Off topic, but:
> The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
> The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
of course clever demagogues and rhetoricians can write such things into legislation, just as they can write legislation that claims you have no right to speak freely, but that just makes the legislation incorrect, like the famous legislation declaring pi to be exactly 3
Of course Google lobbyists are paid to argue that such a right exist and is higher up in the hierarchy than anything else, but there's no reason to listen to this arguments. I have no love for legislative bodies inventing artificial rights (like intellectual property rights), but corporations inventing artificial right is legitimately even worse.
This time fortunately the legislators took the side of the people and created a “right to be forgotten” instead of a “right to hoard private data”.
— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
(https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip... the US Declaration of Independence, expressing the motivation for independence from Europe)
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law, (...)
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Natural law theories base human rights on a "natural" moral, religious or even biological order which is independent of transitory human laws or traditions.
Socrates and his philosophic heirs, Plato and Aristotle, posited the existence of natural justice or natural right (dikaion physikon, δικαιον φυσικον, Latin ius naturale). Of these, Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law, although evidence for this is due largely to the interpretations of his work by Thomas Aquinas.
The development of this tradition of natural justice into one of natural law is usually attributed to the Stoics.
Some of the early Church fathers sought to incorporate the until then pagan concept of natural law into Christianity. Natural law theories have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, and John Locke.
In the Seventeenth Century Thomas Hobbes founded a contractualist theory of legal positivism on what all men could agree upon: what they sought (happiness) was subject to contention, but a broad consensus could form around what they feared (violent death at the hands of another). The natural law was how a rational human being, seeking to survive and prosper, would act. It was discovered by considering humankind's natural rights, whereas previously it could be said that natural rights were discovered by considering the natural law. In Hobbes' opinion, the only way natural law could prevail was for men to submit to the commands of the sovereign. In this lay the foundations of the theory of a social contract between the governed and the governor.
Hugo Grotius based his philosophy of international law on natural law. He wrote that "even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate" natural law, which "would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs." (De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomeni XI). This is the famous argument etiamsi daremus (non-esse Deum), that made natural law no longer dependent on theology.
John Locke incorporated natural law into many of his theories and philosophy, especially in Two Treatises of Government. Locke turned Hobbes' prescription around, saying that if the ruler went against natural law and failed to protect "life, liberty, and property," people could justifiably overthrow the existing state and create a new one.
The Belgian philosopher of law Frank van Dun is one among those who are elaborating a secular conception of natural law in the liberal tradition. There are also emerging and secular forms of natural law theory that define human rights as derivative of the notion of universal human dignity.
The term "human rights" has replaced the term "natural rights" in popularity, because the rights are less and less frequently seen as requiring natural law for their existence.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights#Philosophies_of_h...
Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights. (...)
Natural law first appeared in ancient Greek philosophy, and was referred to by Roman philosopher Cicero. It was subsequently alluded to in the Bible, and then developed in the Middle Ages by Catholic philosophers such as Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas. During the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of natural laws was used to challenge the divine right of kings, and became an alternative justification for the establishment of a social contract, positive law, and government – and thus legal rights – in the form of classical republicanism. Conversely, the concept of natural rights is used by others to challenge the legitimacy of all such establishments.
The idea of human rights derives from theories of natural rights. Those rejecting a distinction between human rights and natural rights view human rights as the successor that is not dependent on natural law, natural theology, or Christian theological doctrine. Natural rights, in particular, are considered beyond the authority of any government or international body to dismiss.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
more generally, though, the idea that good and evil can exist independently of law is foundational to most philosophical systems; if you reject that, you necessarily reject that laws can be evil in ways that go beyond mere internal inconsistency
though they are not based on conceptions of individual rights, taoism, confucianism, and almost any kind of theism posit a moral authority that is higher than any human law and can therefore condemn it
A "right to be forgotten" seems to mean a conflict with the classic rights of others to remember what they know, and to tell each other what they know.
remember that the holocaust, the great leap forward, gulag, the imprisonment of galileo, daily human sacrifice to the aztec sun god, and witch-burnings in the spanish inquisition were not just legal but legally required
therefore, anyone who condemns one of them is appealing to a moral standard they consider superior to, at least, the legal systems of the countries in question at the time
"Under Article 17 of the UK GDPR individuals have the right to have personal data erased. This is also known as the 'right to be forgotten'." [1]
"The right to be forgotten appears in Recitals 65 and 66 and in Article 17 of the GDPR. It states, “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay”" [2]
[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
[2] https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/
https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
This obviously varies depending on jurisdictions, but a great number of users (EU citizens, and people resident in the EU - but additionally, the UK) absolutely have a "right to be forgotten," and brazenly claiming "no such right exists" is ignorant and fallacious, and such unfounded arrogance is a distinctly USian trait. For someone who purportedly lives outside the US, you don't seem to grasp that there are laws in other countries than the US.
