ChrisCam Broadsheet

2553.\\ Access to Information is Not a Fundamental Right

In times such as these, where more people believe in alien abduction than have faith in the fidelity of the Federal Government, it is often with distress and alarm that I encounter news reports of such utter nonsense that it literally causes heart palpitations.

I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, that the great intellectual powerhouse that is common wisdom believes the things it believes. My 4 year old believes that Lost should be on every day, for instance. My 13 year old believes that any logical argument can be countered with 'whatever'. I'll lay odds that if you polled the world on who best represents the best hope for mankind they might just pick a fictional character. I would choose Jack Bauer, but that is beside the point.

To paraphrase Marcus Aurelius, it is pretty ridiculous to be surprised at anything which happens in this life. So it comes as no great shock, although with a meaningful level of distaste, that 4 out of 5 people polled around the world believe that the Internet, and access to it, is a fundamental human right.

I'll wait just a moment to permit Locke to finish turning in his grave. Excellent. Thank you John. And now allow me to disabuse 80% of the masses of their silly notions of 'rights'.

I think that in 2010 we must allow for the premise that rights devolve into two general categories: Natural and Civil (or Legal). Natural rights exist existentially. Humans are born with natural rights derived from God or Nature or the Cosmos or Nothing or whatever you believe in. These rights exist as a result of our existence. They are universal, are not granted by anyone or any group, cannot be revoked, cannot be given up voluntarily, cannot be modified or added to. They simply are and they are inalienable. The right to exist would be the classic one in this category. By virtue of being human and coming into this world, we have the right to live.

The Romans gave us an early sense of the right to our own imagination, conscience or soul: "the body indeed is subjected and in the power of a master, but the mind is independent, and indeed is so free and wild, that it cannot be restrained even by ... the body." And while Seneca was probably not the first to ever conceive of the notion, he may have been the first in the West to apply natural rights to the issue of slavery in order to argue against it. He pointed out that slavery was something imposed on the body from outside. It wasn't something you could do to yourself because at the heart of it, the freedom of the soul is an inalienable right. Slavery, therefore, could not exist as an extension of nature but only as an artificial socio-political construct imposed upon people. Seems obvious now, but it made him pretty unpopular since it basically argued that no man ought to be enslaved.

Inalienable rights were also described in early Sharia Law. The Islamic formulation sounds rather familiar and prevented "the right to take away from his subjects certain rights which inhere in his or her person as a human being." Fascinating that it predates John Locke by 1000 years.

Speaking of the Enlightenment, this is where we get some of our greatest thinkers on the subject of natural rights. But I'd go back a bit further and quote Martin Luther on the subject. Luther enhances the notion of the freedom of conscience and applies it to religion: "Since, then, belief or unbelief is a matter of every one's conscience, and since this is no lessening of the secular power, the latter should be content and attend to its own affairs and permit men to believe one thing or another, as they are able and willing, and constrain no one by force." Boom. Separation of Church and State and the liberty of conscience.

Thomas Hobbes took a slightly different view. He argued that the single natural right was that of self-interest. Or as he puts it in Leviathan: "to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto." The right to life and conscience naturally flows from the innate right of liberty that we are born with. By having the latter you guarantee the former two.

John Locke gives us three inalienable rights. We have the right to life in which everyone is entitled to live once they are created. We also have the right to liberty in which everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the first right (i.e. you don't have the right to kill someone and violate their right to life). Lastly we have the right to estate or property whereby everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn't conflict with the first two rights. I think Locke would pour cold water on the notion that music or software on the Internet is and ought to be owned by everybody who can download it. It is owned by the person who created it by natural right. Nothing you can do will ever change that.

The Scottish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson worded it slightly differently: "Thus no man can really change his sentiments, judgments, and inward affections, at the pleasure of another; nor can it tend to any good to make him profess what is contrary to his heart. The right of private judgment is therefore unalienable." You quite simply cannot by any will or force give up your right to liberty. It is therefore inalienable. Since you can't voluntarily give it up, it is there whether anyone agrees or not.

Thomas Paine added to the notion that natural rights cannot be granted by fiat or ruling or charter since this would imply that they could be revoked by the same instrument that granted them (i.e. a Constitution). As he says: "It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect -- that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. ... They...consequently are instruments of injustice."

Which leads us to the second category of rights: those that are not natural but constructed and agreed to by compact between men, groups, tribes or between the ruled and the rulers.

I'll call them civil rights. These are derived from legal constructs and are based on customs, laws or actions by legislatures. The classic example is the right to vote. You're not born with this as part of your innate human nature, it is granted by a state. It is only applicable in a state. If the state went away, so would the right. They are relative. They depend on a context established by culture and politics. The right to vote would have no meaning in a society where there was no voting.

Civil rights are artificial. They exist only as a result of the social compact between people. There is no right to go to school if the school doesn't exist because we are stone age homo sapiens in small nomadic tribes in the savannah. In that context, the right to school would only exist by permit of some law or other element of the social compact as it is in our society today. My test for what constitutes a civil right versus a natural right is simply to ask would that right exist in the absence of modern civilization? What rights do Jack Shephard and the other surviors of Oceanic 815 have while they're on the island? Certainly not the right to Medicare. They have natural rights only. As the series progresses, they form various types of social compacts to establish other rudimentary forms of civil rights such as voting on where to go and what to do. But as a whole, the characters have only their natural rights. If the right is temporary or based on some grant in the form of a law, charter or act of legislature, if it exists only within a certain socio-political context, then it is a civil or legal right, not a natural or fundamental right.

