Lowry Pressly

This article seeks to shed light on debates about the right to be forgotten by offering a new account of the right as grounded in the confidence that the direction of one’s life is up to one and worth the trouble that it takes to direct it. I show how this confidence is supported by what the right actually provides: the possibility of new social interactions unconditioned by information about one’s past. This view avoids pitfalls facing other accounts of the right’s moral basis, clarifies its relation to rights of privacy, and resolves several puzzles thought to face its practical application.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.