Privacy, rights and natural law: Toward a transpersonal/ecological political theory.

摘要

The thesis develops a broad critical overview of the privacy literature, and of the main approaches to the private/public distinction in political and legal philosophy. After looking at the growing attack on privacy, we discuss its main definitions, and lay down the metaphysical presuppositions of our own transpersonal definition. We then analyze how the emergence of privacy and personality rights counteracts the primacy of property rights in the American constitutional jurisprudence of the last hundred years. We focus on how the right to privacy was conceived first and foremost by Justice Brandeis, and then by Justice Douglas, according to a "homeorhetoric", or dynamic and non formalistic, natural law theory. Starting from Brandeisian premises, we elaborate a hierarchical tripartition of privacy/personality/property rights, resting on a principle of "essential harm", with its corollary principle of "non self-destruction", which is supposed to overcome the atomistic limits of Mill's only partially transpersonal principle of "harm to others". "Ecological transpersonalism", which Brandeis and Douglas derive most directly from Emerson and Thoreau, is thus shown to be the only approach capable of making privacy a fundamental right. In the second part, we argue in favour of the dialectical monism of the perennial and Platonic philosophy, which apprehends reality as innerly articulated into a spiritual and a material pole, and makes privacy the cornerstone of an ecological and spiritual individualism. The bipolar dualism of the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions is seen as promoting a radical separation of spiritual and material, which subjects a despiritualized human privacy to an externalist ethics of merely traditional habits and codes. This opens the way to unipolarity, the reduction of reality to the sole material pole, and primarily to the unipolar dualism of Lockean liberalism, with its merely voluntaristic and conventional assertion of separation, an atomistic independence contradicting the full material (inter)dependence inherent in its own unipolar premises. We show how liberalism ultimately gives in to dependence, the nihilistic loss of privacy (and of the groundless ground of being that in privacy lives) characterizing the unipolar monism of the Benthamite tradition.