Rights Are Not Granted
I came across an article today that makes me break the LiveJournal blogging hiatus. The article starts with a question, "Do players of virtual worlds have rights [applying to their virtual personae]?"
In the process of answering this question, it goes into a very interesting discussion about rights - what they are and how they come into force.
There's at least one theory of rights which says that rights aren't "granted" by anyone. They arise because the populace decides to grant them to themselves. Under this logic, the folks who rose up in France weren't looking for some king with a soon-to-be-foreshortened head to tell them, "You've got the right to live your lives freely." They told themselves that they had that right, and because they had said so, it was so.
Somehow, until I read this paragraph, I never looked upon rights in this way. It appeared to me that the rights were what a committee agreed upon. Some committees could do a worse job than others, though. But how do we know which committee did a good job? Here's one way to judge:
There's another theory of rights which holds them to be intrinsic to people. Under this far more rigid standard, all those cultures which fail to grant them are benighted bastions of savagery. The harder part here is agreeing on what rights are intrinsic to all people everywhere - cultural differences tend to make that hard.
Indeed, the last line is where a lot of contention about "good" and "bad" cultures lies and also gives an insight into conflicts between groups of people. If people of one culture consider the "Right to X" as a cultural pillar, while another culture considers the "Right to not X" as theirs, the use of force by one culture against another on the topic of 'X' is a bid at cultural domination. Unfortunately, the majority of people in both cultures will support the conflict, at least to begin with. The only alternative to aggression would be a gradual reversal in perception by one of those cultures or a dilution of X's significance in both. Perhaps, as a member of one or more cultural entities, one must be careful about what rights to be hardline about and resist the temptation to be a hardliner on everything one believes in.
There's one more statement in the article, that is pertinent to the Right to (Online) Privacy and its breaches that have been recently brought to light:
Unless you continually fight to make [the claim to a right] true, [the right] won't stick. The battleground is not a military one: it's a perception one; as long as everyone is convinced that people have rights, they do. They're inalienable only as long as only a minority does the, uh, aliening.
As of now, there are not a lot of people that believe in the right to online privacy very strongly. Even if they believe in it to some extent, they are not willing to fight for it. The minority of populace that has done the "aliening" of the right to privacy also happens to be the majority of law enforcers, which again makes the issue a bit complicated. Online privacy will continue to be breached until the majority of the population decides that they must revolt or the minority engaged in breach of privacy decide that it's not something worth defending strongly.
Reference: Declaring the Rights of Players - Raph Koster
In the process of answering this question, it goes into a very interesting discussion about rights - what they are and how they come into force.
There's at least one theory of rights which says that rights aren't "granted" by anyone. They arise because the populace decides to grant them to themselves. Under this logic, the folks who rose up in France weren't looking for some king with a soon-to-be-foreshortened head to tell them, "You've got the right to live your lives freely." They told themselves that they had that right, and because they had said so, it was so.
Somehow, until I read this paragraph, I never looked upon rights in this way. It appeared to me that the rights were what a committee agreed upon. Some committees could do a worse job than others, though. But how do we know which committee did a good job? Here's one way to judge:
There's another theory of rights which holds them to be intrinsic to people. Under this far more rigid standard, all those cultures which fail to grant them are benighted bastions of savagery. The harder part here is agreeing on what rights are intrinsic to all people everywhere - cultural differences tend to make that hard.
Indeed, the last line is where a lot of contention about "good" and "bad" cultures lies and also gives an insight into conflicts between groups of people. If people of one culture consider the "Right to X" as a cultural pillar, while another culture considers the "Right to not X" as theirs, the use of force by one culture against another on the topic of 'X' is a bid at cultural domination. Unfortunately, the majority of people in both cultures will support the conflict, at least to begin with. The only alternative to aggression would be a gradual reversal in perception by one of those cultures or a dilution of X's significance in both. Perhaps, as a member of one or more cultural entities, one must be careful about what rights to be hardline about and resist the temptation to be a hardliner on everything one believes in.
There's one more statement in the article, that is pertinent to the Right to (Online) Privacy and its breaches that have been recently brought to light:
Unless you continually fight to make [the claim to a right] true, [the right] won't stick. The battleground is not a military one: it's a perception one; as long as everyone is convinced that people have rights, they do. They're inalienable only as long as only a minority does the, uh, aliening.
As of now, there are not a lot of people that believe in the right to online privacy very strongly. Even if they believe in it to some extent, they are not willing to fight for it. The minority of populace that has done the "aliening" of the right to privacy also happens to be the majority of law enforcers, which again makes the issue a bit complicated. Online privacy will continue to be breached until the majority of the population decides that they must revolt or the minority engaged in breach of privacy decide that it's not something worth defending strongly.
Reference: Declaring the Rights of Players - Raph Koster