all the other attributes (birth, sex, fatherland, religion, culture, race) on which a wide variety of ancient dignities were based in the past become mere accidents with no moral relevance and simply fade away. The difference between the president of the most powerful nation in the world and a homeless person, a migrant who swims across the sea to reach the promised land, or a person in prison for serious crimes is accidental, irrelevant, because there is nothing greater than common dignity. Though the variety of possible circumstances is humanly enriching, all individuals belong equally to the common lot of mortals.
It is often repeated that death is the great equalizer; but before death arrives, in our lifetime, we have all been made equal by our common dignity of origin.
Egalitarianism Leads Straight to Cosmopolitanism
The cosmopolitan ideal would like to see the establishment of a single citizenry for all the inhabitants of this global polis that is our planet. Before being a member of a state, a nation, or a country, each individual is firstly a citizen of the world. Because they belong to the same species, individuals have a generic citizenry from which are derived the rights that every state should always respect, even though the individual is not granted the citizenship that every state can give. Perhaps we will never attain and perhaps it may not even be desirable to attain the world state that Kant longed for (the world ruled by one universal government), but powerful tendencies can be seen on all sides that converge on the future construction of a cosmopolitan civil society.
In the final analysis, cosmopolitanism means simply that: there is only once race, the human race, and only one principle, individual dignity.
References
1 Craig, E. (ed.) (2000). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
2 Ferrater Mora, J. (2009). Diccionario de filosofía. Barcelona: Ariel.
3 Kant, I. (1898). Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
4 Kant, I. (2008). Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Cosimo.
5 Kapust, D. (2011). Cicero on decorum and the morality of rhetoric. European Journal of Political Theory 10 (1): 92–112.
6 Machado, A. (1986). Juan de Mairena 1 & 2. Madrid: Cátedra.
7 Petrarch. (1978). Obras I. Prosa, De los remedios contra la próspera y adversa fortuna. Madrid: Alfaguara.
8 Pinker, S. (2008). The stupidity of dignity. The New Republic (28 May).
3 Communication Rights in an Internet-Based Society Why Is the Principle of Universality So Important?1
Loreto Corredoira
The foundations of the universality of communication rights were laid down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and confirmed in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966. Both texts define three communication rights: seek, receive, and impart. These three activities are at the heart of how the Internet is used across the world today. These three facets of the right also shaped the discussion that took place at the World Summit on the Information Society (as stated in ITU 2003). This chapter discusses the threats to communication rights that originate from the Internet and its universal or mass nature. Though there are many such threats, they should not hinder efforts to ensure the universal application of these rights. The “universal subject” in the information society and the rights that this subject possesses are described in this chapter.
A decade ago, I reflected on UDHR Article 19 (Corredoira 2007) in the context of Web 2.0. My primary focus was how this Article relates to the integration of new forms of public participation in media as well as to the new messages and methods that the Internet makes possible for industries and individual professionals. Since the use of the Internet became widespread in the mid-1990s, the universalization of communication rights has become even clearer. A range of stakeholders has emerged: a public that participates in and contributes to discussions in the media; media channels run by “digital natives” who require no license to broadcast or “print”; and social networks that democratize the communication of information and facilitate many channels for seeking it – sometimes from disruptive sources (Wasserman 2017, p. 72) – and for contributing to collaborative journalism.
Without any doubt, the guarantees contained in the generic right I have just analyzed or in the different “Bills of Rights” that contain them are, as Stephens (2005) says, insufficient. This is why it is useful to deconstruct this generic right into three rights: to seek information and ideas, to receive information and ideas, and to impart information and ideas. As a matter of fact, almost all international texts that recognize and interpret this “standard” do so while highlighting the “multifaceted” nature of freedom of expression, what we call, communication rights in order to reflect better this poliedric nature.
According to both Padovani (Padovani and Pavan 2006) and Raboy (Raboy 2004, pp. 345–359), communication rights originated in the United Nations Charter as described by D’Arcy when he proposed the “right to communicate,” a different concept than “communication rights” but that shares with the latter the idea that we are in need of a more extensive, fleshed-out right or set of three rights:
International recognition of the centrality of information to human rights dates back to the UN Charter, where article 19 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; these rights includes the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
(Padovani and Pavan 2006)
International recognition of the centrality of information to human rights dates back to the UN Charter, where article 19 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; these rights includes the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
(Padovani and Pavan 2006)
Yet it was not until 1969 that another concept, that of a universal “right to communicate” emerged in the words of Jean D’Arcy, former director of the Radio and Visual Service at the Office of Public Information for the UN:
The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to information, first laid down-twenty one years ago in Article in 19. This is the right to communicate.
(D’Arcy 1969)
“The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to information, first laid down-twenty one years ago in Article in 19. This is the right of man to communicate.
d’Arcy (1969)
Twenty-five years from the rise of the Web, the appearance of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism and marketing, the digitalization of the commercial world, and the sharing economy are all trends that make it necessary to reassess the foundations of communication rights.
In the spirit of “updating” communication rights enshrined in the UDHR – rights that, as we will see in other chapters of this book, are the natural evolution of the “freedom of expression”
