"A useful way to approach the idea of a right to privacy is to see how, in their essential structure as rights-generating grounds of duties, privacy interests resemble or overlap with the negative liberties of traditional political theory. Consider first, by way of contrast, how a positive right to autonomy might be specified. True, a right to have an autonomous life is a conceptual impossibility because nobody else can be under a duty to provide me with something that, by definition, I must do for myself. Only I can lead my life from the inside; nobody can coerce me into doing so, for coercion destroys genuine self-determination through external pressure, nor can I be relieved of the fundamentally personal responsibility for leading an autonomous life in any other way. However, it is possible to sidestep this conceptual objection by reconstituting the supposed entitlement as a right to be provided ith “the conditions and opportunities” for leading an autonomous life. This right is “conceptually” unproblematic, but has never (to my knowledge) been a moral or political reality in the history of the world. For nobody could claim such a right unless society's material and technical resources were such that the same right could be universalized to everyone, in accordance with the foundational moral norm of equal respect for persons. Once this “merely” contingent, but under current conditions impossibly demanding, matrial prerequisite is acknowledged, one is obliged to conclude, with Raz, that our mastery over the physical environment has not yet developed to the point where there could bea general right to be provided with the conditions for living an autonomous life: A right to autonomy can be had only in the interest of the right-holder justifies holding members of the society at large to be duty-bound to him to provide him with the social environment necessary to give him a chance to have an autonomous life. Assuming that the interest of one person cannot justify holding so many to be subject to potentially burdensome dutis, regarding such fundamental aspects of their lives, it follows that there is no right to personal autonomy. Personal autonomy may be a moral ideal . . . But in itself, in its full generality, it transcends what any individual has a right to. Put it another way: a person may be denied the chance to have an autonomous life, through the working of social institutions and by individual action, without any of his rights being overridden or violated."