PEA Soup Blog is pleased to be hosting this Ethics discussion with Lowry Pressly (University of Stanford) and Wendy Salkin (University of Stanford).
This discussion focuses on Pressly’s paper “The Right to Be Forgotten and the Value of an Open Future”, with a critical précis from Wendy Salkin.
Critical Precis of Pressly, “The Right to be Forgotten and the Value of an Open Future”
PEA Soup Blog
Wendy Salkin
In “The Right to be Forgotten and the Value of an Open Future,” Lowry Pressly provides a novel account of the moral grounds of the right to be forgotten, which gives “individuals…the power to anonymize or remove historically accurate information about themselves from the internet” (65). This “power is justified,” Pressly tells us, “because the presence of such information online can pose a significant threat to human well-being” (65).
Pressly first articulates the scope of the right to be forgotten: It “empowers individuals to remove from the internet, and only the internet, information that pertains to them but is out of their direct control” (67). Because the information itself is out of their direct control, the “individual has the power to put the controllers of such information (e.g., newspapers, blogs, and directories) under a duty to erase or anonymize it” (erasure), or to put operators of “search engines that index and make the information easily retrievable…under a duty to sever the digital linkage connecting one’s name to the unwanted piece of information” (delisting) (67). However, the right may only be exercised provided that the information at issue is outdated or irrelevant (67). The information at issue “need not be false, misleading, or damaging to one’s reputation for a claim of the right to be forgotten to be justified,” which distinguishes the right from “rights and interests against defamation” (67n5). And the information “must have already been publicly accessible for a sufficiently extensive period of time for one to have a claim of the right to be forgotten over it,” which distinguishes the right from “rights and interests of privacy, confidentiality, and secrets” (67n5).[1] The right’s exercise is “limited principally by a countervailing public interest in access to certain types of information—typically information thought to be important for public safety and democratic self-governance or of artistic value” (68).
But what exactly is the right to be forgotten? It is “a right to the possibility of forming new personal relations not preconditioned by accurate knowledge of one’s past” (66). The right gives its exerciser the possibility of an open future where they are not “‘shackled to the past,’” “‘forever tether[ed]…to all [their] past actions’” (69). It is a right to this possibility in two different senses: First, the exercise of the right offers the possibility, not a guarantee, that one could form new personal relationships unburdened by others’ knowledge of one’s past. After all, some people may already have accessed the information before its erasure or delisting, and people may still get access to the information by other means despite the erasure or delisting (71). Second, it is a right to this possibility insofar as the right has been successfully exercised once one’s name on the internet is no longer easily or always associated with the information at issue. One need never go out and try to form “new relationships un-preconditioned by knowledge of” the information at issue (71)—one need only have the opportunity to do so if one chooses. The right to be forgotten is not about how or even whether the right’s exerciser uses their open future, just that they have one (71).
I am often suspicious of claims that a problem is truly new, that it does not have historical forebears. Pressly anticipates skeptics like me: “before the development of the internet as a global, searchable archive, one could always go elsewhere and make acquaintances who knew nothing about one’s past” (70n19). No longer: “By enabling anyone, anywhere, at any time to access information about one’s past, the invention of the searchable internet made it, for the first time in human history, reasonable to doubt whether one can form new relationships without one’s past rushing ahead to make the first impression” (70). However, important to Pressly’s account of the moral grounds of the right to be forgotten is not merely our newfound access to information about others’ pasts, but our widespread, shared social practice of searching online for information about others and (more to the point of Pressly’s overall argument) the concomitant expectation that others do the same thing “before or shortly after meeting” us (70).
The key question for Pressly is this: What is the moral basis of the right to be forgotten? Pressly critically examines what he calls the “informational autonomy family of views” (72-76) before offering his own “agentive confidence” account (76-79).
According to Pressly, the informational autonomy family of views is “concerned with what the possibility of having new relationships un-preconditioned by knowledge about one’s past permits one to achieve in the formation and projection of a certain self-image.” Such views “understand[] one’s future to be closed in virtue of how the availability of personal information online constrains one’s ability to project a certain self-image” (72).
Pressly characterizes two versions of the informational autonomy account:
- Strongest version: “We have ‘a fundamental interest in controlling, shaping, and maintaining our identity and how we present ourselves to others,’ [quoting Basu 2022] which grounds a right to delist or erase true information pertaining to us because, to some extent, success in ‘controlling’ and ‘shaping’ our identities depends not just on how we present ourselves to others but also on how others take us to be” (72).
Pressly states that this version of the view rests on a confusion between “an interest in autonomous self-determination” and “an interest in the outcomes of that endeavor” (73). Pressly grants his interlocutors both “that there is an interest in the autonomous self-determination of personality” and “that the success or failure of this project will depend in part on how others take one to be” (73). He identifies the view’s “error” as “assuming that because success in one’s project of self-determination depends in part on how one is interpreted by others, it follows that one’s interest in autonomous self-determination therefore extends to others’ interpretations” (73). Pressly responds: “But actually being taken to be x by others is not necessary for one to autonomously determine to be x” (73). According to Pressly, an individual may autonomously orient their life around being x regardless of whether another recognizes that fact. The online availability of information from the past that casts doubt on the individual’s present resolve to be x may make it harder for the individual to carry out the project of convincing them otherwise, but that is different from saying that their project “is therefore less autonomous or self-determined” (73). And here is the first critical part of this critical précis: I found Pressly’s objection to the strongest version of the informational autonomy account interesting but a bit quick. So I am eager for his guidance in better understanding his objection and exactly which parts of the strongest version of the informational autonomy accounts it gives me reason to reject. My request here is motivated partly by an interest in knowing what exactly Pressly intends to retain from the informational autonomy accounts, since he is explicit that he does “not intend to argue that the right’s moral basis has nothing to do with autonomy or self-determination” (75).
Pressly further claims that this version of the informational autonomy view is “far too demanding” insofar as it is meant to support the claim “that an interest in autonomously engaging in our project entails a right to the conditions that make it likely we succeed” (75). And he adds what seems correct to me: “the rest of us have an important autonomy interest in making up our minds about what [the exerciser of the right to be forgotten] is like,” which is not outweighed by the right’s exerciser’s “desire to be seen a certain way” (75). I do, however, wonder whether the strongest version of the informational autonomy view is in fact committed to the claim that an individual’s interest in being understood in a certain way always outweighs others’ interests in making up their own minds about that individual. Even based on Pressly’s characterization of the view, it does not seem to be.
- More moderate version: An individual’s “right to be forgotten is grounded in an interest in [their] projects of self-determination not being unduly burdened by information online” (73).
Pressly states that this interest is also “an unsatisfactory candidate for grounding the right to be forgotten” because the exercise of the right is not limited to online information that is burdensome to the individual—one can exercise the right against any information that is outdated or irrelevant (74). Pressly adds that this version of the view “requires us to make judgments about which sorts of burdens to achieving one’s desired self-image are undue and which are not, an exercise of adjudication the right to be forgotten conspicuously refuses” (75).
