Okay.

Thank you.

We know from the history of ethics and the history of the law that those kinds of arguments aren't very powerful. If they were powerful, we would still have slavery and bear baiting. "People really like bear baiting! They really like the Colosseum, seeing people torn apart!" Therefore we ...

Yes. Behind the veil of ignorance, what kind of society would you choose? You can do a similar thing for the purchase of newspapers. If you didn't know whether or not you were going to be you or one of the victims of this paper's intrusive privacy policy ...

It was just something I wanted to put in for completeness' sake, because a lot of the debate focuses on -- can paint the press as somehow people sitting around in a room making up evil things to do. There's no -- if there's no demand for salacious gossip and ...

Yes.

Even the absolute "musts" are limited here.

Yes. Some of the "musts" are even weaker than others and that's a particular -- that's a hedged "must".

Sorry, it's even stronger.

When you say the one -- the subsequent one -- the press must take care not to publish inaccurate -- well, again, I think that's -- it's not unqualified. It's syntactically unqualified, there's no explicit qualification, but it's "must" or what?

But --

Well, I don't know -- I mean, the -- I don't know if it is the place of this code to have positive duties because if it's a heterogeneous press and a free press, then I certainly don't have a direct argument that says all media outlets, all ...

Yes.

Yes.

Well, the worry about "misleading" is misleading is an audience-relative notion. You can mislead some but not others. So in order to assess what kinds of misleading are relevant, we have to say a lot more about what kinds of misleading we're concerned with. Is it misleading the average ...

Well, one major concern is it doesn't tell you what "inaccurate" or "misleading" or "distorted information" amount to. There ought to be an addendum at the bottom which says, "And by this we mean ... here is a further expansion of what we mean by that."

So if I publish ...

I can.

I don't, but --

That's true, but then something's limited about that line of argument because -- and I've heard it said that if you regulate us too heavily, people will just go to the blogosphere and that will be all the worse. I don't think that follows at all. My ...

That's why I thought the analogy with medical ethics is quite a useful one, because obviously then -- from the 1960s onwards, with the major changes in clinical ethics across the globe, there was also resistance, people who would say, "We're not engaged in all this stuff about informing ...

Yes.

Yes. All right, thank you.

So respect for persons seems to be missing from at least part of the sort of everyday practices of a sizeable part of the media, and so -- the question was about what would make it ethical? It would become much more ethical if there were ...

No, no, the NUJ had highlighted the fact that there was -- in an economically competitive media environment, especially younger journalists are put under incredible pressure. That's all --

Yes. I did put a brief warning at the beginning of that that a full response to that question might take considerably longer than we have here -- several lifetimes -- but particularly because in philosophy there are lots of different ethical theories with very long and distinguished histories. But all of ...

It is a question of the drawing the line in the appropriate place. So the mood that I wanted to highlight was keeping apart the notion of content censorship from enforcement standards.

Now, once you get enforcement standards in place, then of course you have this indirect restriction on content ...

No, especially if the main justification for a free press is in terms of its utility in informing us of relevant facts. I mean, I'm not ruling out entertainment, because entertainment is something else that the press does and there may be different questions that arise there, but in ...

Yes. This just, again, returns to the point we started with, which is the way that the debate is framed in terms of an opposition between censorship on the one hand and freedom of the press on the other seems to be misleading and ill-conceived, and that when we think ...

Yes.

Absolutely. It's positively beneficial, but my note of caution was in moving from the positively beneficial to a stronger claim that therefore it ought to be required, because there are lots of other considerations that might be relevant for why that might not be the first port of call ...

There's a balancing act here because in an ideal world, it would be useful if there were somewhere where that kind of information was accessible. Whether it ought to be disclosed in hard copy print might be quite difficult because it would make hard copy print unreadable, if you ...

Milton's claims aren't abouts journalistic sources, though he's particularly concerned with political pamphleteering. So it is the source of opinion.

Now, actually, in the statement here, I don't specifically address anything to do with the protection of journalistic sources. The claim here was more narrowly focused ...

Indeed. There's A term I used elsewhere which I didn't use in here, which is epistemic pollution -- "epistemic" means to do with knowledge and "pollution" just being pollution -- where people who routinely deceive at the level of public life and in the media -- it is akin to a ...

When we're talking about the public interest here, there's two different roles that public interest is playing, both in my submission and within the Inquiry more generally. In the one sense, public interest is used quite narrowly talking about the specific public interest defence. That's not the ...

Yes. So this notion of the right to know is one which is also offered up fairly regularly as a justification, sometimes a justification for intrusive actions. One problem -- the logical problem is the right to know doesn't make any sense, because if it's supposed to be a ...

You're absolutely right. There are lots of things -- a famous person walking down the street can't conceal themselves and alter their behaviour in every circumstance, but that wasn't the claim. It was about having an interest in, if you like -- it's the classic privacy interest, the ...

I think the best -- there's more than one thing. What I was trying to allude to was the way that our privacy interests vary depending upon the situations that we believe ourselves to be in.

You can't ever escape. I'm agreeing with you. We're arguing about something one step down the line, which is why we should think that that claim holds true, and what I was trying to allude to was there is a difference between walking down Oxford Street just ...

Of course, because the fact that anybody could see them is very different -- because we would behave very, very differently if we thought everybody was looking at us, and we shape our behaviour -- this is why I pointed to the spot on the nose example. I would behave very differently ...

Yes, because --

I agree with you, but the difficulty here is articulating in a clear and defensible way why that distinction should hold, because one of the -- the counterargument that could be used by a journalist is: "They're already in a public space. All I was doing was recording something that ...

That was just an example.

Yes. The notion of privacy -- I have quite abstract philosophical views, which I shall spare you, here, just to spare everybody -- but more relevantly there is unclarity about what we mean by privacy, both in the descriptive sense and then there's unclarity in the normative sense as well, in ...

-- just because I don't believe there is an argument that connects the two of them automatically.

You would need an argument to establish why they would be the same but given the major and important differences between them, it would be very unlikely that they would be the same. I don't believe they are the same --

And of course, logically, they might be the same --

They are -- I'd like to say they were obviously different but if one reads a lot of things which are written in the public domain on freedom of the press, they're often articulated in terms of freedom of expression. But freedom of expression and freedom of the press ...

Well, not exactly, because, of course -- I mean, here we have an analogy with something else outside the press. Suppose we argue that freedom of movement is absolutely central to a democracy. Seems quite plausible. I shouldn't, as the Prime Minister, be allowed to forbid people to go to ...

All right.

Well, there's two general things that are wrong with it. When I say "wrong with it", there are two limitations to it. First of all, it only applies to those areas of the press or those actors in the press who are committed to getting at the truth. It ...

All right, so by content-based, one kind of argument in favour of freedom of the press, which I've just mentioned briefly before, is that the press is in a special position to provide knowledge of certain kinds of facts to the populace that they otherwise would not know. So ...