Communication and Rights

Citation

Cruft R (2022) Communication and Rights. In: Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 171-187. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198871194.003.0010

Abstract
This chapter’s primary aim is to defend the place of the concept of rights in the morality and law of communication. A second aim is to sketch out distinctions between some of the fundamental interests that ground our rights of communication: the chapter distinguishes those communicative rights that are components of other human rights from rights groundable simply in the importance of communication as such; it also distinguishes the ways communicators’ interests, recipients’ interests, and third party interests interact to ground communicative rights, and it develops a novel claim that communication’s distinctive way of connecting participants in the first and second person is intrinsically good for participants. A third aim is to show communication rights to be a form of social right, one that straddles traditional distinctions between civil-political and socio-economic rights, and between positive and negative rights.

Keywords
communication; communicative rights; connection; negative rights; positive rights; social rights