This idea becomes clearer in Stanley Benn’s essay, “Privacy, Freedom, and Respect for Persons,” where he considers the value of privacy. Like Immanuel Kant, Benn develops a non-consequentialist argument: it is not the consequence of our actions, but rather the goodness of the act in itself that is significant. Benn looks at this in the context of privacy, attempting to show that “some minimal right to immunity from observation and reporting is required by certain basic features of our conception of a person” (Benn 224). Benn believes that invasions of privacy are inherently bad, because of their disrespect for personhood. He thus argues that everyone is entitled to a certain degree of consideration for the fact that they are rational, autonomous agents; we must recognize others as having “a kind of enterprise” like our own (229). Benn shows that, “to respect someone as a person is to concede that one ought to take account of the way in which his enterprise might be affected by one’s own decisions (229).” In other words, a decision or policy that both removes a person’s privacy and disregards its value, like Posner’s, is disrespectful of a person’s autonomy because it changes the meaning of his actions and alters his “consciousness of himself and his experienced relation to his world” (229).
Additionally, by placing individuals and corporations in the same pool, Posner implies that the economic success of companies will increase economic wealth and efficiency, which is
Additionally, by placing individuals and corporations in the same pool, Posner implies that the economic success of companies will increase economic wealth and efficiency, which is