Information ethics Luciano Floridi

Information ethics Luciano Floridi

5.1 Introduction: in search of a unified approach to information ethics

In recent years, Information Ethics (IE) has come to mean different things to different researchers working in a variety of disciplines, including computer ethics, business ethics, medical ethics, computer science, the philosophy of information, social epistemology and library and information science. This is not surprising. Perhaps this Babel was always going to be inevitable, given the novelty of the field and the multifarious nature of the concept of information itself and of its related phenomena. It is, however, unfortunate, for it has generated some confusion about the specific nature and scope of IE. The problem, however, is not irremediable, for a unified approach can help to explain and relate the main senses in which IE has been discussed in the literature. The approach is best introduced schematically and by focusing our attention on a moral agent A.

Suppose A is interested in pursuing whatever she considers her best course of action, given her predicament. We shall assume that A’s evaluations and actions have some moral value, but no specific value needs to be introduced. Intuitively, A can use some information (information as a resource) to gen- erate some other information (information as a product) and in so doing affect her informational environment (information as target). Now, since the appearance of the first works in the eighties (for an early review see Smith 1996), Information Ethics has been claimed to be the study of moral issues arising from one or another of these three distinct ‘information arrows’ (see Figure 5.1). This, in turn, has paved the way to a fruitless compartmental- ization and false dilemmas, with researchers either ignoring the wider scope of IE, or arguing as if only one ‘arrow’ and its corresponding microethics (that is a practical, field-dependent, applied and professional ethics) provided the right approach to IE. The limits of such narrowly constructed interpreta- tions of IE become evident once we look at each ‘informational arrow’ more closely.

5.1.1 Information-as-a-resource Ethics

Consider first the crucial role played by information as a resource for A’s moral evaluations and actions. Moral evaluations and actions have an epis- temic component, since A may be expected to proceed ‘to the best of her information’, that is, A may be expected to avail herself of whatever infor- mation she can muster, in order to reach (better) conclusions about what can and ought to be done in some given circumstances.

Socrates already argued that a moral agent is naturally interested in gaining as much valuable information as the circumstances require, and that a well- informed agent is more likely to do the right thing. The ensuing ‘ethical intellectualism’ analyses evil and morally wrong behaviour as the outcome of deficient information. Conversely, A’s moral responsibility tends to be directly proportional to A’s degree of information: any decrease in the latter usually corresponds to a decrease in the former. This is the sense in which information occurs in the guise of judicial evidence. It is also the sense in which one speaks of A’s informed decision, informed consent or well-informed participation. In Christian ethics, even the worst sins can be forgiven in the light of the sinner’s insufficient information, as a counterfactual evaluation is possible: had A been properly informed A would have acted differently and hence would not have sinned (Luke 23:44). In a secular context, Oedipus and Macbeth remind us how the (inadvertent) mismanagement of informational resources may have tragic consequences.

From a ‘resource’ perspective, it seems that the machinery of moral thinking and behaviour needs information, and quite a lot of it, to function properly. However, even within the limited scope adopted by an analysis based solely on information as a resource, care should be exercised lest all ethical discourse is reduced to the nuances of higher quantity, quality and intelligibility of informational resources. The more the better is not the only, nor always the best, rule of thumb. For the (sometimes explicit and conscious) withdrawal of information can often make a significant difference. A may need to lack (or intentionally preclude herself from accessing) some information in order to achieve morally desirable goals, such as protecting anonymity, enhancing fair treatment or implementing unbiased evaluation. Famously, Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ exploits precisely this aspect of information-as-a-resource in order to develop an impartial approach to justice (Rawls 1999). Being informed is not always a blessing and might sometimes be morally wrong or dangerous.

Whether the (quantitative and qualitative) presence or the (total) absence of information-as-a-resource is in question, it is obvious that there is a perfectly reasonable sense in which Information Ethics may be described as the study of the moral issues arising from ‘the triple A’: availability, accessibility and accuracy of informational resources, independently of their format, kind and physical support. Rawls’ position has already been mentioned. Other examples of issues in IE, understood as an Information-as-resource Ethics, are the so- called digital divide, the problem of infoglut, and the analysis of the reliability and trustworthiness of information sources (Floridi 1995). Indeed, one may recognize in this approach to Information Ethics a position broadly defended by van den Hoven (1995) and more recently by Mathiesen (2004), who criti- cizes Floridi (1999b) and is in turn criticized by Mather (2005). Whereas van den Hoven purports to present his approach to IE as an enriching perspective contributing to the debate, Mathiesen means to present her view, restricted to the informational needs and states of the moral agent, as the only correct interpretation of IE. Her position is thus undermined by the problems affecting any microethical interpretation of IE, as Mather well argues.

5.1.2 Information-as-a-product Ethics

A second, but closely related sense in which information plays an important moral role is as a product of A’s moral evaluations and actions. A is not only an information consumer but also an information producer, who may be subject to constraints while being able to take advantage of opportunities. Both constraints and opportunities call for an ethical analysis. Thus, IE, under- stood as Information-as-a-product Ethics, may cover moral issues arising, for example, in the context of accountability, liability, libel legislation, testimony, plagiarism, advertising, propaganda, misinformation, and more generally of pragmatic rules of communication a` la Grice. Kant’s analysis of the immoral- ity of lying is one of the best known case-studies in the philosophical liter- ature concerning this kind of Information Ethics. The boy crying wolf, Iago misleading Othello, or Cassandra and Laocoon, pointlessly warning the Trojans against the Greeks’ wooden horse, remind us how the ineffective management of informational products may have tragic consequences.

