Rights have inherent limits.

Op-Ed: Americans are obsessed with 'rights.' In the pandemic, that's killing us https://t.co/OXqmBgqqQX

— mozu (@mozumozumozu) July 2, 2020

One-quarter of the world’s constitutions provide a right against disability discrimination. Ours doesn’t. Germans have a constitutional right to feed pigeons in a public square or to ride horses in the forest. We don’t. Many of the world’s constitutions permit citizens to claim rights against private companies. Good luck with that here. Europeans have a right to be forgotten on the Internet. We wish.


This kind of absolutism comes at a cost. When rights are perceived as absolute, judges can get nervous about declaring them. The Supreme Court laid those anxieties bare when it denied the right to an education in 1974, worrying openly that such a right might portend a right to food or shelter. The court in 1987 rejected a right to avoid execution based on proof of racially biased prosecution and sentencing practices, reasoning that recognizing such a right “throws into serious question the principles that underlie the entire criminal justice system.”


Don’t blame the framers of the Constitution, who well understood that rights had inherent limits.

Instead of continuing the ceaseless tit-for-tat of “I have rights!”/ ”No, you don’t!” we should instead begin to develop a language of moderation when it comes to rights.

We can concede that an arbitrary masking law, one that, say, required masks only on weekdays or only for men, would violate our rights. But people also have a right to go food shopping without the risk that an unmasked person transmits a deadly disease.

How this conflict is resolved isn’t for me to decide, or for you. We have democratic institutions — legislatures and governors and mayors — precisely to reconcile our rights, through law.

アメリカ人は何かというと「おれには権利がある」というが、しかし、権利はあっても、無制限ではないのであって、他の権利や、憲法上の重要な原則と衝突する場合、民主的な議論を通じて、法律によって制限されるものだ、と。

結果として、アメリカ人は、権利、権利と言うわりには、身障者に対する権利も保証していないし、インターネット上の自己情報について削除してもらう権利もないんだ、と。