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... and each of those are determined by Constitutional rights, and any laws states may impose that don't interfere with Constitutional limits on the states' abilities to govern their own citizens and contracts.
In the case of all three, these involve contracts, so the answer should probably be within the limits on contracts imposed by law. In the case of the federal and state governments, that contract governing the extent of governmental control over its citizens rights is the US Constitution, specifically, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Ultimately, in a country founded on the rule of law, all of these come down to two things--what the law says, and whether that law is Constitutional.
If you, for example, were denied housing because you refused to sign a lease containing a demonstrably illegal clause, your recourse is the fair housing law of your state, and if applicable, federal housing law. But, if you sign a lease, you accept its conditions (barring actions which may make you a participant in an illegality), and the rights enumerated to the landlord are part of that mutually agreed upon contract. If your landlord begins to act beyond the limits of that contract, your recourse is to demand that the activity cease, and failing that, legal action.
You see, it's almost impossible to make a general statement about situations which are defined by specific contract, and how the limits of the legality of the contract are defined by law.
Here's sort of what I mean, taking the contractual examples of government and your example of a landlord's rights. A common clause in any lease is the right of the landlord to inspect his property. In order to do so, he has to have access. Now, if a lease clause gives that landlord an absolute right to enter the property at any time without notice, some state laws and Constitutional theory might suggest that the landlord is making an unreasonable encroachment on your right to privacy. If you were refused housing because you would not sign the lease because the clause were illegal under state or federal housing law, then you could show cause that you had been harmed by the landlord's actions.
The case could be construed differently if there were no housing law enumerating the ways in which your privacy must be protected. It would be up to you to seek redress on the basis of privacy being one of those rights protected under Article IX.
The case might be construed even more differently if there were no housing law protecting you and you voluntarily (for whatever reason, desperation, inconvenience, lack of time) signed the lease, which would mean that you had agreed to the legal terms of a contract and agreed to surrender your rights to privacy in exchange for the housing.
Now, the ethical and moral considerations are even more complex, and the intersection of the ethical, moral and legal questions are immeasurably more complex.
Even if, say, you felt, and could justify with impervious ethical logic, the death penalty to be fundamentally wrong--that such was an excessive abuse of the power of the state over its citizens, the issue is still bound by law, and the test, under the Constitution, would be whether or not you could prove, legally, that state execution constituted a denial of an individual's Constitutional rights. Your only other recourse would be to influence your government--using that ethical logic--to amend or repeal its laws on the death penalty.
In a weird way, it probably explains why this country has so many lawyers, because almost every situation of consequence in this country involves a contract, explicit or implicit.
Cheers.
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