Libraries and alethic rights: one, no one or one hundred thousand truths?

Abstract

Two articles recently published in the international journal Libri summarized and rekindled the debate on fake news, post-truth and intellectual neutrality of librarians hosted a few years ago by AIB studi, focusing on the issues of the relevance of the concept of truth for libraries and of the possible introduction among librarians’ ethical principles of the 'alethic rights' theorized by the Italian philosopher Franca D'Agostini.

These rights can be understood in a 'strong' or a 'weak' sense: in the first case, adopting them would be problematic for libraries both from a technical and from a deontological point of view, while in the second case the adoption would be dangerous and redundant. Dangerous due to the risk that aletic rights, even if ‘weak’, are still interpreted as ‘strong’. And redundant because, on the one hand, they would not modify the practices currently in force in libraries and, on the other, any temporary (and risky) limitations of the intellectual freedom of users motivated by emergencies such as the current pandemic could in some way be justified by the principle of social responsibility, already present in many ethical codes.

As regards the relevance of truth for libraries, the theory of 'alethic pluralism' is - among those that try to define this elusive, but indispensable, concept - the most suitable to be applied in the library field, because it allows to 'translate' it with other characteristics more easily requirable from documents collected by libraries and from information provided by their reference services, such as reliability and accuracy.