Pressly focuses on what he takes to be the shortcomings of the informational autonomy family of views in articulating the moral basis of the right to be forgotten. Chief among his concerns is that such accounts “take an instrumental view on the value of [the] possibility [of forming new social relations that are not preconditioned by knowledge of one’s past], connected to the role it can—but need not—play in the autonomous self-determination of personality” (76). However, his claim that he does “not intend to argue that the right’s moral basis has nothing to do with autonomy or self-determination” (75) invites these questions:
- What exactly does the moral basis of the right to be forgotten have to do with autonomy or self-determination?
- What, if anything, does Pressly think the informational autonomy family of views gets right?
- And how different, exactly, are the informational autonomy views from the agentive confidence view Pressly proposes as an alternative?
Pressly then argues that the moral basis of the right to be forgotten is that it can help bolster an individual’s agentive confidence. According to Pressly, “healthy agency—including the self-determination of one’s personality—requires, among other things, an agent’s confidence [1] that it is up to her to direct her life and, importantly, [2] that it is worth the trouble to try to do so” (76). One’s agentive confidence can be harmed when one “believ[es] that one has lost the possibility of forming new relations not preconditioned by knowledge about one’s past” (72). The use of the term “believes” here is important: According to Pressly, an individual can suffer harms to her agentive confidence even if:
(1) she never “encounters someone who fails to recognize her in the way she would prefer” (76),
(2) no one ever accesses the relevant information about her again, or at all (77), and
(3) all the available information about her on the internet is consistent with how she would currently like to be understood by others (77).
Pressly is careful to clarify that an individual’s interest in agentive confidence does not generate a “right to that particular psychological attitude, such that its absence would entail duties on others to make her feel a certain way” (77-78). Rather, she “can have a right to…the conditions necessary for such confidence to be reasonably available to her” (78), which brings me to my next question, about the conditions that are necessary for agentive confidence to be reasonably available. If the right to be forgotten is grounded in our interest in restoring or preserving our agentive confidence, must it be the case that the exercise of this right is the only or even simply the best way to restore our agentive confidence? Pressly explicitly states that agentive confidence “has a social basis; it is not an inevitable or isolated fact of human psychology but a response to a certain arrangement of a society’s material and ideological conditions. Just like other forms of confidence, it is given shape and conditions of meaning by an array of social structures and practices, which can both support and undermine it” (78)—or, in other words, the moral basis of the right to be forgotten is agentive confidence in societies like ours. So here are two cases to test the strength of the relationship between agentive confidence and the right to be forgotten in societies with slightly different norms:
Norm of not searching: Imagine that we worked collectively to shift our shared social norms such that we did not by default search the names of people we met immediately before or immediately after meeting them. As the norms shifted, we also came to stop assuming that others did this to us.
Norm of disassociation: Next, imagine a social norm whereby we all commonly agree that, to the extent that we are able, we will avoid associating people with any information we learn about them on the internet that is more than ten years old, say. A widespread social norm of not associating people with information from long ago might do much of the same work as erasing or delisting that same information. Such a social norm, if sufficiently successfully widespread, could “unshackle” people from their pasts in much the same way as the ability to delist or erase the same information.
The shift toward either of the aforementioned social norms would, it seems to me, create “the conditions for [agentive] confidence to be reasonably available” even if we could no longer erase or delist information about ourselves on the internet that we did not want others to see—not because the information was no longer there, but because we either would be more confident that others would not go out and look for it (norm of not searching) or that others would not associate us with outdated or irrelevant information (norm of disassociation). This is not to say that shifting our norms would be all-things-considered better than individuals being able to erase or delist outdated or irrelevant material about themselves from the internet.[2] Nor am I suggesting that we could not both shift our norms and allow people to individually exercise the right to be forgotten. Rather, my question is more narrowly whether the ability to shift our social norms in one of the aforementioned manners (or another that might have the effect of making our futures feel more open to each of us) would make the right to be forgotten less necessary for agentive confidence to be reasonably available.
As mentioned, Pressly further clarifies the scope of the right to be forgotten by discussing its relationship to and distinctness from the right to privacy. I found this discussion particularly illuminating. To begin, consider how these rights differ. First, they differ in their scope: “the right to privacy is concerned with information (or bodies, objects, etc.) not already freely available in the public sphere, while the right to be forgotten concerns only information already freely available in the public sphere” (79). Second, the rights take different forms: “the right to be forgotten is a right to enact a change to the status quo and does not offer a standing protection against violation, as privacy does” (80). Third, the duties associated with the respective rights are different: Whereas my right to privacy puts a duty on others to (for instance) not read my diary, my right to be forgotten does not impose a duty on others to (for instance) not read an article about me available on the internet (80). Despite these differences, Pressly confirms that the rights are connected, not because either is reducible to the other (according to Pressly), but “because they protect the same sort of thing, albeit in different ways” (80): As discussed, the right to be forgotten protects agentive confidence—that is, “the confidence that one’s life is one’s own and worth the trouble of trying to lead it” (82). Similarly, at least on the accounts that concern Pressly, privacy “support[s] an individual’s sense of holding moral title over her life” (81, discussing Reiman 1976), which sense Kupfer (1987) specifies as “important because, among other things, it is a necessary condition for living a life that may properly be described as autonomous or self-determined” (81). What is especially interesting here is that Pressly states explicitly that it is Kupfer’s understanding of holding moral title over one’s life—an understanding that prizes autonomy and self-determination—that “comes closer to [Pressly’s] view” (81). Upon reading this, I was drawn once again to ask how much of the informational autonomy accounts—which also prize a certain form of autonomy and self-determination—Pressly really wants (or is even able) to reject.
The final substantive section of the article opens a valuable conversation about how to balance an individual’s right to be forgotten with countervailing public interests in democratic self-governance and public safety (82-87). In it, we are led to see the real-world applications of the view—how the right to be forgotten might interact with a long-ago murder conviction (82-86), freedom of expression (83-84), the public interest in accurate information (84-85), Megan’s Law (86), and criminal branding (86-87). This section is a tour de force, and I simply cannot do it justice here, so I commend it (along with the entire article) to the reader. I hope and expect that it will generate much fruitful discussion in the comments on this post.
