4 ms·

Positive rights and negative rights often clash, as the tension you correctly describe shows, but the implicit premise of your post is that all negative rights

Positive rights and negative rights often clash, as the tension you correctly describe shows, but the implicit premise of your post is that all negative rights supersede all positive rights. I do not agree. The very conceptualization of negative rights was in response to a feeling that the positive rights guaranteed by earlier liberal thought were insufficient to secure a just and free society. It is far from obvious to me that there should be an expansive and universal right to be forgotten. But the position that there obviously should not be strikes me as ignorant to the changing balance of power between those two conceptions of the good. No one asked for a right to be forgotten by erasing 30 year old newspaper coverage. And they ask for it now not because the list of things people wish were forgotten has changed; rather, it because technology has driven social change in terms of what forgetting occurs and what the consequences of that are. I think it naive that we would pre-assume the balance between those two rights would not change in light of that. I also think it is possible to have a richer discussion about the issue if we do not immediately get bogged down in the contractualism that so often swamps out discussions about "rights".

ksdale 8y ago
I think this is an excellent point. I have no idea what the right answer is, but I think that the role of technology is really underappreciated. On the one hand, people are probably correct to say that it's an infringement on their rights to not be able to talk about something that happened to them. On the other hand, what it means to "talk about something" has changed radically. One hundred years ago, your reach would have been limited to the people in your social circle. If you were really determined to let people know what happened to you, you could take out an ad in the newspaper, but that would probably be seen as fairly weird if it was about something that happened years ago where the perpetrator has already been released from prison. What about if the perpetrator decided to go live somewhere else, and the victim personally took it upon themselves to take out an ad in every city that the perpetrator moved to, telling everyone what happened. I daresay that person would be looked at as vindictive and possibly a little crazy. The internet allows basically the last scenario, with very little effort on behalf of the victim, and none of the cost of publishing in a newspaper. It possibly even comes without the social cost of looking vindictive. Because it's so much easier to publish things online, no one considers the emotion that would be required to generate the post, as opposed to the strength of feeling required to get something published in a newspaper in a different city. It seems to me that a discussion of rights without a discussion of technology will not accomplish much, as much as we'd like to believe that what is right is not dependent on something as arbitrary as the current level of tech.

ksdale 8y ago

I think this is an excellent point. I have no idea what the right answer is, but I think that the role of technology is really underappreciated. On the one hand, people are probably correct to say that it's an infringement on their rights to not be able to talk about something that happened to them. On the other hand, what it means to "talk about something" has changed radically. One hundred years ago, your reach would have been limited to the people in your social circle. If you were really determined to let people know what happened to you, you could take out an ad in the newspaper, but that would probably be seen as fairly weird if it was about something that happened years ago where the perpetrator has already been released from prison. What about if the perpetrator decided to go live somewhere else, and the victim personally took it upon themselves to take out an ad in every city that the perpetrator moved to, telling everyone what happened. I daresay that person would be looked at as vindictive and possibly a little crazy. The internet allows basically the last scenario, with very little effort on behalf of the victim, and none of the cost of publishing in a newspaper. It possibly even comes without the social cost of looking vindictive. Because it's so much easier to publish things online, no one considers the emotion that would be required to generate the post, as opposed to the strength of feeling required to get something published in a newspaper in a different city. It seems to me that a discussion of rights without a discussion of technology will not accomplish much, as much as we'd like to believe that what is right is not dependent on something as arbitrary as the current level of tech.