Subject: [hrpc] 3 dimensions

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2015 19:03:28 +0200

Hi,

This is to try to make perhaps plainer the dimensions I was talking
about in the room today.  I think I see three.  For these purposes,
I'm going to assume we know what a right is, and what rights are
important or desirable.  (I am extremely sceptical of such a view in
general, but for the sake of the argument we can suppose that we
properly understand the relevant UN declaration and so on.  For those
of a philosophical bent, I'm really more an Aristotelian virtue ethics
type, and am therefore suspicious of rights claims, but I can
understand them.)

The first lies in the specification and implementation of (what I'm
going to call) rights-aiding primitives in protocols.  (For instance,
strong encryption might be one of those primitives.)  I think if this RG has
anything to do with respect to this dimension, it is only to identify
a gap in the primitive space and perhaps to outline the extent of that
gap.

The second lies in figuring out how rights-aiding primitives fit
together to create a given rights-enhancing technology.  This is at
least part of what the glossary draft is trying to do.  I think this
is necessary work in that, to talk about the rights consequences of
technical decisions, one is going to have to understand how the
technology is combined to effectuate a right.

The third dimension, I think, lies in understanding rights paradoxes,
where the interaction of different kinds of rights-enhancing
technologies and rights-aiding primitives paradoxically produce an
erosion either of the very rights they were intended to aid, or else a
different right.  The latter _might_ be an example of the "rights
conflict" issue that we saw in the Zitterbart/Grunwald presentation
today; I'm not sure.  The former certainly is not, because it's
inherently paradoxical.  The reason I think this is a separate
dimension is because I do not believe that rights stand alone as
absolute items, but interact with one another to make a fully realised
human condition.  (Perhaps this shows the influence of the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms on me!)

I hope these are useful.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]