Access to knowledge is a human right
engineuring.wordpress.com
engineuring.wordpress.com
All the time I see "health care is a human right", "shelter is a human right", "food is a human right" - that always drives me a little bonkers, and it's not because I don't support guaranteed assistance in these areas. It's because these things require real cost, time and effort from somebody else to acquire. Saying they're "human rights" implies that you're willing to force other humans to acquire these goods for you, for free. This is very different from things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc. which are the "default" state of things until someone uses violence to try to take them from you.
Similarly, it costs time, effort and money to assemble information in ways so that it can be consumed online. Saying "it's a human right" just means you want it for free.
What you are writing there is a frequent complaint on discussion threads on news-for-nerds sites, but it misses the point: of course those things require real cost, time and effort from somebody else, and that is why there is a longstanding distinction between positive and negative rights.[0] Yes, the prominence of negative rights is a big feature of American culture due to the 18th-century Lockean context that the USA’s Founding Fathers operated in, but a lot of things have happened in the interim, and other views on rights have arisen. And even the USA gave lip service to the positive rights enshrined in the UN’s founding human-rights charter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
But those are also the most expensive line items in Federal and State budgets, massively expanded the public bureaucracies, and had variable success in achieving their stated goals and are some of the most contentious and controversial political topics, with public education in particularly attracting the full brunt of the culture war in recent years in part due to lockdown policies during the pandemic giving more parents more insight into the education their children are (or are not) receiving, and that’s just one positive right.
To put it bluntly, the mere arising of new views around “rights” since 1789 is insufficient if those new views do not represent a qualitative improvement over prior thought, and positive rights advocates have not exactly covered themselves in glory. The mere conjecture of a new positive right in the way activists and advocates proceed is also insufficient; the nature of them is such that you actually do need lawful agreement, and that agreement is only binding in the jurisdiction which created it.
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/discretionary_s...
1. Non-discretionary spending.
2. 50 additional links to breakdowns of the public budgets for the 50 States.
I know the US is good at pretending their problems are so unique that all the rational and numbers-based approaches everywhere else in the world won't fly, but in my eyes you either want to live in a society and want it to be good or you pretend you don't live inside one and deal with the consequences. The former gives me a happier life, the latter gives me dystopian vibes and a bit more on the bank account so my choice should be clear.
We value property differently. We value entrepreneurship differently. We are a military superpower and provide most of the muscle in NATO that both the US and Denmark are part of. We have a larger border with both of our immediate neighbors. There isn’t a North American equivalent of the Schengen Area. We’re a lot more religious despite not having a State religion. Our Head of State is not Royal, but an elected position that churns every 4 to 8 years. We’re not a unitary State, but a Federation of 50 States, each with their own laws and histories and yeah, culturally we take that seriously here. We don’t even have a single Parliament, and our legislature does not function like one. Denmark is 86% people of Danish descent, while Americans aren’t 86% anything in particular, ethnically nor racially.
No matter how you slice it, the differences do define us, much like the differences between Japan and Denmark or Australia and Denmark. As I already pointed out, America has lawfully implemented some forms of what are called positive rights, but what those look like do not closely resemble the Danish analogues, and one of those differences is how much we disagree with each other as much as we disagree with the rest of the world, but hey, one if the nicer things about the world we live in is if you find a place you like more, it’s often possible to just go live there, provided you subject yourself to the requirements of the locals and there’s nothing wrong with that. :)
I read recently that many political philosophers think the U.S. has become a (de facto) oligarchy.
In Republic book eight 552 it's argued that oligarchies "admit the greatest of all evils... Allowing someone to sell all his possessions and someone else to buy them...". Now this is particularly true in regards to land (which even when "owned" is essentially rented from the government in the form of property taxes). I don't know the history but I've seen hints that much of this land acquisition was pretty coercive.
I think it's difficult for many Americans to admit this because their thinking is biased in the same way that someone becomes biased about a person they love - no matter what anybody tells them, "loving eyes never see". Only the love here is the love of "the good life" - the materially rich one.
