Posner's Argument Analysis

Aside from threatening our freedom, ignoring the differences between personal and corporate privacy results in unusual conclusions. We often make a clear distinction between general corporate rights and personal rights, because they have different meanings and purposes in different contexts. And we rightfully treat humans and corporations differently. For example, individual and corporate taxes are not one in the same. Unlike most individuals, corporations end up saving money each year when it comes to taxation, as Catherine Rampell points out in her opinion article, “Corporations are people. So what if people were corporations?” But in recent years, the United States has accorded corporations more rights on the grounds that they are, in a

This would ultimately lead to a restructuring of his argument, since the two definitions of privacy are strikingly different. Yet Posner could potentially fashion a counter argument through the dictionary definition of “corporation” that Nina Totenberg cites in an NPR article: “’a number of persons united in one body for a purpose” (Totenberg). This indeed points to several similarities between corporations and people that Posner could use to group the two together. This definition still poses a problem, though, for if we regard corporations as associations of people, it makes little sense to only give individuals privacy within the

But not only is it difficult to prove that corporations are more efficient with their privacy than individuals are, this also circles back to the policy’s affect on individual autonomy. And I believe it is necessary for Posner to consider the implications of his argument for humanity: an ethics argument that does not propose the betterment of society is unlikely to lead to better laws. For although Posner could use his claim that “history does not teach that privacy is a precondition to creativity or individuality” to argue against privacy’s relation to autonomy, it is inevitable that his policy would impact society for good or bad (Posner 407). Posner needs to address the effect by presenting contemporary evidence to support the view that privacy is unimportant to human emotion and individuality since his historical argument is irrelevant. Early philosophers such as Aristotle recognized the important “distinction between the public sphere of political action and the private sphere associated with family and domestic life,” and so while privacy may not have looked the same in these past societies, it nevertheless did exist (DeCew). Since cultures and social conditions have changed dramatically since Aristotle’s time, it is difficult to make a relevant comparison between privacy then and