In the spirit of the skepticism I mentioned above, I will close with an effort to challenge (1) the idea that the right to be forgotten is responding to a problem that is truly new or sui generis, and (2) the idea that the right itself is up to the task it is being asked to undertake. Pressly is certainly correct that there is something distinctive about the ease we have in accessing information about others on the internet. Pressly argues that the right to be forgotten finds its moral basis in protecting a reasonable confidence that one might enter new relationships unburdened by a particular type of background presumption. But, and I do not mean this glibly: When do we ever have the experience of entering new relationships unburdened by background presumptions? Background presumptions about our social identities, where we came from, what we think (to name just a few) inform many if not most of our first meetings with others. We could not hope to eradicate these background presumptions. The right to be forgotten may lighten the burden of feeling shackled to some particular information about me otherwise widely available on the internet. But it does not offer me (and I suspect it does not offer many people) the confidence that I am able to form new social relations completely unburdened by the background ideas and prejudices of others having nothing to do with what they may find out about me on the internet. I do not deny that there are special cases where what is publicly available on the internet—one’s murder conviction, to use Pressly’s example—may shackle one to the past in a particular way. But the past is not the only thing to which we are shackled that may constrain our confidence that our lives are our own. To the extent that all of our new social relationships are informed (and perhaps constrained) by others’ background presumptions of us, I wonder whether Pressly’s ideal of “healthy agency,” which “requires, among other things, an agent’s confidence that it is up to her to direct her life, and, importantly, that it is worth the trouble to try to do so” (76) is a rather tall order—at best aspirational and at worst utopian. For it seems to leave a great many of us out, who would have thought that we are fully “healthy” agents despite impingements on our confidence that our lives are self-directed and even when we sometimes do not feel “that the game is worth the candle” (81).
[1] Pressly later devotes a whole section of the article to discussing the relationship between the right to be forgotten and the right to privacy. I return to this below.
[2] Pressly might object that these norms are unlikely to take hold. For instance, the norm of not searching seems farfetched—people are very attached to searching for one another on the internet, as Pressly’s striking example in footnote 18 on page 70 illustrates. And Pressly might further object that the norm of disassociation, even if possible, is too blunt a tool for the purpose of salving individuals’ agentive confidence—after all, many people want to be associated with the outdated or irrelevant information about them that is available on the internet.
Thank you for the wonderful paper, which I thoroughly enjoyed studying.
I would like to use my comment to explore the relationship between the interest in informational self-determination and individuals’ ability to shape others’ perceptions of themselves. According to the paper, this relationship renders the interest in informational self-determination a less plausible candidate for grounding the right to be forgotten, as it draws a problematic link between what the right holder is entitled to enjoy and the interference with the information others should or should not consider in their deliberations about the right holder’s character and image. I will first systematically analyse this relationship and then attempt to provide a defence of the interest in informational self-determination.
Let us consider a scenario involving a presenter of self-image and a perceiver who must deliberate on how to perceive the presenter. Analytically, we can distinguish two components of the interest in informational self-determination: (1) the presenter’s ability to present his image to the perceiver and (2) how the perceiver ultimately perceives him. Depending on how the relationship between these two components is understood, at least three versions of the interest can be identified.
As acknowledged in the paper, a strong version of the interest suggests that (2) should be solely determined by (1)—that a perceiver’s perception of the presenter should align largely with the way he presents himself to her. In this case, the presenter’s searchable past information should not factor into the perceiver’s deliberation if it contradicts with the image presented in (1).The paper rightly argues that this strong version is too demanding, as it “neglects the fact that others have an important autonomy interest in forming their own judgments” when deliberating about what a person is like.
A weak version of the interest would require only that the presenter has the opportunity to exercise (1)—presenting his side of the story of who he truly is. In this case, after hearing the presenter’s account, the perceiver is free to conduct any online search on all available past information about the presenter, balancing all the information to arrive at (2).The author appears to have this version in mind when stating that “being taken to be x by others is not necessary for one to autonomously determine to be x.” However, no further argument is provided to evaluate the weak version. One possible reason for this omission may be that the weak version does not provide a normative foundation for grounding the right to be forgotten, as it allows the perceiver access to most information about the presenter.
A moderate version requires, roughly, that (1) be given a fair opportunity to influence (2). As the author suggests, this implies that the project of self-determination should not be unduly burdened by certain types of information, including searchable past online information. Consequently, proponents of this version of the interest in informational self-determination must determine whether a particular piece of information imposes an undue burden on (1), preventing it from having a fair opportunity to shape (2). According to the paper, the problem with the moderate version is that it might be overly expansive, allowing the right to be forgotten to cover information such as offline court records and data stored in private homes. Simultaneously, it might be overly restrictive, as the existing right to be forgotten does not require right holders to demonstrate that the information is unduly burdensome to justify its deletion.
If the above analysis fairly represents the author’s argument, my concern is that it places an exclusive emphasis on the presenter’s interest in influencing the perceiver. What seems to be missing is a broader moral principle to guide how a perceiver should form and update her beliefs about others.
Specifically, we form our opinions about a person by deliberating on various sources of information, including direct interactions with the person, rumours from unreliable sources, personal prejudices, and past or recent news from reliable sources. From a moral perspective, it is reasonable to argue that the perceiver should exclude rumours and prejudices from her deliberation, focusing solely on verifiable information from both the present and the past.
Understood in this way, the interest in informational self-determination need not merely be a standalone interest in controlling how others perceive us; rather, it serves as a moral justification for further restricting the information included in the perceiver’s deliberation, grounded in a theory of morality in how we should perceive fellow humans.
As a result, the strong version of this interest is implausible because it suggests that only the information provided by the presenter should be considered, thereby precluding the perceiver’s entitlement to make well-informed deliberations. The weak version is also implausible, as it allows outdated information about the presenter—information that no longer defines him—to be given equal weight in the perceiver’s deliberation. Morality may require us to give others the opportunity to make a reasonable request for the exclusion of irrelevant personal information from our deliberation about their character.
The moderate view appears to strike the right balance. Specifically, it allows the presenter not only to share his side of the story about what he is like (as in the weak model) but also to have a say in excluding certain outdated information about him from the perceiver’s deliberation. However, unlike the strong model, it ensures that the perceiver still retains a reasonable opportunity to meaningfully self-deliberate based on the available information. Overall, it could be argued that the perceiver has a moral obligation to deliberate well when forming her perceptions of others, and fulfilling this obligation requires accounting for the individuals’ interest in informational self-determination, understood in its moderate form.
Regarding the concern that the moderate version is overly expansive, I believe it does not necessarily commit to deleting all information, including both hard and digital copies. When the destruction of certain past information is costly or implausible, the perceiver might simply have an obligation to refrain from seeking out such information if the presenter indicates that he wants it excluded from the perceiver’s deliberation. Additionally, I agree that the presenter should be allowed to exercise discretion in determining which past information constitutes an undue burden for his project of self-determination without needing to justify it to others.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this, Lowry, and I apologise in advance if I have misinterpreted your argument in any way.