5.1.3  Information-as-a-target Ethics

3. Independently of A’s information input (info-resource) and output (info- product), there is a third sense in which information may be subject to ethical analysis, namely when A’s moral evaluations and actions affect the infor- mational environment. Think, for example, of A’s respect for, or breach of, someone’s information privacy or confidentiality. Hacking, understood as the unauthorized access to a (usually computerized) information system, is another good example. It is not uncommon to mistake it for a problem to be discussed within the conceptual frame of an ethics of informational resources. This mis- classification allows the hacker to defend his position by arguing that no use (let alone misuse) of the accessed information has been made. Yet hack- ing, properly understood, is a form of breach of privacy. What is in question is not what A does with the information, which has been accessed without authorization, but what it means for an informational environment to be accessed by A without authorization. So the analysis of hacking belongs to an Info-target Ethics. Other issues here include security, vandalism (from the burning of libraries and books to the dissemination of viruses), piracy, intel- lectual property, open source, freedom of expression, censorship, filtering and contents control. Mill’s analysis ‘Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion’ is a classic of IE interpreted as Information-as-a-target Ethics. Juliet, simu- lating her death, and Hamlet, re-enacting his father’s homicide, show how the risky management of one’s informational environment may have tragic consequences.

   5.1.4  The limits of any microethical approach to Information Ethics

4. At the end of this overview, it seems that the RPT model, summarized in

   Figure 5.1, may help one to get some initial orientation in the multiplicity of issues belonging to different interpretations of Information Ethics. The model is also useful to explain why any technology which radically modifies the ‘life of information’ is going to have profound implications for any moral agent. ICT (information and communication technologies), by radically changing the informational context in which moral issues arise, not only add interesting new dimensions to old problems, but lead us to rethink, methodologically, the very grounds on which our ethical positions are based.

   At the same time, the model rectifies the excessive emphasis placed on specific technologies (this happens most notably in computer ethics), by concentrating on the more fundamental phenomenon of information in all its variety and long tradition. This was Wiener’s position (see Chapter 2) and I have argued (Floridi 1999b, Floridi and Sanders 2002) that the various dif- ficulties encountered in the philosophical foundations of computer ethics are connected to the fact that the latter has not yet been recognized as primarily an environmental ethics whose main concern is (or should be) the ecological management and well-being of the infosphere.

   Despite these advantages, however, the model can still be criticized for being inadequate, for two reasons.

   On the one hand, the model is still too simplistic. Arguably, several impor- tant issues belong mainly but not only to the analysis of just one ‘infor- mational arrow’. A few examples well illustrate the problem: someone’s testi- mony (e.g. Iago’s) is someone else’s trustworthy information (i.e. Othello’s); A’s responsibility may be determined by the information A holds (‘apostle’ means ‘messenger’ in Greek), but it may also concern the information A issues (e.g. Judas’ kiss); censorship affects A both as a user and as a producer of information; misinformation (i.e., the deliberate production and distribution of misleading, false contents) is an ethical problem that concerns all three ‘informational arrows’; freedom of speech also affects the availability of offen- sive content (e.g. child pornography, violent content and socially, politically or religiously disrespectful statements) that might be morally questionable and should not circulate.

   On the other hand, the model is insufficiently inclusive. There are many important issues that cannot easily be placed on the map at all, for they really emerge from, or supervene upon, the interactions among the ‘informa- tional arrows’. Two significant examples may suffice: the ‘panopticon’ or ‘big brother’, that is, the problem of monitoring and controlling anything that might concern A; and the debate about information ownership (including copyright and patents legislation), which affects both users and producers while shaping their informational environment.

   So the criticism is fair. The RPT model is indeed inadequate. Yet why it is inadequate is a different matter. The tripartite analysis just provided is unsatisfactory, despite its partial usefulness, precisely because any interpre- tation of Information Ethics based on only one of the ‘informational arrows’ is bound to be too reductive. As the examples mentioned above emphasize, supporters of narrowly constructed interpretations of Information Ethics as a microethics are faced with the problem of being unable to cope with a wide variety of relevant issues, which remain either uncovered or inexplicable. In other words, the model shows that idiosyncratic versions of IE, which priv- ilege only some limited aspects of the information cycle, are unsatisfactory. We should not use the model to attempt to pigeonhole problems neatly, which is impossible. We should rather exploit it as a useful scheme to be superseded, in view of a more encompassing approach to IE as a macroethics, that is, as a theoretical, field-independent, applicable ethics. Philosophers will recognize here a Wittgensteinian ladder.

   In order to climb on, and then throw away, any narrowly constructed con- ception of Information Ethics, a more encompassing approach to IE needs to

   (i) bring together the three ‘informational arrows’;
   (ii) consider the whole information-cycle (including creation, elaboration,

   distribution, storage, protection, usage and possible destruction); and (iii) analyse informationally all entities involved (including the moral agent A) and their changes, actions and interactions, by treating them not apart from, but as part of the informational environment, or info- sphere, to which they belong as informational systems themselves (see

   Figure 5.2).

   Whereas steps (i) and (ii) do not pose particular problems and may be shared by other approaches to IE, step (iii) is crucial but requires a shift in the concep- tion of ‘information’. Instead of limiting the analysis to (veridical) semantic contents – as any narrower interpretation of IE as a microethics inevitably does – an ecological approach to Information Ethics looks at information from an object-oriented perspective and treats it as an entity. In other words, we move from a (broadly constructed) epistemological conception of Information Ethics to one which is typically ontological.

   A simple analogy may help introduce this new perspective.1 Imagine looking at the whole Universe from a chemical perspective. Every entity and process will satisfy a certain chemical description. An agent A, for example, will be between 45% and 75% water. Now consider an informational perspective.

The same entities will be described as clusters of data, that is, as informa- tional objects. More precisely, A (like any other entity) will be a discrete, self-contained, encapsulated package containing

1. (i)  the appropriate data structures which constitute the nature of the entity in question, that is, the state of the object, its unique identity and its attributes; and

2. (ii)  a collection of operations, functions, or procedures which are activated by various interactions or stimuli (that is, messages received from other objects or changes within itself) and correspondingly define how the object behaves or reacts to them.

