Computer Access Equity

Walter Maner

• 1. The Call for Access Rights
• 2. Structral Barriers to Access Rights
• 3. An Offering of Bounded Concessions
• 4. Evidence of Access Inequity
• 5. Concern for Justice
• 6. What Access Do People Deserve?
• References

2. Structural Barriers to Access Rights

We may want everyone to have such tools, but there are formidable sociopolitical constraints that limit what we can hope to achieve. Health care access is a parallel case. Tristram Englehardt (1986), writing in The Foundations of Bioethics, identified six prominent factors that limit the right to access health care. The same constraints clearly limit information access rights:

• Individual rights to free choice, which constrain the authority of society to compel the provision of access



• Private property, which constrains the authority of society to appropriate and redistribute resources



• The limited authority of the state, which has only the powers that those governed choose to give it



• Societal or communal free choice, which may waste or misdirect scarce resources



• The finitude of all resources, which constrains both individuals and groups from achieving worthy ambitions



• The limits of human reason, which make it difficult to establish that a particular redistribution of social benefits and burdens should be undertaken

Go to: 3. An Offering of Bounded Concessions

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