Rowan Cruft: "Communication and Collective Action"

Modern forms of communication that enable, say, ‘fake news’ or ‘nudge’ advertising have clear epistemic costs. In my view they also prevent us from constituting communities who can act collectively. The public sphere – perhaps especially the national public sphere(s) in the UK – is not ‘ours’, for any inclusive ‘we’. Because of this, we cannot act collectively; thus when the state acts there is no ‘we’ whose action this is. For democracy to be possible, we need to reform our public sphere, and I will sketch proposals that give centre stage to the importance of collective knowledge for collective action. This lecture was held at the 2017 Holberg Symposium: "Ethics for Communication" in honour of Holberg Laureate Onora O'Neill. BIOGRAPHY Rowan Cruft, Senior lecturer in Philosophy, University of Stirling. Cruft has published on rights, duties, respect and justice.