From this perspective, informational systems as such, rather than just living systems in general, are raised to the role of agents and patients of any action, with environmental processes, changes and interactions equally described informationally.

Understanding the nature of IE ontologically rather than epistemologically modifies the interpretation of the scope of IE. Not only can an ecological IE gain a global view of the whole life-cycle of information, thus overcoming the limits of other microethical approaches, but it can also claim a role as a macroethics, that is, as an ethics that concerns the whole realm of reality. This is what we shall see in the next section.

 Information Ethics as a macroethics

This section provides a quick and accessible overview of Information Ethics understood as a macroethics (henceforth simply Information Ethics). For rea- sons of space, no attempt will be made to summarize the specific arguments, relevant evidence and detailed analyses required to flesh out the ecological approach to IE. Nor will its many philosophical implications be unfolded. The goal is rather to provide a general flavour of the theory. The hope is that the reader interested in knowing more about IE might be enticed to read more about it by following the references.

This section consists of five questions and answers that introduce IE. Section 5.3 consists of six objections and replies that, it is to be hoped, will dispel some common misunderstandings concerning IE.

What is IE?

IE is an ontocentric, patient-oriented, ecological macroethics (Floridi 1999b). An intuitive way to unpack this answer is by comparing IE to other environ- mental approaches.

Biocentric ethics usually grounds its analysis of the moral standing of bio- entities and eco-systems on the intrinsic worthiness of life and the intrinsically negative value of suffering. It seeks to develop a patient-oriented ethics in which the ‘patient’ may be not only a human being, but also any form of life. Indeed, Land Ethics extends the concept of patient to any component of the environment, thus coming close to the approach defended by Information Ethics. Any form of life is deemed to enjoy some essential proprieties or moral interests that deserve and demand to be respected, at least minimally if not absolutely, that is, in a possibly overridable sense, when contrasted to other interests. So biocentric ethics argues that the nature and well-being of the patient of any action constitute (at least partly) its moral standing and that the latter makes important claims on the interacting agent, claims that in principle ought to contribute to the guidance of the agent’s ethical decisions and the constraint of the agent’s moral behaviour. The ‘receiver’ of the action is placed at the core of the ethical discourse, as a centre of moral concern, while the ‘transmitter’ of any moral action is moved to its periphery.

Substitute now ‘life’ with ‘existence’ and it should become clear what IE amounts to. IE is an ecological ethics that replaces biocentrism with ontocen- trism. IE suggests that there is something even more elemental than life, namely being – that is, the existence and flourishing of all entities and their global environment – and something more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy. The latter is most emphatically not the physicists’ concept of thermodynamic entropy. Entropy here refers to any kind of destruction or cor- ruption of informational objects (mind, not of information), that is, any form of impoverishment of being, including nothingness, to phrase it more meta- physically. More specifically, destruction is to be understood as the complete annihilation of the object in question, which ceases to exist; compare this to the process of ‘erasing’ an entity irrevocably. Corruption is to be understood as a form of pollution or depletion of some of the properties of the object, which ceases to exist as that object and begins to exist as a different object minus the properties that have been corrupted or eliminated. This may be compared to a process degrading the integrity of the object in question.

IE then provides a common vocabulary to understand the whole realm of being through an informational perspective. IE holds that being/information has an intrinsic worthiness. It substantiates this position by recognizing that any informational entity has a Spinozian right to persist in its own status, and a constructionist right to flourish, i.e. to improve and enrich its existence and essence. As a consequence of such ‘rights’, IE evaluates the duty of any moral agent in terms of contribution to the growth of the infosphere (see Sections 5.2.4 and 5.2.5) and any process, action or event that negatively affects the whole infosphere – not just an informational entity – as an increase in its level of entropy and hence as an instance of evil (Floridi and Sanders 1999, Floridi and Sanders 2001, Floridi 2003).

In IE, the ethical discourse concerns any entity, understood informationally, that is, not only all persons, their cultivation, well-being and social interac- tions, not only animals, plants and their proper natural life, but also anything that exists, from paintings and books to stars and stones; anything that may or will exist, like future generations; and anything that was but is no more, like our ancestors or old civilizations. Indeed, according to IE, even ideal, intan- gible or intellectual objects can have a minimal degree of moral value, no matter how humble, and so be entitled to some respect. UNESCO, for example, recognizes this in its protection of ‘masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity’ by attributing them an intrinsic worth.

IE is impartial and universal because it brings to ultimate completion the process of enlargement of the concept of what may count as a centre of a (no matter how minimal) moral claim, which now includes every instance of being understood informationally (see Section 5.2.3), no matter whether physically implemented or not. In this respect, IE holds that every entity, as an expression of being, has a dignity, constituted by its mode of existence and essence (the collection of all the elementary proprieties that constitute it for what it is), which deserves to be respected (at least in a minimal and overridable sense) and hence places moral claims on the interacting agent and ought to contribute to the constraint and guidance of his ethical decisions and behaviour. This ontological equality principle means that any form of reality (any instance of information/being), simply for the fact of being what it is, enjoys a minimal, initial, overridable, equal right to exist and develop in a way which is appropriate to its nature. In the history of philosophy, this is a view that can already be found advocated by Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers.

The conscious recognition of the ontological equality principle presupposes a disinterested judgement of the moral situation from an objective perspective, i.e. a perspective which is as non-anthropocentric as possible. Moral behaviour is less likely without this epistemic virtue. The application of the ontological equality principle is achieved whenever actions are impartial, universal and ‘caring’.

The crucial importance of the radical change in ontological perspective cannot be overestimated. Bioethics and Environmental Ethics fail to achieve a level of complete impartiality because they are still biased against what is inanimate, lifeless, intangible or abstract (even Land Ethics is biased against technology and artefacts, for example). From their perspective, only what is intuitively alive deserves to be considered as a proper centre of moral claims, no matter how minimal, so a whole Universe escapes their attention. Now, this is precisely the fundamental limit overcome by IE, which further lowers the minimal condition that needs to be satisfied, in order to qualify as a centre of moral concern, to the common factor shared by any entity, namely its informational state. And since any form of being is in any case also a coherent body of information, to say that IE is infocentric is tantamount to interpreting it, correctly, as an ontocentric theory.

