The Right to Know in the Information Polity

Abstract

In a world struggling with a surfeit of misinformation and disinformation, the task of justifying a citizen’s right to reliable information, the so-called ‘right to know’, is urgent and unavoidable. To that end, the article deploys the theory of justice of John Rawls, a leading figure in Anglophone political philosophy in the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. The ‘neo-Rawlsians’ are introduced as a school which has sought to apply Rawlsian thinking to the new age. According to neo-Rawlsians, there is a strong case for information now to be recognised as a primary good belonging to Rawls’s liberty principle. However, the article seeks to break new ground by, instead of treating the right to know as a standalone civil liberty, placing it under what Rawls calls the ‘fair value of political liberty’. The advantage of this move is that it converts it from a ‘negative’ (formal) to a ‘positive’ (proactive) liberty. While reducing its scope, the manoeuvre entails that the state comes under a moral and, hopefully, legal obligation to guarantee that citizens become apprised of important political information, such as election information. The article ends by discussing some of the ways in which neo-Rawlsian thinking might be developed for the digital age.