BBC: Pick and Choose Your "Fundamental Rights"!

The BBC recently commissioned an "international polling firm" called GlobeScan to determine various public opinions on the internet and internet access. There were 27,973 participants across 26 countries, a sizable amount of which (14,306) had internet access at the time of taking the poll. For the report as it was made available to the public, please click the following link, noting that it will bring up a PDF file:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08_03_10_BBC_internet_poll.pdf

Of particular interest to me are the responses to the following proposition: "Access to the Internet Should Be a Fundamental Right of All People." 50% of respondents strongly agreed, 29% somewhat agreed, 9% somewhat disagreed, 6% strongly disagreed, and 6% did not know or did not respond.

The normative nature of this question-- "should", rather than "is", seems odd to me, particularly concerning what is commonly meant by "fundamental". The US Supreme Court, in Roe v Wade (410 US 113) defined a "Fundamental Right" as a right that is "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" (see Section VIII for the source of the quote). Clearly, however, internet access did not exist at times when ordered liberty existed, and thus it is not implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. Even if it were the case, however, that internet access was a fundamental right (implicit in the concept of ordered liberty), I'm going to side with Kant and argue that "should" implies that it's possible that something may or may not be manifested. If I tell you that you should go to class, that implies the possibility of you not going to class. If a scientist states that a test should work, the implication is that the test might not work, given certain contingencies. I would not, however, state that the sum of two and two should be four; I would state that it is equivalent to four.

If this is correct, then one ought not (read: should not) claim that one should do something if that something is fundamental, because fundamental means implicit-- it is already contained within. If free speech is a fundamental human right, the question of whether or not it is one is moot. If internet access is implicit in the idea of ordered liberty, it is analytically contained within the idea-- even if one has not discovered it-- and there is no question of whether it should be. By analogy, one does not debate whether the sum of two and two ought to be equivalent to four; while one might debate whether the sum of two and two is equivalent to four, whether it ought to be is a moot question, because we are speaking analytically, in the context of a predetermined system. In the case of rights, the system is ordered liberty, according to the USSC. One might debate whether this system ought to be followed, but if one accepts the system, one by extension accepts that which is implicit in the system. Being implicitly contained follows from the system, and one cannot pick and choose what follows; if I choose the system of classical logic, I am stuck with [(not a) or (a)] being tautologically true. I can reject classical logic, but, if I do not, I cannot reject that which is implicitly contained, and thus the "should" question here is meaningless.

In conclusion, the pollsters ought to have asked if internet access is a fundamental right, not whether it should be. While it seems intellectually untenable to hold it as such, that sort of move seems far less problematic than the question of whether it should be one.