What counts as a moral agent, according to IE?

A moral agent is an interactive, autonomous and adaptable transition system that can perform morally qualifiable actions (Floridi and Sanders 2004). As usual, the definition requires some explanations.

First, we need to understand what a transition system is. Let us agree that a system is characterized by the properties it satisfies, once a given perspective is made explicit. We are interested in systems that change, which means that some of those properties change value. A changing system has its evolution captured by the values of its attributes. Thus, an entity can be thought of as having states, determined by the value of the properties that hold at any instant of its evolution. For then any change in the entity corresponds to a state change and vice versa. This conceptual approach allows us to view any entity as having states. Each change corresponds to a transition from one state to another. Note that a transition may be non-deterministic, since the transition might lead from a given initial state to one of several possible subsequent states. According to this view, the entity becomes a transition system.

A transition system is interactive when the system and its environment (can) act upon each other. Typical examples include input or output of a value, or simultaneous engagement of an action by both agent and patient – for example, gravitational force between bodies. An interactive transition system is autonomous when the system is able to change state without direct response to interaction, that is, it can perform internal transitions to change its state. So an agent must have at least two states. This property imbues an agent with a certain degree of complexity and independence from its environment. Finally, an interactive transition system is adaptable when the system’s interactions (can) change the transition rules by which it changes state. This property ensures that an agent might be viewed as learning its own mode of operation in a way which depends critically on its experience.

All we need to understand now is the meaning of ‘morally qualifiable action’. Very simply, an action qualifies as moral if it can cause moral good or evil. Note that this interpretation is neither consequentialist nor intentionalist in nature. We are neither affirming nor denying that the specific evaluation of the morality of the agent might depend on the specific outcome of the agent’s actions or on the agent’s original intentions or principles.

With all the definitions in place, it becomes possible to understand why, according to IE, artificial agents (not just digital agents but also social agents such as companies, parties, or hybrid systems formed by humans and machines, or technologically augmented humans) count as moral agents that are morally accountable for their actions (more on the distinction between responsibility and accountability presently).

The enlargement of the class of moral agents by IE brings several advan- tages. Normally, an entity is considered a moral agent only if

(i) it is an individual agent and
(ii) it is human-based, in the sense that it is either human or at least reducible

to an identifiable aggregation of human beings, who remain the only morally responsible sources of action, like ghosts in the legal machine.

Regarding (i), limiting the ethical discourse to individual agents hinders the development of a satisfactory investigation of distributed morality, a macro- scopic and growing phenomenon of global moral actions and collective responsibilities, resulting from the ‘invisible hand’ of systemic interactions among several agents at a local level.

And as far as (ii) is concerned, insisting on the necessarily human-based nature of the agent means undermining the possibility of understanding another major transformation in the ethical field, the appearance of artifi- cial agents that are sufficiently informed, ‘smart’, autonomous and able to perform morally relevant actions independently of the humans who created them, causing ‘artificial good’ and ‘artificial evil’ (Floridi and Sanders 1999, Floridi and Sanders 2001).

Of course, accepting that artificial agents may be moral agents is not devoid of problems. We have seen that morality is usually predicated upon responsi- bility. So it is often argued that artificial agents cannot be considered moral agents because they are not morally responsible for their actions, since holding them responsible would be a conceptual mistake (see Floridi and Sanders 2004 for a more detailed discussion of the following arguments). The point raised by the objection is that agents are moral agents only if they are responsible in the sense of being prescriptively assessable in principle. An agent x is a moral agent only if x can in principle be put on trial.

The immediate impression is that the ‘lack of responsibility’ objection is merely confusing the identification of x as a moral agent with the evaluationof x as a morally responsible agent. Surely, the counter-argument goes, there is a difference between being able to say who or what is the moral source or cause of (and hence accountable for) the moral action in question, and being able to evaluate, prescriptively, whether and how far the moral source so identified is also morally responsible for that action, and hence deserves to be praised or blamed, and in some cases rewarded or punished accordingly.

Well, that immediate impression is indeed wrong. There is no confusion. Equating identification and evaluation is actually a short cut. The objection is saying that identity (as a moral agent) without responsibility (as a moral agent) is empty, so we may as well save ourselves the bother of all these distinctions and speak only of morally responsible agents and moral agents as co-referential descriptions. But here lies the real mistake. For we can now see that the objection has finally shown its fundamental presupposition, viz., that we should reduce all prescriptive discourse to responsibility analysis. Yet this is an unacceptable assumption, a juridical fallacy. There is plenty of room for prescriptive discourse that is independent of responsibility-assignment and hence requires a clear identification of moral agents.

Consider the following example. There is nothing wrong with identifying a dog as the source of a morally good action, hence as an agent playing a crucial role in a moral situation, and therefore as a moral agent. Search-and-rescue dogs are trained to track missing people. They often help save lives, for which they receive much praise and rewards from both their owners and the people they have located. Yet this is not quite the point. Emotionally, people may be very grateful to the animals, but for the dogs it is a game and they cannot be considered morally responsible for their actions. The point is that the dogs are involved in a moral game as main players and therefore we can rightly identify them as moral agents accountable for the good or evil they can cause.

All this should ring a bell. Trying to equate identification and evaluation is really just another way of shifting the ethical analysis from considering xas the moral agent/source of a first-order moral action y to considering x as a possible moral patient of a second-order moral action z, which is the moral evaluation of x as being morally responsible for y. This is a typical Kantian move, with roots in Christian theology. However, there is clearly more to moral evaluation than just responsibility because x is capable of moral action even if x cannot be (or is not yet) a morally responsible agent.

