[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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