ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the elements of agents, harm and consent, and combines them to see how they generate assertions that a constitutional right has or has not been violated. It then discusses stock of the six types of background theory that structure arguments about constitutional rights. For the claimants in Glucksberg, one strategy is to overcome the problem of balancing harms by treating harm as irrelevant. One claimant position in Glucksberg, then, is the argument that the patients had a constitutional right to obtain physician-assisted suicide insofar as they had validly consented to do so. In order to identify the more specific background theories, the chapter distinguishes between arguments about individual actors and arguments about society. The word individualist will be used to characterize any background theory about some individual interest. The word collectivist will be used to characterize any background theory about the interests of society as a whole.