By distinguishing between moral responsibility, which requires intentions, consciousness and other mental attitudes, and moral accountability, we can now avoid anthropocentric and anthropomorphic attitudes towards agent- hood. Instead, we can rely on an ethical outlook not necessarily based on punishment and reward (responsibility-oriented ethics) but on moral agent- hood, accountability and censure. We are less likely to assign responsibility at any cost, forced by the necessity to identify individual, human agent(s). We can stop the regress of looking for the responsible individual when some- thing evil happens, since we are now ready to acknowledge that sometimes the moral source of evil or good can be different from an individual or group of humans (note that this was a reasonable view in Greek philosophy). As a result, we are able to escape the dichotomy

(i) [(responsibility implies moral agency) implies prescriptive action], versus (ii) [(noresponsibilityimpliesnomoralagency)impliesnoprescriptiveaction].

There can be moral agency in the absence of moral responsibility. Promoting normative action is perfectly reasonable even when there is no responsibility but only moral accountability and the capacity for moral action.  Being able to treat non-human agents as moral agents facilitates the discus- sion of the morality of agents not only in cyberspace but also in the biosphere – where animals can be considered moral agents without their having to dis- play free will, emotions or mental states – and in contexts of ‘distributed morality’, where social and legal agents can now qualify as moral agents. The great advantage is a better grasp of the moral discourse in non-human contexts.

All this does not mean that the concept of ‘responsibility’ is redundant. On the contrary, the previous analysis makes clear the need for further analysis of the concept of responsibility itself, especially when the latter refers to the ontological commitments of creators of new agents and environments. This point is further discussed in Section 5.2.4. The only ‘cost’ of a ‘mind-less morality’ approach is the extension of the class of agents and moral agents to embrace artificial agents. It is a cost that is increasingly worth paying the more we move towards an advanced information society.

Conclusion

There is a famous passage in one of Einstein’s letters that well summarizes the perspective advocated by IE.

Some five years prior to his death, Albert Einstein received a letter from a nineteen-year-old girl grieving over the loss of her younger sister. The young woman wished to know what the famous scientist might say to comfort her. On March 4, 1950, Einstein wrote to this young person: A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is capable of achieving this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. (Einstein 1954)

Does the informational level of abstraction of IE provide an additional per- spective that can further expand the ethical discourse, so as to include the world of morally significant phenomena involving informational objects? Or does it represent a threshold beyond which nothing of moral significance really happens? Does looking at reality through the highly philosophical lens of an informational analysis improve our ethical understanding or is it an ethically pointless (when not misleading) exercise? IE argues that the agent- related behaviour and the patient-related status of informational objects qua informational objects can be morally significant, over and above the instru- mental function that may be attributed to them by other ethical approaches, and hence that they can contribute to determining, normatively, ethical duties and legally enforceable rights. IE’s position, like that of any other macroethics, is not devoid of problems. But it can interact with other macroethical theories. and contribute an important new perspective: a process or action may be morally good or bad irrespective of its consequences, motives, universality or virtuous nature, but depending on how it affects the infosphere. An ontocen- tric ethics provides an insightful perspective. Without IE’s contribution, our understanding of moral facts in general, not just of ICT-related problems in particular, would be less complete.

Ethics after the Information Revolution, Luciano Floridi

 Ethics after the Information Revolution

Luciano Floridi

 

1.1  Introduction: history as the information age

 

