Journal of Political Philosophy最新文献

Many of us will remember the sense of foreboding induced by the simple threat, usually uttered by a teacher: ‘It will go on your permanent record’. This administrative bogeyman exploits our early awareness of the importance of being able to leave some things in the past. While some of the things we do may go on public record at various points in our lives, it used to be possible to comfort ourselves with the thought that these would soon be buried deep in the archives, where most people would not care to look. In the digital age, however, search engines do the digging and can serve up previously long-forgotten results on a simple search of a person's name.

This article takes up the question of what kinds of claims we have against information being dug up from our past. Specifically, it focuses on information that is legitimately a matter of public record. When some information has been stored in an archive and has, in principle, been accessible to anyone, what claims, if any, do we have against that information being brought back to light? Many people would find it intrusive for someone to dig through archives and publicize afresh the information they found out about you there, but it is not clear what the basis of such a complaint would be. Moreover, it is this kind of complaint that is provided protection through data-protection provisions colloquially referred to as the right to be forgotten. Such measures are typically framed as privacy protections. While some have argued that we can have privacy rights over information that has been made public,1 I argue that appeals to privacy fail in cases concerning information that is legitimately a matter of public record.

Paying attention to the reasons we have to object to the dredging up of outdated information reveals a new category of claims that are distinct from claims to privacy, but serve the same general interest in self-presentation that privacy scholars have long been concerned with. I call these claims against distortion. We can understand such claims as falling under a general principle of reputational control embedded in the historic right of personality. That general principle provides the basis for claims to privacy, claims against defamation, and, as I will argue, claims against distortion.

The purpose of invoking the right of personality is to identify a general principle embedded in that concept, and to then draw out a taxonomy of claims that serve that principle in distinct ways. One advantage of separating these three categories of claims is that it allows us to retain clear boundaries around the concept of privacy, which has often come under fire for suffering from a plethora of meanings.2

On my account, claims to privacy are claims to prevent certain information from becoming publicly available beyond one's audience of choice. Privacy provides one aspect of reputational control by allowing us to decide who we share various aspects of oneself with. Claim

Suppose that in a jurisdiction there are 2,000,001 white voters and 1,000,000 black voters, all of whom enjoy equally weighted votes. The question of white supremacy is routinely put to a majority-rule plebiscite. In each such plebiscite, all white voters vote yes for white supremacy and all black voters vote no. This has been going on as long as anyone can remember, and it will continue for as long as anyone can foresee. This is a paradigm of a persistent minority, to which, intuitively, each black voter has an objection.

What is their objection? One answer is that black voters don't get their preferences satisfied. Another answer is that black voters are oppressed by the eventuating policies of white supremacy. Yet another answer considers the white majority as a group. As a group, they have greater power to determine the outcome than have the blacks as a group. Indeed, the white majority as a group is always decisive. In the last plebiscite, all the whites voted for white supremacy and it passed; and if all the whites had voted against, it would have failed. By contrast, the black minority as a group is never decisive. They voted against and it passed; and if any assemblage of them had voted yes, it would still have passed.

In this article, we raise a number of doubts about Abizadeh's suggestion that the power-of-numbers thesis can vindicate the thought that members of the minority as individuals have less voting power and thereby account for their objection to belonging to a persistent minority. Perhaps the most serious doubt is that while Abizadeh correctly holds that voting power must be assessed in part by counterfactualizing on votes—by asking what would have happened if a voter had voted otherwise than he in fact did—he does not counterfactualize in the right way.

We cannot vindicate the thought that members of the minority have less voting power if we assume an a priori measure of voting power that abstracts from information about the distribution of political preferences and its causes. An example is the Banzhaf (or Penrose–Banzhaf) measure of voting power, according to which a voter's power is her probability of casting a decisive vote if all other voters vote independently and with equal probability for either alternative.4 (A voter's vote in favor of (or against) a measure is decisive if the measure passes (fails), but would have failed (passed) if the voter had instead voted against (in favor).) An a priori measure of voting power will not register any differences between members of the persistent minority and anyone else, because it ignores, by construction, the facts about the distribution of preferences and its causes, in virtue of which some voters qualify as members of a persistent minority.

Abizadeh therefore seeks to vindicate the power-of-numbers thesis with an a posteriori measure: power is calculated on the basis of, rather than in abstraction from, information

The notion of rights is ubiquitous in philosophical discourse. As Allen Buchanan put it over thirty years ago, ‘Future historians of moral and political philosophy may well label our period the Age of Rights’.1 This notion is not only popular, but also complex. As the legal scholar W. N. Hohfeld famously suggested, rights are susceptible to multiple interpretations: they can be claims, liberties, powers, or immunities.2 Despite this variation, the consensus view is that the core instance of a right is a claim right.3

In the moral domain, claim rights designate a binary relation between a right-holder and a duty-bearer, where the former stands in a distinctive moral position vis-à-vis the latter.4 While there is controversy as to what, precisely, this distinctive moral position amounts to, the idea that claim rights capture it is seldom put into question.

In this article, I challenge this way of thinking. I argue that the language of claim rights is ill suited for the purpose of picking out a distinctive moral position.5 I show that the notion of a claim right is susceptible to several disambiguations, just as the notion of a right itself is. From this, I conclude that we should either no longer appeal to the concept of a claim right in moral theorizing or rethink its purpose.

The article proceeds as follows. In Section II, I set out two desiderata that a plausible definition of moral claim rights should satisfy. The definition should: (a) capture a distinctive moral position and (b) account for paradigmatic instances of claim rights in our ordinary language. In Section III, I show that the two most prominent accounts of claim rights fail to meet desideratum (b). Of course, the fact that prominent accounts are unsatisfactory does not mean that no satisfactory account could be developed. To support this stronger claim, in Section IV, I offer a systematization of our language of claim rights. I suggest that the greatest common denominator of such language is the idea of empowerment, and show that paradigmatic statements about claim rights track either the justification for certain forms of empowerment (justification rights statements) or empowerment itself and the particular status it confers on individuals (status rights statements).

As I explain in Section V, this twofold connection between claim rights and empowerment reveals that, for structural reasons, our desiderata cannot be jointly satisfied. No notion of claim rights can both capture justification as well as status rights statements and pick out a distinctive moral position. In Section VI, I consider three possible implications of this conclusion. One is that we should abandon the notion of claim rights in moral theorizing. Another, less drastic possibility is that, in light of its disjunctive structure, the notion of claim rights should be given a different purpose. A third possibility, for those not persua