About Us. What Are Human Rights? Article 19 — Freedom of Expression. Article 21 — Right to Democracy. The Story of Human Rights booklet. First Name. Last Name. State-religion relationships Freedom of religion or belief and Gender Equality.
Religion and Freedom of Religion or Belief Literacy. Turn on more accessible mode. Turn off more accessible mode. Knowing how social networking sites deploy techniques such as variable reinforcement schedules to get you hooked on their products does not automatically eliminate their pull, any more than knowing cigarettes use nicotine to make them addictive makes a smoker crave them any less.
Once a line has been drawn between legitimate influence and illegitimate manipulation, it can be asked if the right not to have one's thoughts illegally manipulated should be absolute. Mendlow notes that forcible manipulation of a person's mind is already sometimes permissible, such as in cases where the state is permitted to force certain prisoners with mental health difficulties to ingest psychiatric medication.
Supreme Court recognized this as lawful in Washington v. Harper One case that saw something like such a balance being struck was Kokkinakis v. Greece However, the Court also held that the right of believers to remain free from unwanted conversion attempts was likewise protected by Article 9.
As a result, both the missionary and the believer could appeal to this Article and a balance had to be struck. In this case, the court held that restrictions of proselytism are not necessary in a democratic society as long as conversion attempts do not involve illegitimate means to influence thought.
One approach to developing the right to FoT in the twenty-first century is to suggest that the novelty of the challenges faced necessitates new rights to address them. In contrast, Alegre has argued that these new proposed rights represent the practical development of the contours of FoT in the twenty-first century, and that there is no need to design new rights. Instead she proposes we need clearer guidance and legal development of the meaning of the right to FoT in the modern context and a more detailed legal framework to protect it.
I have argued that the law should develop the right to FoT with the clear understanding that what this aims to secure is mental autonomy. This process would begin by establishing the core mental processes that enable mental autonomy, such as attentional and cognitive agency. These should be placed at the center of the right to FoT. I also argued we should expand the domain of the right to FoT to cover external actions that are arguably constitutive of thought.
This includes reading, writing, and many forms of internet search behavior. This chills thought. Mental autonomy can only be ensured by a prohibition on the illegitimate manipulation of thought. This in turn justifies the right to mental privacy and the right not to have one's thoughts punished, as both effectively manipulate thought. What society wishes to deem to be illegitimate manipulation is a substantive legal and public policy question, urgently needing debating.
Here again, an understanding of the core mental processes underpinning mental agency attentional and cognitive agency is likely to be important in determining what should be deemed illegitimate manipulation. The source of the threat also needs to be considered. Law must protect us from threats to FoT from both the state and corporations. The Founding Fathers of the United States saw the threats corporations could pose. And it is not only the public that needs to be apprised of this threat.
Today, international human rights law treaties, such as the ICCPR, place direct obligations on states, but not corporations. States must ensure that they themselves do not violate human rights. However, they must also take steps to protect human rights from interference by non-state actors. This means that they should avoid infringing on the human rights of others and should address adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved. States hence need to act to prevent corporations violating people's right to FoT, ensuring effective remedies where violations occur, and corporations need to ensure they respect the right to FoT, publically expressing this as a policy commitment and carrying out due diligence on how their activities may adversely impact the right to FoT.
One may be skeptical as to whether corporations will actually do this unless new, enforceable laws, as opposed to Guiding Principles, require them to. In any case, customers voting with their feet may be a more efficient and effective solution.
This raises the question of what ways there are to support FoT which do not require legislation. The best known example of techno-regulation is the use of speed bumps, which by and through their design encourage drivers to stay within the speed limits set by a regulator van den Berg, Whilst techno-regulation often functions so that people have no choice but to act in the desired regulatory pattern van den Berg, , to use it to force FoT would seem somewhat contradictory.
Instead, the value of FoT could be embedded in the design of technology in an optional manner, such as by providing versions of technologies that support FoT, which people can freely choose to utilize.
One such approach could involve creating an on-line speed bump, which creates decisional friction. For example, the scraping of personal data by large tech firms in order to serve up personalized adverts or content suggestions Zuboff, is helpful if we consciously decide that we want to act on this information. However, it can also be viewed as problematic if we consider it in relation to first- and second-order thoughts. We have not worked out if this is our own desire, or simply the desire of the corporation.
This may explain the feeling of disgust we can have after getting lost in products such as YouTube. Surveillance capitalism is encouraging a wanton world. One solution to this would be to require corporations to provide information in an autonomy-supportive context. This would encourage choice and participation in decision-making, provide a rationale for why a particular decision is appropriate, minimize pressure and use non-pressuring language Chatzisarantis et al.
A feature of this environment would be a context that allows thought to be slowed down, making it more likely that responses will be governed by second-order, rule-of-reason thought.
For example, users could have the option to create a moratorium of five minutes before they can respond on-line to a social media post cf.
Jacobs, ; Deibert, , proceed to the next video, or finalize a purchase. Evidence that this promotes the use of reason comes from studies that show stronger arguments may only be more persuasive than weaker arguments when people are given sufficient time to think about them Paxton et al. Mental privacy could be facilitated by mandating search engines to provide an option of making users completely anonymous to facilitate free searching thinking or by enabling audience segmentation that allows users to maintain a range of identities van den Berg and Leenes, A core feature of democracy is that citizens contribute to the laws that bind them.