It is hard to express my gratitude to Professor Wendy Salkin without running the risk of being thought hyperbolic. Nevertheless I risk it, for to have my work reach such a perceptive and generous reader—and for that reader in turn to devote so much time, attention, thought, and style to commenting on and responding to my essay—is to me like one of those unexpected gifts that leaves nothing but the stunned silence of gratitude on one’s tongue. Salkin’s reconstructions of the paper’s argument are so elegant and clear, and her grasp of its central thrust so precise (not least in her critiques), that I find myself almost wishing that she had written it. This precis is extraordinarily thoughtful and well-written: its provocations will be ringing in my ears (and the reader’s, no doubt) for a long time to come. So, again, thank you.
To the extent that I am able to suggest answers to Salkin’s questions and critiques, I feel that they could fill a whole other essay (or several). Nevertheless, I will do my best to do justice to them here.
Salkin’s questions may be grouped roughly into three categories of concern. The first set of questions has to do with my critique of the standard way of thinking about the moral basis of the right to be forgotten, which I refer to in the language of that view’s proponents as the “informational autonomy family of views” (some also use the language of “informational self-determination”). The second has to do with the necessity of the right to be forgotten for agentive confidence. And the third has to do with the plausibility of the harm I describe and possibility that I may also commit an error that implicitly lay at the feet of the views I reject (i.e., making a harm out of an ordinary and ineliminable aspect of human life). I won’t be able to fully answer these here, but I will do my best and will take them in turn:
(1)
One thing I should mention off the top concerns the structure of the paper’s argument: I take the broad consensus about the right’s scope and form for granted and seek to see what sort of moral justification there could be for such a right. This will be significant in a moment, because I think the informational autonomy views have trouble adequately supporting the right they claim to. I didn’t begin writing the article as a partisan for “agentive confidence,” though by the end of it I did come to think that agentive confidence does more than simply doing a slightly better job at the academic philosophical task of grounding the right to be forgotten. I think it also connects this discussion to a broader region of ethical concern that links the right to be forgotten to other rights and interests concerned with the normative reach of information and identification in the digital age and points to a domain of human flourishing that is to some extent opposed to information *as such* and not just the sort that contradicts us or is uncontrolled. I’ll touch on this a bit in what follows, though I don’t have time to go into it fully here. (If I had been permitted one shameless plug, I would have used it here to say that I do discuss this at length in a book that was just published, particularly in its fourth and fifth chapters.)
The information autonomy family of views, I think, do a good job at capturing our moral intuitions about the right to be forgotten without, however, fully accounting for its form and scope. For it is clear to even the most casual observer that the right has to do with information about persons, and that the reasons we have to care about such information have to do with the ineradicably intersubjective dimensions of personhood: we care about what others think of us, in other words; we want at least someone to think we are how we want to be ourselves, and we want this because as agents it can’t not matter to us whether we succeed at our project of being the sort of person that we think we ought to be (here I think of particularly of Harry Frankfurt, but also many others). I just don’t think this desire is strong enough to ground the fairly serious duties of the right to be forgotten. However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it were. Still, I think the informational autonomy views fit the right’s moral basis imperfectly to its scope.
For one thing, they have trouble understanding why the right would be available to someone who wishes to use it to anonymize or deindex information about themselves that was not in any obvious way contradictory to their current desired self-image. I’m not saying that there would be many such people—though it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable or eccentric to want one’s first dates and meetings with strangers not to be preconditioned by accurate information about one’s past both good and bad. The view from agentive confidence does a better job of explaining why the right to be forgotten would be justified in such a case—indeed, on those views concerned with the value of projecting a desired self-image, the anonymization or deindexing of flattering historical information online would seem almost to be a kind of self-harm, at the very least not a justified exercise of the right. By contrast, the view from agentive confidence gives what I find to be a compelling (at least plausible) explanation of the moral psychology of such a person as well as a plausible justification for their claim. I don’t think this is only an explanation of a possible claim of the right to be forgotten, however, but that it also expresses the relevant value here–that is, the importance to well-being of it actually being up to one how one will be taken to be by others, being confident of this fact, and perhaps also experiencing it from time to time. This idea finds other expressions in other domains. Two that spring to mind are Hannah Arendt’s view of the natality of public life in The Human Condition and Richard Sennett’s gregariously theatrical account of personality formation in the ancien régime in The Fall of Public Man. The idea that we lose something when our future is written by our past—even in a way that we would like it to be—is one the information autonomy family of views has trouble making sense of (and to which I will return below in response to Salkin’s third set of questions).
If readers are skeptical, then perhaps we might consider a third area in which I find the same sort of moral idea at work. This is the recent story, reported in the New York Times, about the Harvard undergraduates who connected Meta’s camera-glasses to a facial-recognition AI to identify strangers in public in real time: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/technology/facial-recognition-glasses-privacy-harvard.html
Here, too, is a short video they took on the T in Boston, which I recommend watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHrSXe1cElI
I, for one, would not want to be identified in this way by strangers on the train, even if (a) I suffered no negative consequences form the identification (no manipulation, embarrassment, etc.), and, moreover, (b) I was identified in a way that I would prefer to be recognized by others. I don’t think that I’m alone in this—though I encourage readers to let me know what they think. If pressed to explain my discomfort in moral or ethical terms, I would reach for the same language I used to understand the moral force behind the right to be forgotten concerning an interest in the confidence that when we meet new people, it will be up to us what sort of person they take us to be. To be sure, there are likely differences between the right to be forgotten and the right not to be identified in public (even in a flattering way), but at least for the purposes of this section of my reply we can say that the informational autonomy views will have trouble making sense of why we should care about being identified *as such* and not only in ways that run contrary to our normative self-conceptions.
Here I would like to bring in another of Salkin’s questions on this score concerning the connection of my view to the Kupfer/Reiman theories of privacy. They argue that privacy’s availability offers vital social support for the confidence (or self-understanding) that one’s life is one’s own to direct, and that this is a precondition of autonomous action but also much else. This is something we obviously have an interest in, and it is something that can be harmed even if one isn’t interfered with in the projection of one’s self-image. Alternatively, one can have the projection of one’s desired self-image stymied in some serious way without, however, undermining the confidence that one’s life is one’s own to direct. Indeed, it’s just this incongruity that underlies the expression of outrage in such a scenario. The two interests can come apart, and it is important that we take account of that fact.
Although in the article I noted the differences between moral right to privacy and the right to be forgotten, Salkin’s comments make me realize I should have noted a similarity, too, which is relevant here. Just as the right to privacy does not depend on what one keeps private—say, information in conflict with the sort of self-image one wishes to project—the right to be forgotten doesn’t depend on the content of the information, either, just that one’s pro tanto right isn’t outweighed by competing interests in access to accurate information (discussed in the paper’s final substantive section). This similarity can be explained by the two rights’ shared moral basis in agentive confidence but not on the view from agentive confidence.
(2) Salkin asks the following question: “If the right to be forgotten is grounded in our interest in restoring or preserving our agentive confidence, must it be the case that the exercise of this right is the only or even simply the best way to restore our agentive confidence? […] in other words, the moral basis of the right to be forgotten is agentive confidence in societies like ours.” I think the answer is yes, the right to be forgotten does concern societies like ours, and might not be necessary for agentive confidence in others—including, most notably, human society as it existed for a long time before the internet and search put accurate information about everyone into the pockets of everyone (to put it crudely).
