Maybe something analogous is true of civil liberties. Maybe—like promises—
they too are not supposed to be sensitive to changes on the scale of social costs.
Certainly some have thought so. Civil liberties are often regarded as rights, and
the idea of “rights as trumps”
—which many have found appealing, at least at
the level of rhetoric—is precisely the idea that rights are not to be regarded as
vulnerable to routine changes in the calculus of social utility