> but hey, one [o]f the nicer things about the world we live in is if you find a place you like more, it’s often possible to just go live there, provided you subject yourself to the requirements of the locals and there’s nothing wrong with that. :)
This wasn’t flippant, nor limited to just Americans moving elsewhere. I actually took a small look into the difficulty of migrating to Denmark from America before I wrote that to see if there were any special difficulties and near as I can tell, the bar is much much lower than I was expecting, but it should be noted that if more people took advantage of that, then it’s probable Denmark would raise the requirements and immigration has at least somewhat recently been a political issue for them.
> it’s often possible to just go live there, provided you subject yourself to the requirements of the locals
It is often possible, but what I did not claim was that it was universally so and that’s because it’s not universally possible for all people. That was intentional. It requires the ability to actually meet the requirements of the host country, the ability to cover the travel and moving expenses for yourself and them accepting you into their country, at least if they have solid immigration controls, or the ability to live within their society without going through the official channels if not, as long as you can get yourself there. Almost all of that should have gone without saying though.
A) There are societies, in which the circumstances which would make it reasonable for you to leave are the reason why you cannot. E.g. if you are living in slavery or quasi-slavery moving somewhere else would be good, but the ones profiting from your labour wouldn't like that, so they make it hard. And the reason why you ended up in that position e.g. lack of funds, lack of education might also make it hard or impossible to move somewhere else.
B) We are discussing human rights. I would think they should apply universally. That is of course not the reality of the world, but we should aim for those rights to be defended in each part of the world.
Human rights are a thing that has to be defended by those that are able defend them — and those people are typically not the victim of such violations, but precisely the opposite in terms of social, economic and education capital than the people that would benefit from moving away.
That means just move away as an answer from the standpoint of the affected people is just profoundly naive, as if one would say to "just get rich" when someone isn't or "just get healthy" when someone is ill. On top of that it is an answer that hurts the society of those that give it, as the society as a while accumulates injustices it fails to answer.
So why give thwt answer? Because it has one benefit: It is a simple cure for the nagging feeling of cognitive dissonance that each good person has to get, when they see that the society they are part of produces injustices. It is the answer that allows them to move on and change nothing. "It must be their own fault then".
Typically, because those creating the laws are property owners themselves the law makers side with the property owners. Now if you are lucky you live in a society where the law makers recognized the crisis needs to be addressed and they usually find a way of throwing money at the problem (if you are less lucky, they do it corruptly by supporting their own property or that of their pals).
That means systemically we live in a society where those with power tend to accumulate more power, a phenomenom which leads to suffering and instability, which is why societies need certain guardrails against such accumulation of power (e.g. term limits, ethical frameworks, anti-corruption laws, taxation that doesn't tax poor people a bigger fraction of their money than rich people etc.)
But on the topic of the conversation: yes, you can claim a right that is not universally agreed uppon. That doesn't make it so, but throughout every progressive movement there ever was, this was a strategy. E.g. women claiming that voting is a universal right (in a context where they are barred from doing precisely that) is not stupid, it is clever. By appealing to the universality of a right you are also including those who already excercise that right on your side. In the example of women protesting for the right to vote framing it as an universal right includes men as well, this way a women issue becomes one of universal rights and will be discussed differently.
But ownership is not the issue. The issue is that people conflate ownership and especially money with happiness and live in a society where a lack of money is indeed a source of unhappiness — all while forgetting there are things that make you happy which you as an individual cannot buy with money.
E.g. if I were rich in a poor society I am sure I would feel less happy than me being slightly above the median in a wealthy society. That is because a rich person in a poor society is not free and has to constantly worry about loosing their wealth, getting robbed, mugged, kidnapped or otherwise becoming a victim of crimes. And even if you manage that, you are still living with the fact to be part of a society that sucks for most people. Sure you got money, and have it nice in your gated community, seeing only people of your choosing, but that to me wouls not only be utterly dystopian, but an egocentric capitulation of a person who made their wealth from the fruits of a free society.