Salkin offers two hypothetical societies with different norms, one in which we don’t search for information about one another online like we do now, and another in which we don’t impute sufficiently old historical information to our views of how someone is like today. Wouldn’t the right to be forgotten be unnecessary in either of these societies? Again, I agree with Salkin’s challenge: it would likely be unnecessary. Indeed, I think that it was unnecessary for a long time in those societies, a combination of which could roughly be taken to describe our epistemic practices of personal knowledge before the invention of the internet and algorithmic search.
Public moral discourse about a generalized right to be forgotten—as distinct from, say, a right to have one’s juvenile convictions expunged—emerged at a particular junction in the history of our social practices and expectations about self- and other-knowledge. The judgment implicit in this development is that the pre-internet, pre-search status quo did not harm the relevant interest sufficiently to justify the recognition of a right to be forgotten. I think that this implicit judgment is correct (i.e., justified), and I think that the view from agentive confidence gives us a decent reason for thinking so, which doesn’t have to do with a newly elevated difficulty of self-projection (does anyone think this is the case?) but with a new social expectation about the intersubjective conditions of personhood—the ground on which the game of self-projection is played.
(3) Salkin’s final set of questions raises some very deep and difficult questions about the ethical and social-ontological dimensions of personhood. As you will see, I can at present only skim the surface of the issues she raises.
Salkin is right to ask whether the right really is sui generis, and I share her skepticism about the novelty of supposedly new problems (especially when technology is involved). To which I would add the following: although the internet was novel in some respects (ubiquity and search), it was not in others, and obviously the interest in agentive confidence wasn’t either. However, what was novel in the global movement for a right to be forgotten was the judgment that our social practices of identification that balance information and ignorance about persons had tipped too far over toward the former. This is what made the right seem suddenly important to many people around the world and what cast a sort of spotlight (a newly bright one) on the right’s moral basis. Yet at least since Nietzsche there have been arguments for a human interest in forgetting—in letting the past be past rather than, as Nietzsche put it in one such passage that recalls the metaphor of shackling, a chain that one cannot outrun (this is from “On the Utility & Disutility of History”). Borges is another who, at the dawn of the 20th century, was very concerned with the humane importance of the past not being present (or future, as in the devastation of the character Funes in his story “Funes, el memorioso”).
But this still leaves the big ethical question Salkin raises: What, if any, “background presumptions about our social identities” could possibly be said to shackle us in a way so significant that we’d hold others under duties to undo that shackle (at significant cost to public access to accurate information, no less). Obviously, as she notes, it cannot be that *any* background presumption about me shackles people in the relevant way. Even if one were as hyperbolic as Sartre was about intersubjectivity, such that one responded “of course it does,” still nobody would think that *all* such presumptions ground rights and duties. However, I don’t think that we’d say, at the other extreme, that *no* presumptions present a sort of harm to well-being (especially in the aggregate, which is my concern here, where they’re so pervasive one loses the sense of being able to escape them in the eyes of *anyone*). Fanon, Beauvoir, Ellison, and many others have described, more eloquently than I could hope to, the many ways that prejudiced societies can harm individuals through the prevalence of certain types of presumption about what a person is like.
So, the question remains about where to draw the line, and it is one that I’m going to have to leave open for now. I will say that alongside the obvious sorts of harmful or unjust epistemic states of affairs imposed by racist, homophobic, and sexist societies, I think we ought also to include the state of affairs to which the right to be forgotten responds: a world in which the truth about everyone’s past, more or less, is accessible to everyone else, more or less, at all times and places. I think we ought seriously to consider that such a society is also harmful and possibly unjust in a way that is unsettlingly analogous to those other forms of more recognizable epistemic injustice.
Dear Ricky,
Thank you very much for reading the piece and for your helpful analytic and challenge. Let me give a first pass at your suggestion, and let me know if you think it off the mark.
First, however, let me say that your analytic is very helpful and does a particularly good job at making clear something I was unable to clarify within my allotted word-count (which I had already exceeded rather egregiously… thanks again for reading!). This is what you identify as the moderate version of the informational autonomy view, which I address under “undue burdens to self-projection.”
After the analytic, you offer a lifeline, as it were, to the informational autonomy views. But first allow me to highlight one other element of your analytic reconstruction.
About the weak version of the relevant autonomy interest that you identify, I’d say two things. First, as you note, it’s so weak that it wouldn’t seem to justify a right to be forgotten at all: all it requires that one is unencumbered, as it were, in giving one’s side of the story. So we could just leave that there, as far as the scope of this essay is concerned. Second, this points out part of what I find troubling or frustrating about the “informational autonomy” or “informational self-determination” views, which is that they can be very slippery and equivocal about the concept of autonomy or self-determination that they employ. From this perspective, the weak view seems weak not on account of anything having to do with the epistemic dimensions of personhood or the social ontology of the self, but rather because it’s a sort of bare liberal view of liberty as the absence of hindrance (but note that this begs the question about the sort of obstacle, if any, that the knowledge of others can pose). I try to address some of this in the footnote that cites Nomy Arpaly’s typology of autonomy for the sake of keeping it clear in my own essay, but the views of informational autonomy would benefit a great deal from being clear about just what they mean by autonomy and what its relation is to knowledge (both self-knowledge and being known or recognized).
The issue is repeated with the apparatus of self-determination. It’s rarely clear whether self-determination refers to a sort of freedom of the will with regard to one’s self-projection (I say what I mean to say about myself, to the extent that is possible) or whether it refers to actually determining myself out of my personality’s inchoate potentiality into some sort of concrete personality. (This distinction is what I was trying to make clear in this line you quote about determining to be x.) I think arguments about informational self-determination often use the former meaning when we’re talking about justification or the importance of the interest but then slide to the latter when considering how that plays out in the intersubjectivity of our lives as they’re lived. Thus one of the writers I cite describes the right to be forgotten as “the right to change one’s mind”—very important, hard to argue with that fundamental freedom, but note it’s the first sense of self-determination that’s meant here—which is then used to ground an informational autonomy account of a right to affect information that others have access to (self-determination in the second sense). This move is hard to see because of the semantic slipperiness of the concepts, at least in English—so hard, in fact, that without going back to re-read the piece I can’t be sure I don’t fall prey to it as well.
Now to your suggestion about focusing on the perceivers, which I find very interesting and which echoes somewhat Wendy’s hypothetical societies governed by other epistemic norms. Indeed, the framing of “rights” would seem to imply duties that might go beyond the publishers and indexers of information and apply to “perceivers” as you put it.
