Lockean Rights in the Context of Cyberspace

[Ess discusses positive freedom. ]

[Birsch defends rights; see especially his philosophical framework.]

Still, I feel some force in Locke's invocation of natural rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and so forth; Nozick's sketch of an argument for such rights in Anarchy, State and Utopia, emphasizing their importance in leading a meaningful life, strikes me as on the right track. With apologies for the confessional tone, however, I don't feel the same force when the context is changed to cyberspace, and as I've indicated I don't even find that the minimal constraints of Hobbes's right of nature get a grip on the Net. Addresses on the Net are the responsibility of individuals, and apart from some form of contract those individuals are under no obligation, beyond real-life obligations to persons as opposed to characters or similar users, to treat someone who has logged in to the address in this way or that. If they wish, they do nothing wrong in their domain of cyberspace to let Mr. Bungle loose, even if we think less of them for administrating a sick site. They violate no one's rights, because no rights have been constructed at those sites.

Rights are constructive in cyberspace, natural in real-life. And the edifice of Responsiveness, Caring, and Light hovers in mid-air without the support of Respect. Or to mix metaphors: If an administrator has not constructed or allowed to be constructed a system of rights at his site, appeals to more lofty moral considerations cannot get off the ground. These higher considerations are constructive too. And absent construction of the rights and the reality of individual characters, the higher- level constructions that presuppose them cannot begin. The sick site is one that doesn't take its users seriously. It doesn't care whether they can make a meaningful virtual life there, or whether it responds to their reality, or whether they can form a valuable community there. But many adminstrators do take their users seriously, and consequently do want to provide the conditions for the users' meaningful role at the site, for their being treated as persons and not as mere electronic connections, and for their participating in a valuable community. Indeed, by constructing a moral edifice like the one sketched in this essay, in the first instance by constructing or allowing the construction of a constitution and bill of rights at the site, the administrator can become a vessel of Light.

Further, my claim is not that we flesh-and-blood keyboard-manipulators might come to have rights in cyberspace; but our avatars should.

