The Problem of Information in John Rawls (and what it means for the governance of knowledge in East-Asian Societies)

Abstract

The governance of information is of the essence of the governance of contemporary societies. Human rights covenants admit of restrictions in freedom of expression so that legitimate goals can be accomplished even within societies of liberal and democratic tradition. The international trade system encompasses exceptions to free trade, including information-based free trade, insofar as these are relied on to protect the public morals or public order of a member country. Eastern societies have actively deployed such restrictions and exceptions in order to preserve their political and cultural traditions and the values upon which these rest. Western liberal democracies, however, have been highly critical of these developments (though all the while also practicing them), as if the very idea of restrictions on information flows would be something conceptually unthinkable within a liberal framework. An argument that has often been applied as a justification in Western criticisms is the argument of neutrality, which in this regard is extended as much to the state as to non-state actors who act as gatekeepers of information flows. Restrictions on the flow of information, the argument goes, reflect choices on values and conceptions of the good that any liberal framework should refrain from making; rather, instead of to states and corporations, such choices should be left to individuals in the exercise of their moral powers as free and equal persons. The theoretical roots of such an argument are rarely rendered explicit so as to lend them to a more precise statement as the one just attempted. Yet, we can trace their conception and origin in political theory to a principle of political neutrality that we find most prominently stated in John Rawls’s work. This paper, however, will demonstrate the difficulties of applying John Rawls’s political thought to the governance of information. Such difficulties, the paper argues, stem from the fact that Rawlsian political liberalism conceives of information as a one-dimensional category and of its regulation as a uniform phenomenon across the liberal world. This enables one to treat information as always a political concept – one belonging, that is, in the scope of public reason. Understanding so, in turn, is an essential premise for holding Rawlsian theory demands access to information as a matter of distributive justice. Indeed, works that evaluate the question of access to information with regard to Rawls’s theory of justice have so far widely relied upon such a premise (e.g. Van den Hoven and Rooksby; Merges; and Ng). Yet, once one attends to the deep structure of information (to use Noam Chomsky’s expression) and uncovers the challenge of meaning, once one comes to see that there is much in information that is public as well as that there is much in it that is private, the essence of Rawlsian political liberalism is short-circuited. In ways that this paper will explain, Rawls’s own principle of neutrality makes his theory inapplicable to the regulation of the most typical realms of contemporary information-based societies, where power is exercised in ways extending much beyond the restrained public realm of the Rawlsian basic structure. Understanding so offers an explanation for why the regulation of information flows takes and ought to take place in societies of different political affiliations, be them liberal or less so.