Understanding Information Ethics

Information Ethics

The paper addresses theoretical and practical aspects of information ethics from an intercultural perspective.

The recent concept of information ethics is related particularly to problems which arose in the last century with the development of computer technology and the internet. A broader concept of information ethics as dealing with the digital reconstruction of all possible phenomena leads to questions relating to digital ontology. Following Heidegger’s conception of the relation between ontology and metaphysics, the author argues that ontology has to do with Being itself and not just with the Being of beings which is the matter of metaphysics. The primary aim of an ontological foundation of information ethics is to question the metaphysical ambitions of digital ontology understood as today’s pervading understanding of being. The author analyzes some challenges of digital technology, particularly with regard to the moral status of digital agents. It has been argues that information ethics does not only deal with ethical questions relating to the infosphere. This view is contrasted with arguments presented by Luciano Floridi on the foundation of information ethics as well as on the moral status of digital agents. It is argued that a reductionist view of the human body as digital data overlooks the limits of digital ontology and gives up one basis for ethical orientation. Finally issues related to the digital divide as well as to intercultural aspects of information ethics are explored and long and short-term agendas for appropriate responses are presented.

Luciano Floridi has developed a notion of Information Ethics that begins, classically enough, with ontology but with a novel and centrally important turn: Floridi’s information ontology takes as its primary elements concepts of information objects in an infosphere - roughly equivalent to the “stuff” (hyle) of the ancient PreSocratics. This ontology is expanded to include nothing less than a cosmic awareness of entropy as the degradation of information as a starting point - coupled with an emphasis on autopoeisis as a way of developing an account of the cosmos as self-organizing. Floridi argues that these theoretical specifically ontological foundations of information ethics lead to an applied computer ethics (CE) which focuses on the “patient” or recipient of the consequences of our ethical choices more than traditional CE (which focuses, by contrast, on the agent or actor of ethical choices).

Terrell Ward Bynum argues that Floridi’s Information Ethics in turn fits with the more historical framework for CE that Bynum finds articulated in the foundational work of Norbert Wiener. Wiener argues, for example, that computers should: contribute to human flourishing; advance and defend human values (life, health, freedom, knowledge, happiness); and fulfill “the great principles of justice” drawn from Western philosophical and religious traditions. Bynum provides a range of examples that show how computational technologies do just this, e.g., as they allow a human being otherwise paralyzed to talk, send and receive email, surf the web, create documents, control his/her local environment, etc.. Bynum sees these examples and the larger parameters of Wiener’s CE to fit with Floridi’s notion of an Information Ethics that specifically benefits the infosphere, minimizes entropy, and fosters the flourishing of information objects.

Consistent with but distinct from these broader approaches to CE is what may be generally construed as professional ethics. Professional ethics seeks to define the duties and responsibilities of the practitioners of specific disciplines psychologists, sociologists, and, in our case, computer scientists, and specialists in information systems, etc. In turn, two different emphases can be discerned in here.

To begin with, Kay Mathiesen and Wallace Koehler take up CE as a version of professional ethics that