generalized constitutional doctrine.
THE LIMITS OF MILL'S NOTION OF FREEDOM
The doctrine that we should be free to do those things that do not harm others, put forth by John Stuart Mill, fails to do justice to how identifications and conceptions of self develop within societies. And it misunderstands how the human mind works in solving problems. Because Mill misunderstood these processes, he also failed to understand that the generalization of the right of privacy - in his terms, the right to do anything that does not harm others - is destructive of the very values it is designed to uphold.
In making my
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