No, it's the same kind of thing as having your records "sealed", to not let a past deed haunt you.
Not even sure what kind of logic jumps one has to make to equate something like this to "robbing with inpunity". For starters the punishment to robbing isn't remembrance of your robbing, it's jail time or fine etc. And, fun fact, the aforementioned "records being sealed" can even be applied to someone who e.g. did a robbery or other crime as a juvenile.
Now, since a "right to be forgotten" does explicitly exist in EU and other jurisdictions, I'm not sure what denying its existance means.
If you mean "there's no such right" as a thing in itself, outside laws and treaties and jurisdictions, then the same is true for any right.
No right exists by itself, as if handed to us by nature, not even the right to not be murdered. All rights are based on people deciding some kind of assurances are good to have and putting them into laws and treaties and such.
And all rights are only granted and protected based on power relationships and agreement, not based on some (non-existent) natural truths existing independenty of them in the cosmos. We might call some "self-evident" and "natural" but those are just fancy words. In actual history almost all of our so-called "self-evident/natural" rights have been unrecognized (even in quite recent history), and societies considered this just fine. In fact in some cases, actually giving the rights would be considered the violation of the natural law.
>of course clever demagogues and rhetoricians can write such things into legislation
Demagogue is someone who "who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument". Rhetorician is a public speaker who is good in persuading people with words. Neither have much to do with such legislation being passed (nor was it the work of some demagogues).
It's simply about the internet making anything somebody does into a permanent record [1], and this being understood as not always necessarily being for the benefit of society.
E.g. what some edgy/troubled teenager wrote on his social media account in his teens shouldn't necessarily be part of his "permanent record" for employers and others to judge them by decades afterwards. And in the past, it wasn't, unless it made the press (and even then, it was easily lost due to it being in print and ephemeral), or was deemed necessary so by the state (e.g. to register as a sex offender). Just because technology now makes it being a permanent record trivial doesn't mean we should be OK with it. We should be masters of technology, not slaves to it.
[1] Doesn't matter if something like that could be accomplished in the past too - what matters is that it's far more prevalent, has several orders of magnitude more scale of the kind of stuff that can be kept, and is easier to achieve, and trivial to search with the advent of the internet. This changes the impact of this to society a lot.
(i think your comment would be higher-quality if you also deleted your repetition of that vacuous nonsense, though, because it makes it harder to discuss the substantial issues here; there would be no point in discussing ethical issues at all if moral relativism were correct. you wouldn't have bothered to post a comment at all if you were the nihilist you are posing as)
remember that lashon hara is by definition truthful; the point of the story is not that it is commendable to say everything that is truthful
This is wrong on several levels, including practical and philosophical (and those aspects of it have been covered a lot in moral philosophy).
For starters, whether morality is relative or objective has no bearing at all to whether it exists as a practical force in the human world - and thus whether it makes total practical sense to study it, shape it, apply it, benefit from it, use it to make things work smoother or more to your liking, and so on.
(Not to mention how it also makes sense to examine it, document it, and discuss it, from a curiosity or historical interest perspective, even if it doesn't concern one directly as a practical matter. People do study the morality of other historical periods or distant societies, for example, even if it has no impact on their life in their society).
Note that there are several other things for which exactly the same thing applies: religion, laws, taboos, and so on, even art and fashion.
>you wouldn't have bothered to post a comment at all if you were the nihilist you are posing as
Rejecting natural rights and understanding that rights are historical constructions doesn't mean one is disintered in rights.
I am very much interested in my right to my property, for example, and will vote, advocate, protest, demonstrate, etc, to maintain it.
I don't have to believe there's some inherent natural "right to property" for that. Just that I find the legal enforcement of one beneficial to me, and that I'd rather live in a society where it is enforced, as opposed to one where it's not.
in the former case, you don't seem to be offering to make any concessions (and in any case, how could you, in a public forum like this), and in the latter case, it seems like it would be in people's best interests to close their ears to you except when your arguments are factual (as opposed to normative); and possibly even then, if their interests are likely to run counter to yours, because selective reporting of facts can manipulate people to act against their own interests just as effectively as outright lies
that's what i mean by 'there would be no point in discussing ethical issues at all if moral relativism were correct'. there is certainly a point in negotiating agreements, or even evaluating who is likely to fulfill their negotiated commitments, but that isn't the same thing as discussing questions of ethics
attempting to return to the substantive questions, perhaps we would do well to promote pseudonymous and even anonymous online interaction (especially for media likely to be used by edgy and troubled teenagers) and not grant governments the ability to eliminate facts from the historical record piecemeal, like beria editing stalin's opponents out of photos
If you were familiar with the fallibility of human memory you wouldn't have made such a post
some of us practice sufficiently OK OPSEC to prevent this from becoming an issue but it doesn't mean that we don't have to look out for the greater good of society against unwarranted centralization of technological power.
feel free to breach such legislation if you deem it in your best interests