Devices and rights

Foreign magazines frequently publish accounts from parents who discover that their underage children have secretly used personal computers to exchange erotic or pornographic messages with strangers. One case, involving a twelve-year-old girl and disclosed by her writer mother in Newsweek, caused particular concern.

The United States Senate approved an amendment imposing prison sentences and heavy fines on anyone who uses online electronic services to make indecent material available to people under the age of eighteen.

The measure drew criticism both in the United States and elsewhere. Critics argued that it threatened a long-standing tradition of guarantees protecting freedom of expression and therefore amounted to censorship.

The argument was not intended as a defence of pornography. Rather, some hoped that its expansion would eventually consume itself and warned that prohibition could become a dangerous restriction on the right to express ideas, distribute information and publish images freely.

From that perspective, the online services made possible by the Internet could be understood, in some respects, as an extension of the role of the press and therefore of the rights traditionally associated with it.

Leaving aside the question of whether the issue should be framed as one of censorship and press freedom, rather than as a matter of limits on commercial freedom, it is useful to consider the need to place freedom of expression within a broader context.

One such framework appears in a recently published academic paper.

Robert McGinn, a professor at Stanford University in California, examined a new model operating in contemporary societies through the interaction of powerful technologies, individual rights and a growing number of users. He described this model as “the troubling triad”.

His thesis is that, in a context marked by an increasingly powerful technological arsenal and a rising number of people who consider themselves entitled to use it without restriction, continued adherence to the traditional concept of individual rights has become outdated and potentially dangerous to the quality of life within society.

The troubling triad

The “triad” emerges from the interaction of highly dynamic technologies, traditional rights recognised in Western societies and an ever-growing number of individuals or agents using those technologies.

The technological dimension may involve the scale of a product, its performance, the speed at which it spreads, the intensity of its use or its operation as part of a broader system.

These technologies are used in accordance with established rights such as liberty, property and procreation. At the same time, the number of users continues to increase because of population growth and consumerism.

McGinn’s examples range from life-extension technologies and organ transplants, demanded in the name of the “inviolable right to life” even in cases involving irreversibly comatose patients, to the construction of skyscrapers in city centres through appeals to property rights.

He also discusses the use of all-terrain vehicles in environmentally fragile areas under the claimed right to freedom of movement.

McGinn questions the idea that individual rights remain valid in exactly the same form across all historical periods. He proposes elements for a new theory of moral rights capable of protecting the future quality of life of present and coming generations.

The historical construction of individual rights

The development of individual rights in the Western world includes several major milestones.

The British Bill of Rights of 1689 helped establish protections associated with life, liberty and property.

The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 stated that all people were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The declaration produced by the French Revolution identified liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression as fundamental rights.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights later added economic and social rights. The term “human rights” was promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt in preference to language that referred only to “the rights of man”, thereby explicitly including women.

The dominant view holds that individual rights are immutable, morally inviolable and, for some, granted by God.

Yet rights are formally recognised under particular historical circumstances. Even when they appear eternal or sacred, the social and historical conditions surrounding them change.

As a result, the unrestricted exercise of a right may eventually become harmful to social well-being or even to collective survival.

When one freedom affects another

There are conflicts of interest that carry less ethical weight than the confrontation between electronic pornography and families with underage children, but they still reveal how one group’s exercise of freedom of expression can create social disruption and interfere with the rights of others.

One example is the automated telephone dialler, widely used in the United States.

These devices can systematically call every number connected to a telephone exchange and leave prerecorded messages. Their reach includes listed and unlisted numbers, mobile phones, corporate switchboards and answering machines.

According to a 1993 estimate, at least 25,000 of these machines were operating every day in the United States.

The example demonstrates how a technology that expands an individual’s ability to communicate can also invade the time, privacy and daily life of thousands of other people.

The problem, therefore, does not lie only in the existence of a right or in the power of a particular device. It emerges from the interaction between technological capacity, the number of people using it and the social consequences of exercising that right without limits.