Humanity has organized its history according to many metrics. Some are natural and circular, relying on seasons and planetary motions. Some are social or political and linear, being determined, for example, by the succession of Olympic Games, the number of years since the founding of the city of Rome (ab urbe condita), or the ascension of a king. Still others are religious and have a V-shape, counting years before and after a particular event (e.g. the birth of Christ). There are larger periods that encompass smaller ones, named after influential styles (Baroque), people (Victorian era), particular circumstances (Cold War) or some new technology (Nuclear age). What all these and many other metrics have in common is that they are all historical, in the strict sense that they all depend on the development of systems to record events and hence accumulate and transmit information about the past. It follows that history is actually synonymous with the information age, since prehistory is the age in human development that precedes the availability of recording systems. Hence, one may further argue that humanity has been living in various kinds of information societies at least since the Bronze Age, the era that marks the invention of writing in different regions of the world, and especially in Mesopotamia. Comparing the computer revolution to the printing revolution would be misleading not because they are unrelated, but because they are actually phases of a much wider, macroscopic process that has spanned millennia: the slow emergence of the information society since the fourth millennium BC. And yet, this is not what we normally mean when talking about the information age. Typically, we have in mind something much more limited in scope and closer in time. There may be many explanations, but one seems more convincing than any other: only very recently has human progress and welfare begun to depend mostly on the successful and efficient management of the information life cycle.1 So the long period of time that the information society has taken to surface should not be surprising. Imagine a historian writing in a million years from now. She may consider it normal, and perhaps even elegantly symmetrical, that it took roughly six millennia (from its beginning in the Neolithic, tenth millennium BC, until the Bronze Age) for the agricultural revolution to produce its full effect, and then another six millennia (from the Bronze Age until the end of the second millennium AD) for the information revolution to bear its main fruit. During this span of time, information technologies evolved from being mainly recording systems, to being also communication systems (especially after Gutenberg), to being also processing systems (especially after Turing). As I will explain below, they have begun to play the role of re-ontologizing systems. Thanks to this evolution, nowadays the most advanced economies are highly dependent, for their functioning and growth, upon the pivotal role played by informationbased, intangible assets, information-intensive services (especially business and property services, communications, finance and insurance, and entertainment) as well as information-oriented public sectors (especially education, public administration and health care). For example, all G7 members qualify as information societies because, in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and the United States of America, at least 70% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) depends on intangible goods, which are informationbased, rather than material goods, which are the physical output of agricultural or manufacturing processes. The almost sudden burst of a global information society, after a few millennia of relatively quieter gestation, has generated new and disruptive challenges, which were largely unforeseeable only a few decades ago. Needless to say, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been changing the world profoundly, irreversibly and problematically since the fifties, at a breathtaking pace, and with unprecedented scope, making the creation, management and utilization of information, communication and computational resources vital issues. As a quick reminder, and in order to have some simple, quantitative measure of the transformations experienced by our generation, consider the following findings. In a recent study, researchers at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems estimated that humanity had accumulated approximately 12 exabytes2 of data in the course of its entire history until the commodification of computers, but that it had produced more than 5 exabytes of data just in 2002, ‘equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections’ (Lyman and Varian 2003). In 2002, this was almost 800 MB of recorded data produced per person. It is like saying that every newborn baby came into the world with a burden of 30 feet of books, the equivalent of 800 MB of data on paper. This exponential escalation has been relentless: ‘between 2006 and 2010 . . . the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes’.3 Not feeling under pressure would be abnormal. The development of ICT has not only brought enormous benefits and opportunities but also greatly outpaced our understanding of its conceptual nature and implications, while raising problems whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidly expanding, evolving and becoming increasingly serious. A simple analogy may help to make sense of the current situation. Our technological tree has been growing its far-reaching branches much more widely, rapidly and chaotically than its conceptual, ethical and cultural roots. The lack of balance is obvious and a matter of daily experience in the life of millions of citizens dealing with information-related ethical issues. The risk is that, like a tree with weak roots, further and healthier growth at the top might be impaired by a fragile foundation at the bottom. As a consequence, today, any advanced information society faces the pressing task of equipping itself with a viable philosophy and ethics of information. Applying the previous analogy, while technology keeps growing bottom-up, it is high time we start digging deeper, topdown, in order to expand and reinforce our conceptual understanding of our information age, of its nature, its less visible implications and its impact on human and environmental welfare, and thus give ourselves a chance to anticipate difficulties, identify opportunities and resolve problems, conflicts and dilemmas. It is from such a broad perspective that I would like to invite the reader to approach this volume. The chapters constituting it perfectly complement each other. Written by leading experts in the area, they tackle some of the key issues in information and computer ethics (ICE). Since the authors need no introduction, and the contents of the chapters are outlined in the preface, in the rest of this introductory chapter my contribution will be to discuss some conceptual undercurrents, which flow beneath the surface of the literature on ICE, and may be seen surfacing in different places throughout this book. In discussing them, I shall focus, more generally, on the potential impact of ICT on our lives. And since there would be no merit in predicting the obvious, I will avoid issues such as rising concerns about privacy and identity theft, spamming, viruses, or the importance of semantic tagging, online shopping and virtual communities. Nor will I try to steal ideas from those who know better than I do the future development of the actual technologies (see for example O’Reilly 2005, Microsoft-Research 2005, Nature 2006). I will, instead, stick to what philosophers do better, conceptual engineering, and seek to capture the silent Weltanschauung that might be dawning on us. 

 

1.2   ICT as re-ontologizing technologies 

 

In order to grasp the ICT scenarios that we might witness and experience in the near future, and hence the sort of ethical problems we might be expected to deal with, it is useful to introduce two key concepts at the outset, those of ‘infosphere’ and of ‘re-ontologization’. Infosphere is a neologism I coined some years ago (Floridi 1999a) on the basis of ‘biosphere’, a term referring to that limited region on our planet that supports life. It denotes the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities (thus including informational agents as well), their properties, interactions, processes and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from, cyberspace (which is only one of its subregions, as it were), since it also includes offline and analogue spaces of information. We shall see that it is also an environment (and hence a concept) that is rapidly evolving. Re-ontologizing is another neologism that I have recently introduced in order to refer to a very radical form of re-engineering, one that not only designs, constructs or structures a system (e.g. a company, a machine or some artefact) anew, but one that also fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature, that is, its ontology or essence. In this sense, for example, nanotechnologies and biotechnologies are not merely re-engineering but actually re-ontologizing our world. Using the two previous concepts, it becomes possible to formulate succinctly the following thesis: 

 

ICTs are re-ontologizing the very nature of (and hence what we mean by) the infosphere, and here lies the source of some of the most profound transformations and challenging problems that our information societies will experience in the close future, as far as technology is concerned. The most obvious way in which ICTs are re-ontologizing the infosphere concerns the transition from analogue to digital data and then the ever-increasing growth of our informational space. Both phenomena are very familiar and require no explanation, but a brief comment may not go amiss. Although the production of analogue data is still increasing, the infosphere is becoming more digital by the day. A simple example may help to drive the point home: the new Large Hadron Collider built at the CERN (http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/) to explore the physics of particles produces about 1.5 GB data per second, or about 10 petabytes of data annually, a quantity of data a thousand times larger than the Library of Congress’s print collection and at least twice as large as Google’s whole data storage, reported to be approximately 5 petabytes in 2004 (Mellor 2004).

 