Whilst it has been argued here that limitations on FoT are hard to imagine, and hence its status as an absolute right should stay in place, this is a matter for public debate. For example, if new technologies are deemed to threaten users' absolute right to FoT, this could stop the further development of such technologies.
This may not be deemed desirable given the general benefits such technologies could have. Can a balance be struck here and, if so, how?
One option, driven by the precautionary principle, would be to take what Mullender terms a qualified deontological stance. This would recognize FoT as intrinsically valuable, acknowledge that both it and a culture in which it can flourish are worthy of protection, and demand clear reasons for putting it at risk by brain- or behavior-reading.
Another option, a curb-led approach of the form discussed by Brennan in Whalen v. Roe , would take what Mullender terms a qualified consequentialist stance. This would prioritize the pursuit of generally beneficial outcomes from brain- or behavior-reading e.
Given the importance of the mental autonomy that FoT supports, a qualified deontological stance appears more appropriate. This is particularly the case given the tendency of government to subsume individual rights to the pursuit of the general interest Mullender, and of corporations to subsume individual rights to the pursuit of profit.
The debate over whether the right to FoT should remain absolute will be driven by the public's desired trade-off between risk and freedom. However, there is a risk that the use of hard cases to frame this debate may lead reasoned argument to be overcome by political pressure. For example, emotions run understandably high in the situation of pedophiles and their potential risk to children. As a result, public sentiment that pedophiles should be punished for their thoughts alone could encourage legislators to make it permissible to violate the FoT of sex offenders see Doe v.
If this Rubicon was crossed, with second-order sexual thoughts about children being punishable, other types of thought would inevitably be deemed suitable for thought punishment. But should we abhor any attempt to limit the right to FoT because of what it may lead to, or is the risk of starting down such a slope one that needs to be taken Volokh, ? There is also need to encourage the academic community to engage in the debate about the nature of the right to FoT.
Another is the perception that neural information, which could reveal someone's thoughts, could never be obtained without someone's knowledge and consent.
There are two objections to this. First, wearable brain-reading technology will be developed. Once it is, it is highly likely to be enthusiastically embraced by society once commercially available, due to the convenience it will offer. People will queue up to have their brains read.
Soon, as with cars and the internet, it could become effectively impossible to function in society without this technology.
Second, even if one is skeptical of this threat, one cannot ignore the clear and present danger posed to FoT posed by behavior-reading. Our inner world is already in the process of being inferred, without anyone going near a scanner. The academic community hence needs to think now about the legal and ethical implications of new technologies for the right to FoT.
This process could mirror that in the artificial intelligence AI community, which is considering both contemporary ethical issues raised by AI, as well as the ethical issues it could raise in the future as AI technology further advances e.
We may also want to consider whether the culture we live in has shifted from that in which the ideal of the mentally autonomous, self-determining individual was born. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights granted people rights to achieve the culturally evolved ideal of being an autonomous individual Zuboff, However, the rise of neoliberal market economics created a society which began to undermine the ability of people to be self-determining Smail, ; Zuboff, Not only may the ability for self-determination be ebbing, but so may the desire to think itself.
There is some evidence for this. Consider a recent study by Wilson et al. Two-thirds of men, and a quarter of women, gave themselves at least one electric shock in the 15 min period. How far have we come from the centrality of thought to human life, as stressed by the Founding Fathers of the United States and its most eminent Supreme Court Justices, when we would rather torture ourselves than think?
Would we rather governments and corporations do our thinking for us, by serving up predictions and nudges for us to simply follow? Other questions also arise along these lines. Has surveillance capitalism's interest in us being predictable rather than free impacted our view of ourselves Zuboff, ?
How do we conceive what it is to be human today, and how does this conception map onto a right to FoT? This paper hopes to stimulate a public debate on FoT, as well as interdisciplinary conversations between lawyers, neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers and those working in the technology industries.
Society needs to be structured to encourage and support citizens to be able to think in such debates. In a time-poor society, in which everything, even opinions, need to be delivered on demand, we may ask where the space currently is for thought. This encourages rule-of-thumb thought. Rule-of-reason thought takes time and effort and hence risks becoming privileged. Governments need to give their citizens tools and time for thought, which they have a duty to do under the positive aspect of the right to FoT.
As has been noted by the U. Cooper , And yet, thinking is also a communal process. Thinking is something we must also do together, rather than just in isolation potentially based on for-your-eyes-only micro-targeted information.
We hence need both public and private spaces for thought. The fate of FoT is not just in governmental hands. It also depends on citizens. We must value free thought. We must be courageous, as mental autonomy comes at a price. To allow FoT, one must accept a degree of risk. The land of the free has to also be the home of the brave. The fate of FoT hence depend on both top-down governmental support and bottom-up popular support.
Should we collectively stumble in our defense of humanity's right to FoT, the creature that gets to its feet again may not be recognizably human. The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author is grateful to the two reviewers of this paper, as well as Richard Mullender, Brendan Kelly, Patrick O'Callaghan, and Roseline McCarthy-Jones, for their insightful comments on this manuscript.
The author would like to acknowledge Ms. Susie Alegre for introducing him to the right to freedom of thought in international law as applied to contemporary technological developments, including the work of Vermeulen , Bublitz , Bublitz and Merkel and Boire This framework was applied in a separate analysis in Alegre Abood v. Detroit Board of Education Google Scholar. Ajzen, I. The theory of planned behavior. Alderson-Day, B.
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To address the situation, the report urges amendment to legislation to decriminalize defamation and ensure that powers given to security forces do not infringe on the legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of expression.
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