As I understand it, your comment seeks to rescue the informational autonomy view (particularly the “moderate” version) not on its own terms but by offering an exogenous moral reason for accepting it—I don’t mean this in a negative way, but rather to say that you mean to direct attention to a set of morally relevant considerations that the informational autonomy proponents have ignored. I admire and agree with your way of getting at the question—and its implicit critique of analytic moral philosophy as sometimes being overly focused on autonomous individuals and individual moral transactions at the cost of the messy social embeddedness of our lives as they’re lived—though I think I’d need to hear more to be persuaded that the following addition rescues the informational autonomy views rather than introducing another set of thorny problems into it.
So, here, as I take it, is the crux of the view, where the moral foundation of the information autonomy view is expanded and therefore a more stable base is given:
“From a moral perspective, it is reasonable to argue that the perceiver should exclude rumours and prejudices from her deliberation, focusing solely on verifiable information from both the present and the past. Understood in this way, the interest in informational self-determination need not merely be a standalone interest in controlling how others perceive us; rather, it serves as a moral justification for further restricting the information included in the perceiver’s deliberation, grounded in a theory of morality in how we should perceive fellow humans.”
For one thing, I’m a little hesitant to endorse what seems a bit like a moral duty of paternalism with regard to basically all other adults. I have a right to access to accurate information and therefore you (or google) should take care that I don’t get, as we say today, mis- or disinformation. Actually, it’s much stronger than that, since the right to be forgotten is only concerned with historical *truths*: you (or google) should take care that I don’t have access to true information that is nevertheless somehow at odds with my interest in making up my mind about you. This is a moral principle distinct, I take it, from not lying to others or intentionally deceiving them—issues which, as I’ve just said, aren’t at issue here.
Wouldn’t it be at least as respectful of our potential “perceivers” to treat them as adults, to let them make up their minds about what we’re like given all the facts, rather than excluding true information supposedly for their benefit (when really, let’s be honest, it’s for ours)? This new foundation also raises big, extremely interesting interpretative (and ethical and epistemic) questions about who gets to say which facts are “irrelevant” for others to make accurate but respectful judgments about our character. I’ll say more about this knot in a second, but first let me just mention that your suggestion also makes me wonder how far this principle goes: do we have a duty to come clean to others, to make as full a confession as possible in the present moment such that they will have the information they’re “[entitled to] to make well-informed deliberations” about what we’re like right now? Can we withhold, keep secrets, demand privacy?
If the right were based in the “perceiver’s” interest to accurate information, and not the “presenter’s” then on the one hand we would have to do something that the right explicitly disavows: we would have to make a determination in each case *not* about whether the information in question is sufficiently important to public safety, democratic self-governance, and the like to override the “presenter’s” pro tanto right (or not exclusively about that), but rather about (a) how a person really is today and (b) whether the information in question reflects that. Both (a) and (b) are extremely thorny things to decide with a very high likelihood of compelling plausible counterarguments. More crucially, it’s hard to see how claimants like K, the double murderer, would have a justified claim here—and I think this goes not just for K but for all of us. Again, as indicated in my previous parenthetical, thorny and underdetermined questions of interpretation arise here about what K’s articles say about him—that he *is* a murderer, that he is likely to murder someone again, that he has murdered at least two people in his life? I think the most reasonable interpretation of what his articles say about him—in the terms of your argument: what use they will be to potential “perceivers”—is simply that he committed murder some decades past but has since committed no more murders than those who haven’t killed anybody (yet) and therefore poses no more threat than the average passerby to public safety. It’s not clear how *that* information could be described as inaccurate or outdated. This is, as I said, not just true about K’s articles but also of Anne’s article or the newspaper notice in the landmark EUCJ case or really any instance of the right to be forgotten (which, distinct from rights and norms against defamation, concerns only true information): I doubt any of the information in those cases could be said to be outdated in the sense you suggest of being irrelevant or misleading to the task of us making up our minds about what K, Anne, or Mario Costeja-Gonzalez are like. By contrast, I think that the right to be forgotten suggests that there are moral limits—as well as epistemic ones—to our interest in making up our minds about other people. This is, I’d note, another place where it connects with privacy and other rights and norms concerned with limitations to information.
Actually, I’d go farther, and connect this point to one of my responses to Wendy about the history of arguments for the value of forgetting to well-being, to say that the right doesn’t just reflect that there are normative limits to our making up our minds about others but also to making up our minds about ourselves, an idea reflected in the “openness” of the “open future” on the view from agentive confidence.
Thanks again for reading and for your thoughtful, provocative comments!
Greetings to everyone in (or reading) the comments. Terrific paper Lowry (if I may), and terrific critical discussion Wendy (if I may)–
The core dialectic of the paper concerns the presentation and critique of the informational autonomy views, which Lowry wants to supplant with his agentive confidence view. Not only is Lowry’s treatment of the autonomy views thorough, Wendy’s treatment of Lowry’s treatment is also thorough. So, I will focus on different material–to wit, the status of *privacy* in the interpretation of the moral basis of the right to be forgotten.
Full disclosure: I myself have defended a privacy-based conception of the RTBF (“Privacy and Assurance: On the Right to Be Forgotten” in Political Philosophy), so I am not, shall we say, perfectly objective in approaching this topic. It is worth emphasizing that–as Lowry says and Wendy notes–many people think the RTBF is distinguished from the right to privacy in terms of “scope” and “form.” I accept this as a prima facie challenge to the privacy-based approach to the RTBF; I simply think the challenge can be answered, which is the goal of my own paper.
Now, one tricky issue with situating the RTBF vis-a-vis privacy claims is that privacy is a highly contested topic. A simple question I have for Lowry is why he selected the Reiman/Kupfer approach as the relevant (best? most plausible?) framework for interpreting privacy claims. This question is flat-footed in the sense that I am just curious: why these two authors? The question is not entirely flat-footed, though. In a more critical vein, one might wonder why the similarity between the Reiman/Kupfer view and Lowry’s conception of the RTBF doesn’t recommend reducing the RTBF to an application of the privacy right. This is a conclusion Lowry wants to avoid, but if the two kinds of claims protect the same interest, why isn’t the RTBF just a species of a larger genus (defined by the interest protected)?
This question is offered in a kind of accept-Reiman/Kupfer’s-view-for-the-sake-of-argument spirit. But should we accept this view? I am doubtful–and in one respect that is particularly pertinent to assessing the overall success of Lowry’s view. Kupfer thinks privacy claims protect our ability to “conceive” of our lives as our own. Lowry, similarly, says the RTBF, in protecting agentive confidence, protects something like our ability to *believe* that it is “worth the trouble” to do certain things. Yet one may ask: are our privacy claims, or our RTBF claims, based on an interest in being able to believe/conceive certain things?
