Abstract

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 person's 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