Human Rights for the Digital Age

Abstract

Human rights are those legal and/or moral rights that all persons have simply as persons. In the current digital age, human rights are increasingly being either fulfilled or violated in the online environment. In this article, I provide a way of conceptualizing the relationships between human rights and information technology. I do so by pointing out a number of misunderstandings of human rights evident in Vinton Cerf's recent argument that there is no human right to the Internet. I claim that Cerf fails to recognize the existence of derived human rights. I argue further that we need to consider what other human rights are necessitated by the digital age. I suggest we need a Declaration of Digital Rights. As a step toward the development of such a declaration, I suggest a framework for thinking through how to ensure the human rights are satisfied in digital contexts.

Notes

1. Indeed, Rights theory is typically taught alongside utilitarianism, virtue theory, and Kant's ethics in most introductory ethics courses. See, for example, such standard introductory ethics texts as Simon Blackburn's (2009) Ethics: A Very Short Introduction or Louis P. Pojman's (2004) Ethics: How Should We Live?

2. As is evidenced by the fact that the well regarded Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has separate entries on “rights” and “legal rights.”

3. There is some debate over whether it is possible to have a completely “rights-based morality.” J. L. Mackie (1978) has argued in favor of such a theory as providing a unifying principle for morality, but Joseph Raz (1984) has rejected it on the grounds that there is more to morality than rights (e.g., virtue, supererogatory actions).

4. Note that Ron is ethically obligated to respect Beth's right to the truth whether or not there is a legal requirement to do so.

5. A few nations, such as Estonia, France, and Costa Rica, already legally require that access to the Internet be treated as a fundamental right (La Rue, 2011). However, for the purposes of this article, I am concerned here with whether there is a moral right to the Internet.

6. This is an indication that what Cerf is also concerned with is human rights as moral rights; no legal right is timeless.

7. Admittedly, Cranston's and Rawls' reasons for taking this view differ from Cerf's (and from each other's). Cranston argues that the list of human rights should only include political and civil rights. Rawls argues that the list should be limited to what is required for a state to maintain legitimacy—in other words, as criteria for when intervention would be justified.

8. We need not assume, however, that all the human rights listed in the UN documents are morally justifiable. My own view, for example, is that the rights of authors and creators in their intellectual works is not a human right.

9. In addition the limits on speech imposed by other rights, the following are also often included in UN documents as reasonable limits on speech—“national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals” (ICCPR Articles 18, 19, and 21). Interestingly, the rights to express and seek information are among the few rights where the limit of the right is spelled out in the article asserting the right. In general, it goes without saying that any particular right is limited by other human rights, but the framers of these documents seem to think this must be explicitly said in the case of rights to expression and access to information. One might see these addenda as an attempt to specifically spell out the only reasons for limitations, and thus setting up clearer guidelines on what might justify any restriction.