Liberty and the infosphere: affiliation over citizenship
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Date
2018
Authors
Bregman, Craig Howard
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Abstract
The title of my research report, Liberty and the Infosphere: Affiliation over Citizenship , speaks about
an ideal of liberty, a maximal version, and then asks where such a version may be located, the
proposition being that the infosphere, or more specifically, the internet offers such an environment. It
then poses a supporting proposition in the form of the question: why we ought to a pursue a libertarian
quest for freedom of affiliation online. This implies that we should affiliate with others, and that
affiliation, as a collective-forming enterprise, is a better way of expressing liberty than that offered by
the concept of citizenship. In pursuing this line of thought, I draw on a consequentialist frame of
reference, arguing that liberty ought to guide us towards achieving the best results for both ourselves as
well as others. This leads me further to propose a rule-consequentialist formulation of principles
designed to maximise our experience of liberty by steering us through morally permissible actions and
away from morally impermissible alternatives
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in
partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Applied Ethics for Professionals, Johannesburg, 2017
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Bregman, Craig Howard (2018) Liberty and the infosphere : affiliation over citizenship, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <http://hdl.handle.net/10539/26319>