Remembering responsibility
The appalling shooting of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and several bystanders may be the result of political hate-mongering, but regardless, it reinforces the need to debate the issue of the media’s rights versus its responsibilities, and of public debate — which was brought up in rather different contexts recently by WikiLeaks and the proposed child welfare law in Taiwan (“Right vs responsibility,” Dec. 27, 2010, page 13).
The central question is: How far should the fundamental right to freedom of expression go? In these days of the Internet, it appears that the right to express just about any monstrously stupid, wrong or hateful opinion is winning over the responsibility for civilized and informed debate. While I fully recognize the dangers of curtailing press freedom, there are clearly areas where rights have gone too far.
I have been, for example, compared to excrement and worse on Internet blogs just for writing about environmental issues. While the authors of such excremental writings naturally disqualify themselves, it opens up the wider question of what should be allowed to be placed in the public domain.
Often guarded by anonymity, the torrents of vicious abuse and inflammatory hate-mongering ejaculating from the Internet, the endless repetitions of obvious scientific or historical lies (eg, global warming and the Holocaust), or the seemingly limitless satisfaction of depraved desires (eg, pedophilia) that can now find an outlet on the Internet call into question whether rights and responsibilities are still balanced.
On the one side, we find the hyper-libertarians and compulsory Internet defamers who want all the rights and no responsibilities. On the other extreme, oppressive governments like China want to curtail rights, justifying their actions by emphasizing the responsibilities toward larger societal goals.
To be clear, I support as much freedom as possible, but freedom should go no further than the point where another person’s freedom is limited by that very freedom. We must realize that there is no such thing as total freedom, as it would be a terror for everyone. Whether it is traffic rules, commercial rules or rules governing the media and public debate, some rules must be obeyed to avoid sliding into the anarchy of unregulated chaos. Clearly, press freedoms should not extend to inciting murder or denying the Holocaust, for example.
Therefore, we need global governance for those common areas which affect everybody. We need a movement of global citizenry that demands global rights — universal human rights, equitable sharing of resources and opportunities and a healthy planet — but which also accepts global responsibilities — limiting consumption and waste, wealth redistribution and, as I suggest above, rules regarding what should be allowed in public debate, including on the Internet.
Every person or organization should ask themselves whether they are abusing the rights given to them by an open society without thinking about the responsibilities that they should also abide by. Balancing rights and responsibilities is never easy, but then again, no one ever said resolving complex issues should be easy.
Bruno Walther
Taipei
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