Maybe I am naive, or stupid, but for me it is like this: Either I live in a society and want to improve it, for the benefit of myself and all those around me, or you can become a total recluse and build your own hut, melt your own iron, live your own live in isolation.
Well, sure. IMHO it's not so much an implication as it is the whole point of designating them human rights.
What this looks like in practice is that government funds homeless shelters and other social programs.
We need to be careful about what we call rights. They cost us a great deal in blood and treasure.
No. Wanting it to be a human right in that context means I want to live in a society where people don't have to worry about that thing. Living in a society that catches people that has some humane quality to it is a value in itself.
That being said, there are actual human rights. Rights our political representatives deemed so important, they enshrined them in law, be it in the Magna Carta, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, in national laws etc.
On the question of resources: It can and will happen, that your society will have to expend some resources to prevent humans from having their human rights violated. The collective pooling and use of resources is a hallmark of what it means to live inside a society. And that is not bad — a society as a whole benefits from doing this (the ones who so this most seem the fare quite well in every metric you can think of, e.g. the whole of Scandinavia).
Now if you ask me, you certainly have the right to work and get rich. But you don't get to do so on the achievements of a society and then pretend that it never did anything for you, so you won't need to give back all while driving on the roads that got built during times with a 90% tax bracket.
I don't know you, so don't take anything I write personal, but if this was about me, I'd rather live freely in a world where no-one around me is devastated and poor by paying my fair share, than having to spend that same money because I have to live in a gated community.
The goal of life is not to earn money, it is to lead a happy life. And a major, major part of just how happy that life is depends on your environment. This is why the most liveable cities in the world are typically not capitalist hellscapes in areas of high income disparities, but in working social democracies with good social systems and a good mix of all income brackets throughout the city.
When I have the choice between your right to pay a little bit less taxes and another one's right to not starve, my choice is very simple. You probably already have enough, the other one hasn't, I profit from them not starving more than from you having that money.
People pretend rights can exists without duties because, like you said, they're trying to get good things for free. They're asking for work from others and not being upfront on the price of the work. I say "I have a right to good service at the DMV", because I can't say the DMV must give me, let alone everyone, good service. In a larger view[1], a language of rights without duties undermines the broader social contract, confuses conversations with indirect terms[2], and provides the selfish with the illusion of care for their fellow man.
As it so happens, the original declaration of human rights[2] specifically calls out the necessary union of duties and rights. However, the UN declaration does not do so, likely because no one, bar a few western countries, actually had the power to enforce those rights on a global scale. Hannah Arendt commented on this topic at length, though it's hard for hyper-individualists to digest[4].
[1] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/samuel-moyn-rights-dut...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights#C...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Declaration_of_the_Ri...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Critique_of_huma...
Or, y'know, actually that we require the costs to be shared equally...
Like we do with fresh water or firefighters or the police or armed forces. Like, I don't smoke, so why should you get your firefighter for free?
What good are any other human rights if you are denied access to the law, or drinking water for that matter?
People are ALREADY getting this stuff "for free" - it's just not you and me!
This is all before we spent ~815 BILLION dollars on our defense budget - and we're at peace!
Everyone gets it for free but YOU and ME, and you're carrying their water by defending this system! We give it out for free with one hand, and then pretend everyone has to work for it, and along the way there's no free food, shelter, or medical care!
Copying information online is also 'default' state of things, until some government uses violence to stop it, block access, and etc. Sci-Hub does not rely on any 'violence' to operate, unless you consider 'entering library without permission' to be violence. But that concept of violence is too general: we can call 'violence' pretty much anything we do not like. Someone offended us with their opinion? Violence! (and yes, sometimes opinions hurt)
> you're willing to force other humans to acquire these goods for you, for free
it is wrong. One thing, is to say to other human: do something for me! that is, to force someone. But having a right to use what is already available, is a completely different thing. The two cannot be conflated.
In fact, the latter is exactly what is being argued for, without the philosophical quagmire of the question of what is a “right”?