	CMC Magazine / January 1, 1996
	Wizards, Toads, and Ethics, by Wes Cooper Lockean Rights in the Context of Cyberspace Let me return to the idea that MUDs, and similar places in cyberspace, are Hobbesian states of nature. In fact they are worse, and nothing that I have said so far would make them better, in the absence of considerations that haven't been brought forward yet. In Thomas Hobbes's state of nature one has "the right of nature" to do anything one deems necessary to one's self-interest. So the right of nature does not extend to gratuitous torture, for instance, since by hypothesis the torturer is torturing gratuitously. (It's easy enough to think of cases in which torturing someone would be the rationally self-interested thing to do, but we are not considering those cases.) The right of nature does not validate torture, and the law of nature, which counsels a search for peace in so far forth as others seek peace too, prohibits it. Appeals to "nature" and what's "natural" are shaky at best, and it's not hard to sympathize with Bentham's dictum that talk about rights is nonsense, and talk about natural rights is nonsense on stilts. [Ess discusses positive freedom. ] [Birsch defends rights; see especially his philosophical framework.] Still, I feel some force in Locke's invocation of natural rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and so forth; Nozick's sketch of an argument for such rights in Anarchy, State and Utopia, emphasizing their importance in leading a meaningful life, strikes me as on the right track. With apologies for the confessional tone, however, I don't feel the same force when the context is changed to cyberspace, and as I've indicated I don't even find that the minimal constraints of Hobbes's right of nature get a grip on the Net. Addresses on the Net are the responsibility of individuals, and apart from some form of contract those individuals are under no obligation, beyond real-life obligations to persons as opposed to characters or similar users, to treat someone who has logged in to the address in this way or that. If they wish, they do nothing wrong in their domain of cyberspace to let Mr. Bungle loose, even if we think less of them for administrating a sick site. They violate no one's rights, because no rights have been constructed at those sites. Rights are constructive in cyberspace, natural in real-life. And the edifice of Responsiveness, Caring, and Light hovers in mid-air without the support of Respect. Or to mix metaphors: If an administrator has not constructed or allowed to be constructed a system of rights at his site, appeals to more lofty moral considerations cannot get off the ground. These higher considerations are constructive too. And absent construction of the rights and the reality of individual characters, the higher- level constructions that presuppose them cannot begin. The sick site is one that doesn't take its users seriously. It doesn't care whether they can make a meaningful virtual life there, or whether it responds to their reality, or whether they can form a valuable community there. But many adminstrators do take their users seriously, and consequently do want to provide the conditions for the users' meaningful role at the site, for their being treated as persons and not as mere electronic connections, and for their participating in a valuable community. Indeed, by constructing a moral edifice like the one sketched in this essay, in the first instance by constructing or allowing the construction of a constitution and bill of rights at the site, the administrator can become a vessel of Light. Further, my claim is not that we flesh-and-blood keyboard-manipulators might come to have rights in cyberspace; but our avatars should.
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	CMC Magazine / January 1, 1996
	Wizards, Toads, and Ethics, by Wes Cooper Lockean Rights in the Context of Cyberspace Let me return to the idea that MUDs, and similar places in cyberspace, are Hobbesian states of nature. In fact they are worse, and nothing that I have said so far would make them better, in the absence of considerations that haven't been brought forward yet. In Thomas Hobbes's state of nature one has "the right of nature" to do anything one deems necessary to one's self-interest. So the right of nature does not extend to gratuitous torture, for instance, since by hypothesis the torturer is torturing gratuitously. (It's easy enough to think of cases in which torturing someone would be the rationally self-interested thing to do, but we are not considering those cases.) The right of nature does not validate torture, and the law of nature, which counsels a search for peace in so far forth as others seek peace too, prohibits it. Appeals to "nature" and what's "natural" are shaky at best, and it's not hard to sympathize with Bentham's dictum that talk about rights is nonsense, and talk about natural rights is nonsense on stilts. [Ess discusses positive freedom. ] [Birsch defends rights; see especially his philosophical framework.] Still, I feel some force in Locke's invocation of natural rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and so forth; Nozick's sketch of an argument for such rights in Anarchy, State and Utopia, emphasizing their importance in leading a meaningful life, strikes me as on the right track. With apologies for the confessional tone, however, I don't feel the same force when the context is changed to cyberspace, and as I've indicated I don't even find that the minimal constraints of Hobbes's right of nature get a grip on the Net. Addresses on the Net are the responsibility of individuals, and apart from some form of contract those individuals are under no obligation, beyond real-life obligations to persons as opposed to characters or similar users, to treat someone who has logged in to the address in this way or that. If they wish, they do nothing wrong in their domain of cyberspace to let Mr. Bungle loose, even if we think less of them for administrating a sick site. They violate no one's rights, because no rights have been constructed at those sites. Rights are constructive in cyberspace, natural in real-life. And the edifice of Responsiveness, Caring, and Light hovers in mid-air without the support of Respect. Or to mix metaphors: If an administrator has not constructed or allowed to be constructed a system of rights at his site, appeals to more lofty moral considerations cannot get off the ground. These higher considerations are constructive too. And absent construction of the rights and the reality of individual characters, the higher- level constructions that presuppose them cannot begin. The sick site is one that doesn't take its users seriously. It doesn't care whether they can make a meaningful virtual life there, or whether it responds to their reality, or whether they can form a valuable community there. But many adminstrators do take their users seriously, and consequently do want to provide the conditions for the users' meaningful role at the site, for their being treated as persons and not as mere electronic connections, and for their participating in a valuable community. Indeed, by constructing a moral edifice like the one sketched in this essay, in the first instance by constructing or allowing the construction of a constitution and bill of rights at the site, the administrator can become a vessel of Light. Further, my claim is not that we flesh-and-blood keyboard-manipulators might come to have rights in cyberspace; but our avatars should.
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