Wednesday, January 12, 2005
The Right to Privacy
This semester I'm teaching Family Law, and today I devoted the first class to tracing the development of the right to privacy in the context of human relationships. When viewed as a seamless line of cases (Meyer - Pierce - Griswold - Eisenstadt - Roe - Lawrence, among others) it becomes tempting to embrace the development as a logical unfolding of family and individual autonomy. I assume that most champions of the moral anthropology applaud the holdings of Meyer (state can't forbid teaching of foreign language) and Pierce (state can't require public education), especially their framing of parental obligations and duties in terms of natural rights. Even Griswold is grounded in a conception of the marital relationship as sacred, requiring its own sphere of autonomy against state interference. The right to privacy, in many respects, is entirely consistent with the system of limited government / mediating structures envisioned by Catholic social thought.
So I have a question for co-bloggers and readers who may have devoted more thought to this area than I have: where exactly does the right to privacy's development deviate from the Catholic worldview? Is it Eisenstadt's disconnect of privacy from traditional family relationships? Or is it not until Roe elevates privacy over competing claims of personhood from another living being? Or is there a problem with the right to privacy itself?
Rob
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2005/01/the_right_to_pr.html