This radical re-ontologization of the infosphere is largely due to the fundamental convergence between digital resources and digital tools. The ontology of the information technologies available (e.g. software, databases, communication channels and protocols, etc.) is now the same as (and hence fully compatible with) the ontology of their objects. This was one of Turing’s most consequential intuitions: in the re-ontologized infosphere, there is no longer any substantial difference between the processor and the processed, so the digital deals effortlessly and seamlessly with the digital. This potentially eliminates one of the most long-standing bottlenecks in the infosphere and, as a result, there is a gradual erasure of ontological friction. Ontological friction refers to the forces that oppose the flow of information within (a region of) the infosphere, and hence (as a coefficient) to the amount of work and effort required to generate, obtain, process and transmit information in a given environment, e.g. by establishing and maintaining channels of communication and by overcoming obstacles in the flow of information such as distance, noise, lack of resources (especially time and memory), amount and complexity of the data to be processed, and so forth. Given a certain amount of information available in (a region of) the infosphere, the lower the ontological friction within it, the higher the accessibility of that amount of information becomes. Thus, if one quantifies ontological friction from 0 to 1, a fully successful firewall would produce a 1.0 degree of friction, i.e. a complete standstill in the flow of information through its ‘barrier’. On the other hand, we describe our society as informationally porous the more it tends towards a 0 degree of informational friction. Because of their ‘data superconductivity’, ICTs are well known for being among the most influential factors that affect the ontological friction in the infosphere. We are all acquainted daily with aspects of a frictionless infosphere, such as spamming and micrometering (every fraction of a penny counts). Other significant consequences include (a) a substantial erosion of the right to ignore: in an increasingly porous society, it becomes progressively less credible to claim ignorance when confronted by easily predictable events (e.g. as George W. Bush did with respect to Hurricane Katrina’s disastrous effects on New Orleans’s flood barriers) and hardly ignorable facts (e.g. as Tessa Jowell, a British Labour MP, did with respect to her husband’s finances). And therefore (b) an exponential increase in common knowledge: this is a technical term from epistemic logic, which basically refers to the case in which everybody not only knows that p but also knows that everybody knows that everybody knows, . . . , that p. In other words, (a) and (b) will also be the case because meta-information about how much information is, was or should have been available will become overabundant. From (a) and (b) it follows that, in the future, (c) we shall witness a steady increase in agents’ responsibilities. As I shall argue towards the end of this chapter, ICTs are making humanity increasingly responsible, morally speaking, for the way the world is, will and should be (Floridi and Sanders 2001, Floridi 2006b).

 

 

1.4 The global infosphere or how information is becoming our ecosystem 

 

During the last decade or so, we have become accustomed to conceptualizing our life online as a mixture between an evolutionary adaptation of human agents to a digital environment, and a form of post-modern, neocolonization of the latter by the former. This is probably a mistake. ICTs are as much re-ontologizing our world as they are creating new realities. The threshold between here (analogue, carbon-based, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred, but this is as much to the advantage of the latter as it is to the former. The digital is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it. This recent phenomenon is variously known as ‘Ubiquitous Computing’, ‘Ambient Intelligence’, ‘The Internet of Things’ or ‘Web-augmented Things’. It is, or will soon be, the next stage in the development of the information age. The increasing re-ontologization of artefacts and of whole (social) environments suggests that soon it will be difficult to understand what life was like in predigital times and, in the near future, the very distinction between online and offline will become blurred and then disappear. To someone who was born in 2000 the world will always have been wireless, for example. To her, the peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by conventional modems while handshaking will be as alien as the sounds made by a telegraph’s Morse signals. To put it dramatically, the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other ontological space. Let me explain. In the (fast-approaching) future, more and more objects will be ITentities able to learn, advise and communicate with each other. A good example (but it is only an example) is provided by RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags, which can store and remotely retrieve data from an object and give it a unique identity, like a barcode. Tags can measure 0.4 mm2 and are thinner than paper. Incorporate this tiny microchip in everything, including humans and animals, and you have created ITentities. This is not science fiction. According to a report by market research company InStat, the worldwide production of RFID will increase more than 25-fold between 2005 and 2010 and reach 33 billion. Imagine networking these 33 billion ITentities together with all the hundreds of millions of PCs, DVDs, iPods and ICT devices available and you see that the infosphere is no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’ and it is here to stay. Your Nike and iPod already talk to each other, with predictable (but amazingly unforeseen) problems in terms of privacy (Saponas et al. 2007). Nowadays, we are still used to considering the space of information as something we log-in to and log-out from. Our view of the world (our metaphysics) is still modern or Newtonian: it is made of ‘dead’ cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive and incapable of communicating, learning or memorizing. But, as I shall argue in the next section, what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time. The day when we routinely google the location of physical objects (‘where are the car keys?’) is very close.4 As a consequence of such re-ontologization of our ordinary environment, we shall be living in an infosphere that will become increasingly synchronized (time), delocalized (space) and correlated (interactions). Although this might be read, optimistically, as the friendly face of globalization, we should not harbour illusions about how widespread and inclusive the evolution of information societies will be. The digital divide will become a chasm, generating new forms of discrimination between those who can be denizens of the infosphere and those who cannot, between insiders and outsiders, between information rich and information poor. It will redesign the map of worldwide society, generating or widening generational, geographic, socio-economic and cultural divides. But the gap will not be reducible to the distance between industrialized and developing countries, since it will cut across societies (Floridi 2002a). We are preparing the ground for tomorrow’s informational slums. 

 

1.3   The metaphysics of the infosphere 

 

The previous transformations will invite us to understand the world as something ‘a-live’ (artificially live). Such animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces. The second step will be a reconceptualization of our ontology in informational terms. It will become normal to consider the world as part of the infosphere, not so much in the dystopian sense expressed by a Matrix-like scenario, where the ‘real reality’ is still as hard as the metal of the machines that inhabit it, but in the evolutionary, hybrid sense represented by an environment such as New Port City, the fictional, post-cybernetic metropolis of Ghost in the Shell. The infosphere will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely ‘material’ world behind; rather, it will be the world itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood informationally, as part of the infosphere. At the end of this shift, the infosphere will have moved from being a way to refer to the space of information to being synonymous with Being. Thus, our way of conceptualizing and making sense of reality will keep shifting from a materialist perspective, in which physical objects and processes still play a key role, to an informational one, in which

 

·      objects and processes are dephysicalized, typified and perfectly clonable; 

·      the right of usage is at least as important as the right to ownership; and 

·      the criterion for existence is no longer being immutable (Greek metaphysics) or being potentially subject to perception (modern metaphysics) but being interactable. 