Certainly *some* of them might be–but not all of them, I don’t think. It may be important to a woman that she can (with reason) believe that her boss does not think she is pregnant. But suppose she has no interest in believing this–say, because she lives in a society where bosses do not penalize women who plan to take maternity leave. She is under no threat of psychological discomfort that might inhibit her activity. Still, she has a privacy claim against her boss reading her emails to discover that she is pregnant.
I think this line of questioning is important because, as Wendy helpfully notes, the word ‘believes’ does a lot of work for Lowry. It has the theoretical strength of insulating his view against important objections of the what-if-you-never-meet-someone-who-knows-your-information variety. But it seems to me that it has the theoretically deficiency of tethering our RTBF claims to interests in enjoying certain psychological states, which seems like a narrower range of interests than are in fact protected by the RTBF. Consider, in conclusion, an example, of someone who does not want people to be able to find on Google the articles he wrote for his college newspaper. Suppose that, psychologically, he would not be deterred in the least from living a bold and confident life if he believed that others could access these articles. Lowry’s view implies that he has no claim against the availability of these articles, which seems to me wrong.
Again, I am a partisan in this debate. So please correct me if I am being uncharitable in presenting the nature of the interest in agentive confidence and Reiman/Kupfer’s conception of the interest served by the right to privacy. Thanks again, Lowry, for making your paper available for public discussion–it’s an impressive piece of philosophy!
Dear Lowry,
Thank you so much for reading my comment and for your thoughtful and wonderful response.
Firstly, I must concede that the idea of a more stable moral foundation for the interest in informational autonomy is something I have always implicitly assumed to be intuitive, but I have never given enough careful thought to its validity. For that reason, your reply is incredibly helpful, as it highlights a set of thorny problems that genuinely challenge this idea.
I will try to further clarify the idea here, and I would appreciate your thoughts on it. To start, the moral theory of deliberating well in forming perceptions that I have in mind is quite narrow. Specifically, regarding your concern that the theory entails that Google or the perceived/presenter must supply accurate and relevant information to the perceiver, I believe it should instead be the perceiver’s responsibility to acquire publicly available information necessary for her deliberation and to ensure its authenticity (potentially with assistance from Google in fact-checking). As a result, the perceived would still retain the right to conceal secrets and maintain their privacy, provided the information in question has not yet been made public.
The interesting question arises when we consider publicly available information about the perceived that he believes no longer defines him yet remains easily accessible online in the absence of the right to be forgotten. A justification for the right to be forgotten in such cases is that the perceiver may have a moral duty toward the perceived to exclude this information when making up her mind about him. To appreciate the appeal of this moral duty, consider the example of meeting a new person for the first time. It might be considered morally right to refrain from forming our perception of the person based on prejudices, street rumours, and, as suggested by the above analysis, certain past information the person no longer wishes to be associated with.
However, your concern regarding what qualifies as irrelevant information that should be excluded from the perceiver’s deliberation, and how much discretion the perceived should have in determining the relevance of information, remains a thorny challenge. One issue is that we might think that the perceiver should also have a say in determining relevance, particularly when certain information could serve as a “deal-breaker” in deciding whether to engage further with the perceived. For instance, the perceived might wish the perceiver to exclude the fact that he lost his driving licence ten years ago due to frequent speeding offences( but he has since been a law-abiding driver). Yet, if the perceiver is considering hiring him as her driver, she would likely never consent to hiring someone with a history of speeding offences.
I am unsure how to resolve this tension, particularly because if we require the perceiver to assess the relevance of the information or co-deliberate with the perceived on this issue, the perceived would effectively be deprived of the right to be forgotten—even if the information is later deemed irrelevant, the perceiver cannot simply erase it from her memory.
But I wonder if this is a problem inherent to the very concept of the right to be forgotten?
Thank you, Lowry, Wendy, and Scott. I have learned a great deal from the paper and the comments shared here.
Hi Scott,
Thanks very much for reading and for your thoughtful provocations. I’m excited to read your paper, which I wish had come out before this piece went to press. Congratulations on that substantial achievement!
I also wish I had time to read your full account there before responding, but alas we don’t have that sort of time in this format. So I’ll try to do justice to your comments and then look forward to a more thorough dialogue in the future.
As a threshold matter, I’ll say that I am typically skeptical of attempts to reduce the wide variety of rights and interests concerning information to rights of privacy. For one thing, I try to take seriously the ordinary usage of the relevant terms and concepts—not just by experts, but ordinary folks, too—and its extraordinarily rich variety of moral language for describing interests, rights, norms, and the rest concerning (a) concealment and/or (b) the normative reach of information in human affairs. As a defeasible presumption, I find the idea that the emergence of novel moral rhetoric across many cultures and jurisdictions responds to *some* meaningful difference between, in this case, privacy and the right to be forgotten more likely than the fact that we all suddenly and more or less unawares started using a wholly different set of terms and concepts to describe something we’d been talking and caring about for more than a century. Of course, that’s possible (and perhaps even more interesting). Yet even if one doesn’t think that way, it strikes me as much simpler to describe the two rights as being grounded in the same (or similar) interest and simply responding to two sorts of threats to that interest, rather than seeing one as derivative from the other. This is something I don’t just presume but argue for at length in my book—which also happens to include a slew of critiques of the last several decades of philosophy on privacy—and which is also to say that like you I’m also invested in the issue!
Of course, this answer corresponds to a suggestion raised in one of your questions, to which I should reply more explicitly: if the two rights share a moral basis, then I don’t think follows that one is the application of the other—they might be species of a larger genus, as you suggest, but it would be a mistake to give the name of one species (privacy, e.g.) to the genus. This would be a conceptual mistake but also, as I argue in the paper, would have negative practical consequences for those who think that both rights are real and important.
It was, in fact, for those reasons and others that I initially refused to include a section on privacy in the article, until I was finally convinced by multiple reviewers and editors to do so. The main reason for my reluctance is the enormity of the philosophical debate you mention—but also, as I just referenced in Shameless Plug #2, the fact that I think most of the contemporary debate is founded on a mistake—I didn’t think I could do it justice in a single section of a paper dedicated to another topic. But they were right, of course, because the connection is a very live question.
So, I chose the Reiman-Kupfer view for two reasons. One is that I we both arrive at similar conclusions about the moral basis of the rights in question, and by similar means: taking for granted that our moral practices and language of privacy (or the RTBF) actually picks out something like an extant moral right and then seeing what sort of basis there might be for it. I take it as support for my exercise (and its somewhat unusual conclusion) that two very clever philosophers arrived at a similar point in a similar exercise directed at a right that many see as connected to the one I was thinking about. (NB: I don’t take the correctness of the Reiman/Kupfer views for granted from the start, and in fact my own view of privacy is slightly different from theirs, although I do feel very strongly that Reiman’s PAPA article is still, some 40 years and tankers of spilled ink later, the best philosophy paper written on privacy, my own included).
