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The Struggle Between Liberties and Authorities in the Information Age

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Abstract

The “struggle between liberties and authorities”, as described by Mill, refers to the tension between individual rights and the rules restricting them that are imposed by public authorities exerting their power over civil society. In this paper I argue that contemporary information societies are experiencing a new form of such a struggle, which now involves liberties and authorities in the cyber-sphere and, more specifically, refers to the tension between cyber-security measures and individual liberties. Ethicists, political philosophers and political scientists have long debated how to strike an ethically sound balance between security measures and individual rights. I argue that such a balance can only be reached once individual rights are clearly defined, and that such a definition cannot prescind from an analysis of individual well-being in the information age. Hence, I propose an analysis of individual well-being which rests on the capability approach, and I then identify a set of rights that individuals should claim for themselves. Finally, I consider a criterion for balancing the proposed set of individual rights with cyber-security measures in the information age.

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Notes

  1. The involvement of public authorities in the management and regulation of the cyber-sphere does not come as a novelty when one considers that the design and development of the internet has been since the very beginning a part of governmental research to ensure national and international security; see for example the famous Pentagon Arpanet project (Abbate 2000). At the same time, it is worth recalling that security requirements and the support of military activities are often the goals motivating the design and development of plenty of technologies that have then become commonly used. Computers offer quite an evident example: they went from being a technology used to support military efforts during the Second World War to being a tool people use in their everyday lives (Copeland 2006; Freed and Ishida 1995); the same goes for robotics and AI, Predator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator) and Taranis offering two interesting examples (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Taranis).

  2. The reader interested in the on-going debate on cyber-warfare and on the ethical and regulatory issues that it poses may find relevant the following papers (Arquilla 1998; Denning 1999; Dipert 2010; Lucas 2012) (Taddeo forthcoming, 2014).

  3. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/09/remarks-president-press-conference.

  4. http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/futurium/en/content/onlife-manifesto-being-human-hyperconnected-era.

  5. A more in details analysis of the work developed under the ‘Onlife Initiative’ has been provided here (Floridi 2014c).

  6. The concept of narrative has been extensively used in the literature focusing on personal identity (Maan 1999; MacIntyre 2007; MacIntyre 1989; Schechtman 2007; Taylor 1989). However, it is worth remarking that the analysis proposed in this paper does not rest on the narrative approach insofar as it is not concerned with the process of constructing personal identities. The reader interested in such a topic may find useful (Ess 2012).

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  1. Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Mariarosaria Taddeo

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Taddeo, M. The Struggle Between Liberties and Authorities in the Information Age. Sci Eng Ethics 21, 1125–1138 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9586-0

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