The early Sharia Law granted various civil rights. In the Constitution of Medina written in the mid-600s, the rights were specifically enumerated. In fact, that document describes rights for various groups and classes of people. It provides various civil rights to non-Muslims, for example: "The security (dhimma) of God is equal for all groups; non-Muslim members have equal political and cultural rights as Muslims. They will have autonomy and freedom of religion; non-Muslims will take up arms against the enemy of the Ummah and share the cost of war. There is to be no treachery between the two; non-Muslims will not be obliged to take part in religious wars of the Muslims." Pretty straight forward and rather progressive. One wonders what the world be like today if they had adhered to that formulation.

At any rate, the Islamic example highlights another aspect of civil rights. They have various subdivisions and subclasses that differ between contexts. There is, for example, a distinction between positive rights and negative rights. A positive right grants permission to do something or receive something. Receiving welfare would be a positive right. Negative rights grant permission to do nothing or receive nothing. This the right to be left alone, an entitlement to non-interference. The right against robbery is a negative right. However, because civil rights are contextual, some rights are both positive and negative depending on the political context. In the United States voting is a negative right, that is, you have the right to vote but you don't have to vote. In other countries voting is a positive right. You have the right to vote and you do not have the right to not vote. You must vote or face a penalty.

There are other classes of civil rights. There are individual rights, group rights, liberty rights and claim rights. There are even other formulations entirely of civil rights. The most popular one divides them into a hierarchical set of three 'generations' of rights, each dependent upon the previous generation. The point is that all of these are established only via social compact between peoples. They don't exist without that government or charter or law.

Yes, various historians and philosophers have argued that natural rights don't exist at all or they do exist but only when civil rights are first established. Thomas Aquinas sliced and diced the meanings of natural and positive civil rights. Edmund Burke, Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham are among those who think natural rights are rubbish and any right to life can only exist when laws permit it. There are others who quibble about the natural right of a man do something versus the natural ability of him to do it. I would say that it is a complicated matter. But what cannot be denied is the basic principle of the right to liberty of one's own conscience. No law granted by any authority can violate this right to thought. It exists in nature, it exists without government, without law and without agreement. It is involuntary and inalienable. Given that this 'natural' right exists regardless of context, I cannot but endorse the notion that there are at least two categories of rights. Even if there is only a single natural right, there is still at least two categories.

Which brings me to why I felt compelled to write this history of philosophy lecture. There is no natural right to the Internet or the information on it. Let me repeat, humans do not have a fundamental right to the Internet. The Internet only exists because it was invented by man. Access to it only exists because governments have permitted that access. The information on it is only consumable because the owners of that information permit its use. Whether any of this is desirable or progressive or needed is irrelevant. The fact remains that access to information on the Internet (or off it for that matter) is permitted and that permission can be revoked at will. It is most certainly not a fundamental right.

You may even argue that it isn't a right at all. If it is any kind of right, it is a civil right. And within that category it may still not even be a right. If it is at all, it is not a First Generation or even Second Generation right. It may be covered under the Third Generation right to communicate but even that seems a stretch since you can communicate without the Internet. In any event, none of the Second or Third Generation rights are even universally recognized or granted. Even the First Generation rights are applicable to only a fraction of the human race. It is entirely dependent on law, politics, policy and societal context.

There is no right to own a dog. You may own a dog, it isn't illegal, but you do not have a right to it that is enshrined in and protected by founding documents. The act of owning a dog is enabled or prevented by local laws. I would argue that the same principle applies to the Internet. It is a medium. You have no more 'right' to a medium than you do to a dog. Secondly, there is nothing that the Internet provides that cannot be obtained some other way. You don't have a 'right' to watch Hulu or chat with perverts on Chatroulette. You can get medical advice without WebMD. You can learn history and philosophy without ChrisCam. Sure the Internet makes it easier to get information or communicate. But in the same way a car makes it easier for me to get to New York, I have no entitlement to a car. I can walk to New York.

Perhaps there are societies out there (looking at you Scandinavia) where the social compact includes an entitlement or civil right to a car (or free access to the Internet). This is likely to also be the society where the civil rights are so vast and so enumerated in such detail so as to adversely impact the natural right to liberty. You can already see some of this in our own society. Recently passed hate crime legislation makes it worse to commit a crime when thinking something that is disagreeable to the majority of the society. It may intend well, but it treads on the natural right to liberty of conscience and liberty of thought upon which the entire social edifice is built. Such a society cannot, therefore, endure. It will eventually contravene natural rights to such a degree that it will collapse by decay or armed insurrection. Our Founders understood that. That is why they constructed our social compact to protect natural rights as the bedrock of the system. Violate those rights and the rest is meaningless.

The Internet and/or access to it is not a fundamental right. Neither is it a civil right. The act of attempting to make it so will by its very rationale trample on the natural rights which underpin the civil ones.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 8, 2010 @ 11:35

 TAGGED AS: Aquinas, Civil Rights, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Hutcheson, John Locke, Liberty, Lost, Luther, Natural Rights, Paine, Rights, Rousseau

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2508.\\ Miranda Rights For Bin Laden

I may have my issues with Senator Graham (some of which I have told him in person on various flights home to Greenville), but in this clip he simply destroys the AG by using his own logic against him. One thing I would ask, however, is how many phone books is Lindsey Graham sitting on?

Reported by Christo the Elder on November 20, 2009 @ 12:11

 TAGGED AS: Congress, Eric Holder, KSM, Lindsay Graham, Osama Bin Laden, Rights, Terrorists

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