Marcelo Thompson

There will be an FCC hearing on Network Neutrality going on next Monday at the Berkman Center. Prof Benkler will be there. It will be interesting to learn Prof Benkler’s more detailed vision on the issue.

In both an outstanding earlier piece and his The Wealth of Networks, Prof Benkler has almost fully embraced Joseph Raz’s theory of autonomy.

It is important to notice that Raz is a liberal-perfectionist, or, more straightforwardly, that Raz is at the same time committed to the value of autonomy AND to denying that a principle of neutral political concern should preside over state action. For Raz, states should not embrace neutrality in policy making.

Raz’s The Morality of Freedom as a whole reflects this philosophy. Let us see one excerpt:

Political action should be concerned with providing individuals with the means by which they can develop, which enable them to choose and attempt to realize their own conception of the good. But there is nothing here which speaks for neutrality. For it is the goal of all political action to enable individuals to pursue valid conceptions of the good and to discourage evil or empty ones.

In his The Wealth of Networks, Prof. Benkler sought, at the same time, to embrace Raz’s morality of freedom (as far as the value of autonomy is concerned) AND John Rawls’s theory of justice. The problem is that these theories are in stiff opposition. While Raz is a perfectionist, Rawls was a self-proclaimed neutralist. Rawls’s theory of justice embraces a principle of neutral political concern with regard to all the goods that he sees as lying beyond his veil of ignorance. And though Prof Benkler enlarged on autonomy in his book and prior work, he left the concept of neutrality hanging in the air (except, implicitly, for his endorsement of John Rawls — see, in particular, p.305). It is impossible for the reader to understand the precise way in which both theories can come together, and if they can. It is also impossible to know precisely what Prof Benkler thinks of neutrality. In spite of all the merits of Prof. Benkler’s impressive feat in his book — unquestionably the best written so far on the normative aspects of the networked society –, I found the idea that Raz and Rawls may hang out together in so contentious grounds very hard to digest.

It is particularly challenging to observe the prominence that the value of knowledge holds in Prof Benkler’s works and try to blend this with the undeniable fact that Rawls’s assumed neutralism put him in a highly problematic relation with the value of knowledge (and with state action geared towards promoting knowledge). For Rawls,

the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits.

Speaking of Rawls’s theory of justice, John Finnis fires:

For the sake of a ‘democratic’ impartiality between differing conceptions of human good, Rawls insists that, in selecting principles of justice, one must treat as primary goods only liberty, opportunity, wealth, and self-respect, and that one must not attribute intrinsic value to such basic forms of good as truth, or play, or art, or friendship.

However, as Finnis claims, it is

unreasonable for anyone to deny that knowledge is (and is to be treated as) a form of excellence, and that error, illusion, muddle, superstition, and ignorance are evils that no one should wish for, or plan for, or encourage in himself or in others.

Prof. Benkler’s compelling arguments towards a commons-based society tell me much about the values he believes in. Values in which I fully believe too. But they do not give me reasons to suppose we, our states, our corporations, or any other actor of our society, should seek to engage with neutral pursuits instead of with practical reason and principled action.

Let us see what more he has to say about neutrality in the upcoming Monday. I hope he will stick to Raz.