I think one’s perspective on this depends on whether your reaction to this sort of invocation of “human rights” is that it adds strength to the claim or whether it makes the claim more abstract and complex.
But there is still a paywall for academic journals, indeed all academic journals are now behind paywalls.
This world, apparently, would be an appalling place, rife with human rights violations.
You cannot have one without the other.
A human right is a right humans enjoy for no other reason than being a human. Despite my first paragraph, certain things like surviving or not getting harmed/punished simply because you exist are near-universally accepted as human rights, but again, like obligations, rights only have meaning if they can be enforced. The human part of human rights is critical because it transcends laws created by people. In essence, they are rights given to a person by their creator. This is why human rights, as ordained by the Creator is used as foundational reasoning behind the US war of independence and civil wars.
Both slavery and King George's tyranny were lawful but the law was rejected because a right given to humans beyond the authority of any government to regulate was violated.
This is one if the reasons why I passionately hate communism, because they don't enforce mere secular agnosticism but explicit atheism because anything short of that allowd the people to reason and challenge authority imposed on them that is absolute and unquestionable. You can't challenge the CCP and tell them you will hold a religious service without permit at your home because it is your right as a human to believe what you want and share that belief because under that regime there is no authority over humans above the government and as such human rights are defined by the government and is beyond challenge.
Ultimately, what the military (or victor military of a conflict) allows to be your human right is what is practiced.
What you’re describing are what we frame as natural rights in the US, which can be understood to be “human rights” but this phrasing as I understand it went back to roughly the UN Declaration of Human Rights which is an odd document, and I’m not aware of this phrasing being used much in English at least before then (but feel free to correct me if you know otherwise!).
American law is best understood within a framework of natural and common law, but one of the issues this has caused is that natural or “God-given” law is at odds with the separation of church and State, so what it really boils down to is we rely more heavily on the common law tradition which is in turn also informed by natural law as it was conceived of through the customs of England at a point in time. Citing natural law is done, but I’m not convinced that relying on it solely would withstand a serious challenge under American jurisprudence anymore because at the end of the day, it is amorphous and it does violate separation of church and State. Even common law, while informative of how the Federal courts operate, is actually not that useful at the Federal level seeing as how Federal law relies more heavily on the Constitution (again, informed by the common law, and common law tradition is used to understand the language with better clarity but it is never cited as a source for law) and the statutes that Congress passes or the treaties we sign.
> Both slavery and King George's tyranny were lawful but the law was rejected because a right given to humans beyond the authority of any government to regulate was violated.
Well, it was rhetorically rejected, but perhaps it would be best understood as independence was proclaimed by the Union of States and then recognized by the United Kingdom, with a war in-between to settle the claim. Then for a period of time, the United States government was governed by the Articles of Confederation before we passed the Constitution.
As for slavery, we rejected that (and indentured servitude) through a constitutional amendment. Our elimination of it relied on statute, not any common or natural law concepts (although the rhetoric against slavery did cite natural law, rhetoric is rhetoric and law is law).
> This is one if the reasons why I passionately hate communism, because they don't enforce mere secular agnosticism but explicit atheism because anything short of that allowd the people to reason and challenge authority imposed on them that is absolute and unquestionable. You can't challenge the CCP and tell them you will hold a religious service without permit at your home because it is your right as a human to believe what you want and share that belief because under that regime there is no authority over humans above the government and as such human rights are defined by the government and is beyond challenge.
You see, this cuts to the heart of the matter: the continued existence of the PRC under the CCP’s domination, and other states like North Korea, the KSA and some other Muslim Kingdoms and other illiberal States really kind of cuts against the whole “X is a human right” schtick. Some would even argue that the United States is illiberal which, let me be clear, I strongly disagree with, but because our values don’t line up with theirs and they find some of our values or traditions abhorrent, they’ll argue the point anyway. So at the end of the day, we’ve got a bunch of claims by different peoples and organizations about what is actually a human right and basically no agreement. Given that we share this world, I can’t really agree that such a thing actually exists in any meaningful sense, but I can say I vastly prefer my tradition over others.