But there’s a further advantage, I think, which is that the similarities between the views help us better understand where the two rights overlap and where they differ. This is, as I think I write in the paper, important not just for the conceptual exercises that we do here, but also for ethical and political reasons, since conflating the two rights risks undermining them both, notwithstanding that the RTBF might stand to gain from the practical force of privacy’s moral idiom.
Your last question and challenge is right on—surely it would be too broad to understand the right to be forgotten as the right to a particular psychological state—and it brings me to one other reason I like the Reiman article and think it’s still the best on privacy. This is that although he takes for granted the individualized nature of the privacy-violation as a kind of moral transaction, he explains our intuitions, interests, etc. about *that* by reference to “the social ritual of privacy”: a sort of practice with expressive/symbolic dimensions that go beyond the individual transaction of violation or respect. (I’d also note here that although privacy violations typically appear like isolated moral transactions, the experience of unviolated privacy does not typically take that form, but is more amorphous and socialized, something more like an ongoing and highly complex practice or ritual.)
For Reiman, it’s the social ritual of privacy, as well as the actual experience of taking oneself off where no one else can experience your life but yourself, that conveys the full benefit to human well-being. The same is true, I think, for the practices of memory in a society (and in chapter 4 of my book I discuss this connection at length). This is what I was trying to get at by talking about the “public good of the right to be forgotten,” which is by its sheer availability in a society whose mnemonic practices have tipped too far in the direction of access to accurate information about others (i.e., ours, presumably) it conveys a benefit on all living there—it holds the future open for them in the relevant sense by conveying a message, via the institutional structure of our laws and practices and norms, that they would have a pro tanto right to anonymize or delist information in the future if ever they needed to. On such a view, not every case of the right’s exercise needs to involve the relevant psychological state (loss of agentive confidence) for the right to find its basis in the value of such confidence to agency, and in any case the right doesn’t demand that we adjudicate that one has suffered sufficiently to warrant it. So, in response to the very good, very serious challenge that the focus on agentive confidence “has the theoretically deficiency of tethering our RTBF claims to interests in enjoying certain psychological states, which seems like a narrower range of interests than are in fact protected by the RTBF,” I’d maybe say that basically I see it the other way round: the RTBF protects/restores the material and social conditions for agentive confidence to be reasonably available to ppl living in that society, and that of course these conditions may also support a broader range other activities, experiences, etc. without necessarily existing in a relation of justification to them (i.e., to that “broader range”).
Finally, about the person who doesn’t want people to be able to read his juvenilia—c’est moi!—I’d want to know just why he didn’t want people to see his college writing and what sort of moral reasons we have to care about that (indeed, to think google et al. have a duty to do has he wishes). For it’s not enough for him simply to want google to edit him out of its search results for google to be under an obligation to do so. Although the harm or discomfort in his case might be quite minor, I think that at base there would either (a) find that he is motivated by something similar to what I describe as agentive confidence, or (b) that he was acting on pure whim, which we don’t have strong reasons to translate into a right (holding aside questions of intellectual property etc. which could come into play since he wrote the stuff). Alternatively, we can take the approach that I outlined in the previous paragraph, and make a reply about the social conditions of agentive confidence which doesn’t require us to look into the mental states of every claimant.
Your questions are great and provocative, and I hope I have begun to do them justice, though of course the issues you raise demand a good deal more time and thought than we have here today. So I look forward to mulling them over more, to reading your paper, and hopefully to continuing the discussion in the near future.
Thank you!
Hi Ricky,
Thanks for your reply! You’ve hit on one of my favorite areas to think about (the ethics of self-knowledge), although I have to temper expectations by admitting that it’s one of my favorites because I find it so challenging and murky. So I don’t know how much light I’ll be able to shed on your question, though I’ll begin by noting just how thorny some of the issues you raise are—which also tie into to some of my reply to Scott—and then hopefully after I finish teaching I’ll have thought about it more and can offer you more.
Since I’m not sure if this reply will appear underneath your second reply, let me start by quoting the following paragraph from your text:
“The interesting question arises when we consider publicly available information about the perceived that he believes no longer defines him yet remains easily accessible online in the absence of the right to be forgotten. A justification for the right to be forgotten in such cases is that the perceiver may have a moral duty toward the perceived to exclude this information when making up her mind about him. To appreciate the appeal of this moral duty, consider the example of meeting a new person for the first time. It might be considered morally right to refrain from forming our perception of the person based on prejudices, street rumours, and, as suggested by the above analysis, certain past information the person no longer wishes to be associated with.”
One of the big challenges here—and I think it a fundamentally ethical one, albeit with epistemic dimensions—is not simply determining (a) what “really defines him” and (b) the importance of the fact that “he believes [some info] no longer defines him yet remains easily accessible online (the question I stick to in the article), but is rather how to even form the question. We need a social ontology of the person, and an ethical view of its well-being, to begin to ask the moral questions about how to treat her (or oneself) with regard to information before we can even begin to ask questions about authority (epistemic or moral) over whether it’s “relevant” or not to what someone is like. So, as I said, a huge and fascinating question!
My view, in brief, is something like the following. (a) Everybody gets to say what [true] information is relevant to what one is like—which is basically to say that nobody has the final word or veto power about what they are like. Some people know us better than we know ourselves, at least in certain respects, and people are famously susceptible to flattering self-deception, etc. Lots of examples here. To my eye, being any way at all—which no fully developed person alive today can avoid—is a big agonal mess in public, full of pitfalls and misunderstanding and fatal, lasting misrecognitions both at the hands of oneself and others. Yet be that as it may, (b) it would nevertheless be a terrible injury to agency for one to feel as though the direction of one’s life is not fundamentally up to one and nobody else. There’s a bit of a mismatch between (a) and (b), but I think that’s just the human condition—I won’t go so far as to call it tragic, just an aspect of what it means to be the sort of “selfed” creatures we are (indeed, our lives are rife with such mismatches). This is what I would say, to borrow your phrase, is the “problem inherent in the very concept of the right to be forgotten”—but it’s not a conceptual problem, rather a human one. What the RTBF seeks to do, I think, is to balance the harms that can come when, due to social conditions, (a) appears to present a reasonable danger of overwhelming (b).
The view I’ve just offered seems to imply that I don’t tend to think that people owe us duties based on purely epistemic grounds (which is what I take your comment to be saying: we have a moral duty/right in this case because we have an interest in accurately knowing others/the world). Rather, I think that if we owe certain epistemic obligations, then it’s probably a function of a kind of relationship that demands it. Some of these obligations may be socially generalized (like privacy—and here your view can come back in, or based in a deontological view of the person (duties not to deceive, etc.), while many others derive from personal relationships. I owe it to my wife that she know me (i.e., I owe her the sorts of things you’re discussing) in a way I don’t think I do to strangers or even to one’s own children; friendship and the therapeutic relation entail different sorts and levels of this sort of obligation; and so on.
Ok, I’ve got to run, but I’ll think on this a bit more. Thank you, Ricky!