A Further Study of the Deconstruction and Inquiry of “Digital Human Rights”

So far the debate on “digital human rights” has focused on three controversial aspects, namely, the fourth-generation human rights, the moral foundations of human rights, and the nature of human rights. Logically speaking, to judge whether a right is a human right depends first on whether it can be deduced from the original attributes of human beings; otherwise, it doesn’t matter how many generations of human rights there are or whether human rights have new features. In the view of the origin of human rights, “digital humanity” is not the nature of human beings, and if it is regarded as the humanity foundation of human rights, it will lead to the ethical crisis of the vacuity of the subjects, the variation of the forms, and the expansion of obligations. In terms of the structure of human rights, the value evidence of “digital human rights” lacks the minimum foundation; the separation of political decision and academic proof leads to doubts about scientificity; and the breakthrough of the “triad structure” is not conducive to the stability of the normative system. In addition, the logic, theory and knowledge production of the discourse expression of “digital human rights” are characterized by a lack of self-consistency, self-confidence and autonomy, that is, inversion of cause and effect, path dependence and repetitive production. Therefore, the complex relationship between digital science and technology and human rights still needs to be further pursued from the perspectives of the origin, the structure and the discourse of human rights.