> Ultimately, what the military (or victor military of a conflict) allows to be your human right is what is practiced.
While I appreciate your pragmatism, I don’t think this is fair. Maybe all law is enforced by the gun barrel of the State pointed at us, but within many countries there does exist the means to defend yourself and your claims without resorting to military campaigning, even against the State, and there are one or more elected bodies representing people’s interests, juries, and as much I personally disrespect them, even referendums in a lot of places. Our conception of rights changes all the time, and while I don’t think positive rights are always well thought out, it is a fact that a lot of places have actually incorporated them well after a nation was founded through a process of lawmaking.
Not true at all. The "modern" understanding of separation is what is at odds with the original intent at the time. Enforcement or support of a specific religion is what separation of Church and state is about not enforcement of agnosticism. Congress had sunday mass every week for many decades at the begining of the country. They still have chaplains, as does the military, they just don't enforce a specific religion.
> I can’t really agree that such a thing actually exists in any meaningful sense, but I can say I vastly prefer my tradition over others.
If you note my conclusion, human right is something enforced by the military not courts. To begin with, the law can recognize a human right but it can't define it, it (same as natural right to me) is beyond the jursidiction of the law. Unlike legal rights, declaring something a human right by law is merely recognizing a higher law, which means historical violations can retroactively be punished. Human rights can also be used as cause to fight a war (typically civil wars unless the aggressir claims their nationals are affected, like with putin and crimea). Human rights not only exist but have existed as long as humans have, when human law fails to recognize them and allows their violation the both the law and the violators are criminal enterprizes.
> rhetoric is rhetoric and law is law
It isn't rhetoric, it is reasoning and intent behind law as defined by the lawmakers. The law defines rules not reasoning and justification behind rules. Material like this can be used in court to argue a case.
For your last paragraph, ultimately all criminal law exists because of the threat of imprisonment, but what I meant was not just that but also the fact that natural law is above legal law and that dispute is settled by violence usually. The most common human violator afterall is the state.
Communism is a more general idea about common ownership and it is not limited to a single implementation in CCCP.
It lets you say "I really, really think that X is good" but act as if you're just reporting "Everyone agrees with me that we should do whatever 'X is good' implies." It muddles the meaning of rights, tarnishes the concept by equating the support for rights in general with a specific, controversial position many people will reject, and all to make an argument that won't stand up to scrutiny and makes your audience feel cheated.
It's confusing even trying to describe what's normative and what's descriptive in the headline. Arguing descriptively that something is a right, which isn't widely thought to be a right, because it ought to be a right, because then your claim would be accepted, is too convoluted. It's making a descriptive claim about what normatives I do accept that's actually a normative claim about what normatives I ought to behave as if I accept. What?
If you want argue for specific action, just do it. Don't try to tell the audience what they believe.
The framing also means that people argue about rights instead of whatever the point was, like we're about to do here.
And now one could argue is or should knowledge be a human right? What is the role of knowledge within a free and democratic society? How does adding friction to the access of information influence said free society? In wich cases is such a friction, or even a regulation of access desireable from the standpoint of a free society?
When back in the the Suffragettes argued voting is a human right, they did so in the context of a society where they (women) didn't get that right. Was it therefore a bad argument? I don't think so, as the appeal to universality helped them get men on board.
When someone says that X should be a right, is making it a right the ultimate goal? (What specifically does "should be a right" even mean? What do they think rights are? What do I?) Usually there's something else that making X a right implies, a goal for which the right is just an instrument. If making X a right results in Y, and Y is good, and that's why X should be a right, then why not argue directly for Y?
Otherwise you make a purely moral argument that only works on people who already share your values. What if they don't? That happens all the time with moral framings. One side doesn't understand the other doesn't care about their values and repeating or restating them in different ways won't change that.
Calling X a right is a position statement, not an argument. If you want to use it as a premise in an argument that "X is a right, therefore Y," you have to make a separate argument that X is actually a right. You can't just assert it.
Borrowing the moral weight of humans rights most people recognize, attaching it to an asserted right most people don't, and using that to argue for an outcome based on their support for "human rights" is turning human rights into a stick to hit them with. The more it's used, the more they learn to roll their eyes at arguments invoking "human rights." What happens when they start to roll their eyes at human rights?
I am sorry, but knowledge is not specific, it is a very old, basic and fundamental concept. Without knowledge, human race wouldn't exist. It is not some transient and quirky concept suddenly made up. Even if controversial, it is a good candidate to be considered a human right.
indeed, in the UN declaration of human rights, there is a right to education already in article 26 - it is not that different from knowledge, but knowledge as a concept fits here much better.
If someone wants to do private research and sell the results to people via journals, then they should be free to do so.
So I would not focus on the edge cases.
That's not what this article is talking about though. This article is attempting to conflate the right to knowledge with a right to access publications that another party produced and put behind a pay wall.
Which is also different than the 3rd discussion of "if it is tax funded, shouldn't it be available to the general public?".
Thank you for clarifying this. I could see how a reasonable person could easily assume that Elbakyan is in fact talking about the prohibition of dropping rocks without going through an elaborate bit of mental gymnastics for a pedantic language gotcha in order to arrive at such an interpretation.
You should note that many authorities and governments in the past have absolutely punished the gathering of scientific knowledge, e.g. in a theology.
This is a good point. A person can mention freedom of speech and another person can respond in intentional misunderstanding in order to make a joke or to seem intelligent.
Like for example, someone can see an article written by the creator of Sci-Hub on a very specific topic and bring up rocks.
That indeed is the “specific topic” isn’t it?
Private corporations even pay for open access because the addressable market for such a product in dollars will be a pittance compared to whatever it cost them to research the product.
Regardless, LLM training has a different notion about the public domain, so trade secrets are what you're looking for - licensing isn't going to stop anyone.
in the case of Sci-Hub, acquiring knowledge is prohibited, and for what reason? Because if you read this paper, academic publisher will not be able to become rich and make huge profits! Do you see anything wrong here?
Or do you live in a place where that feels normal?
Until then (which probably means forever), I hope Sci-Hub and similar keep thriving.
First of all, you said that tax payer funded research needs to be publicly available. I agree with this principle, but I wonder how you define "publicly available". Does it mean that anyone can access it for free, or does it mean that anyone can access it for a reasonable fee? If the former, then who pays for the costs of publishing, peer-reviewing, and maintaining the quality and integrity of the research? If the latter, then how do you determine what is a reasonable fee, and who decides who can afford it?
Secondly, you said that if someone wants to do private research and sell the results to people via journals, then they should be free to do so. I agree that there is a place for private research in the academic world, but I also think that there are some ethical and social implications of this practice. For example, how do you ensure that private research is not biased by the interests of the sponsors or the publishers? How do you prevent private research from creating monopolies or inequalities in the dissemination of knowledge? How do you foster collaboration and innovation among researchers who work in different sectors and have different incentives?
Thirdly, you said that "human rights" has become such a loaded term, and that you are not entitled to know everything. I agree that human rights is a complex and contested concept, but I also think that it is a valuable and powerful one. Human rights are not just legal or moral claims, but also expressions of human dignity and aspirations. They are not static or fixed, but dynamic and evolving. They are not absolute or universal, but relative and contextual. They are not granted or given, but claimed and defended.
One of the human rights that has been recognized by various international instruments and declarations is the right to education. This right includes not only access to formal schooling, but also access to information and knowledge that is relevant, diverse, and inclusive. This right is based on the premise that education is essential for human development, empowerment, and participation in society. Therefore, I would argue that access to knowledge is not just a privilege or a luxury, but a human right that deserves respect and protection.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with my points? I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.
In fact the reason why people talk about it at all is that what in consideration to be "human right" often go against the laws of nature, so we need to somehow make it happen. I think a better phrasing should be "most of us want this to happen", or better "this will be good for everyone"