If all this seems a bit too ‘philosophical’, let me provide an illustrative example. Despite some important exceptions (e.g. vases and metal tools in ancient civilizations or books after Gutenberg), it was the industrial revolution that really marked the passage from a nominalist world of unique objects to a Platonist world of types of objects, all perfectly reproducible as identical to each other, therefore epistemically indiscernible, and hence pragmatically dispensable because replaceable without any loss. Today, we find it obvious that two automobiles may be virtually identical and that we are invited to buy a model rather than a specific ‘incarnation’ of it. Indeed, we are fast moving towards a commodification of objects that considers repair as synonymous with replacement, even when it comes to entire buildings. This has led, by way of compensation, to a prioritization of branding – a process compared by Klein (2000) to the creation of ‘cultural accessories and personal philosophies’ – and of re-appropriation: the person who puts a sticker on the window of her car, which is otherwise perfectly identical to thousands of others, is fighting an anti-Platonic battle. The information revolution has further exacerbated this process. Once our window-shopping becomes Windows-shopping and no longer means walking down the street but browsing through the Web, the problem caused by the dephysicalization and typification of individuals as unique and irreplaceable entities starts eroding our sense of personal identity as well. We become mass-produced, anonymous entities among other anonymous entities, exposed to billions of other similar inforgs online. So we construct, self-brand and re-appropriate ourselves in the infosphere by blogs and FaceBook entries, homepages, YouTube videos, flickr albums, fashionable clothes and choices of places we visit, types of holidays we take and cars we drive and so forth. We use and expose information about ourselves to become less informationally indiscernible. We wish to maintain a high level of informational privacy almost as if that were the only way of saving a precious capital which can then be publicly invested by us in order to construct ourselves as individuals discernible and easily re-identifiable by others. Now, processes such as the one I have just sketched are part of a far deeper metaphysical drift caused by the information revolution.

 

1.4   The information turn as the fourth revolution 

 

Oversimplifying more than a bit, one may say that science has two fundamental ways of changing our understanding. One may be called extrovert, or about the world, and the other introvert, or about ourselves. Three scientific revolutions have had great impact in both ways. They changed not only our understanding of the external world, but, in doing so, they also modified our conception of who we are. After Nicolaus Copernicus, the heliocentric cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the Universe. Charles Darwin showed that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through natural selection, thus displacing humanity from the centre of the biological kingdom. Thirdly, following Sigmund Freud, we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious and subject to the defence mechanism of repression, thus displacing it from the centre of pure rationality, a position that had been assumed as uncontroversial at least since Descartes. The reader who, like Popper, would be reluctant to follow Freud in considering psychoanalysis a scientific enterprise, might yet be willing to concede that contemporary neuroscience is a likely candidate for such a revolutionary role. Either way, the result is that we are not immobile, at the centre of the Universe (Copernican revolution), we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom (Darwinian revolution), and we are very far from being Cartesian minds entirely transparent to ourselves (Freudian or Neuroscientific revolution). Freud (1917) was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of a single process of reassessment of human nature (see Weinert 2009). The hermeneutic manoeuvre was, admittedly, rather self-serving. But it did strike a reasonable note. In a similar way, when we now perceive that something very significant and profound has happened to human life after the informational turn, I would argue that our intuition is once again perceptive, because we are experiencing what may be described as a fourth revolution, in the process of dislocation and reassessment of humanity’s fundamental nature and role in the universe. After Turing, computer science has not only provided unprecedented epistemic and engineering powers over natural and artificial realities; it has also cast new light on who we are and how we are related to the world. Today, we are slowly accepting the idea that we are not standalone and unique entities, but rather informationally embodied organisms (inforgs), mutually connected and embedded in an informational environment, the infosphere, which we share with both natural and artificial agents similar to us in many respects. 

 

1.5   The evolution of inforgs 

 

We have seen that we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between onlife and online. A further transformation worth highlighting concerns precisely the emergence of artificial and hybrid (multi)agents, i.e., partly artificial and partly human (consider, for example, a family as a single agent, equipped with digital cameras, laptops, palm pilots, iPods, mobiles, wireless network, digital TVs, DVDs, CD players, etc.). These new agents already share the same ontology with their environment and can operate within it with much more freedom and control. We (shall) delegate or outsource to artificial agents and companions (Floridi 2008a) memories, decisions, routine tasks and other activities in ways that will be increasingly integrated with us and with our understanding of what it means to be an agent. This is rather well known, but one aspect of this transformation may be in need of some clarification in this context. Our understanding of ourselves as agents will also be deeply affected. I am not referring here to the sci-fi vision of a ‘cyborged’ humanity. Walking around with something like a Bluetooth wireless headset implanted in your ear does not seem the best way forward, not least because it contradicts the social message it is also meant to be sending: being on call 24/7 is a form of slavery, and anyone so busy and important should have a personal assistant instead. The truth is rather that being a sort of cyborg is not what people will embrace, but what they will try to avoid, unless it is inevitable. Nor am I referring to a GM humanity, in charge of its informational DNA and hence of its future embodiments. This is something that we shall probably see in the future, but it is still too far away, both technically (safely doable) and ethically (morally acceptable), to be discussed at this stage. As I anticipated in the previous section, I have in mind a quieter, less sensational and yet crucial and profound change in our conception of what it means to be an agent. We have begun to see ourselves as connected informational organisms (inforgs), not through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically, through the re-ontologization of our environment and of ourselves. By re-ontologizing the infosphere, ICTs have brought to light the intrinsically informational nature of human agents. This is not equivalent to saying that people have digital alter egos, some Messrs Hydes represented by their @s, blogs and https. This trivial point only encourages us to mistake ICTs for merely enhancing technologies. The informational nature of agents should not be confused with a ‘data shadow’ either, a term introduced by Westin (1968) to describe a digital profile generated from data concerning a user’s habits online. The change is more radical. To understand it, consider the distinction between enhancing and augmenting appliances. The switches and dials of the former are interfaces meant to plug the appliance into the user’s body ergonomically. Drills and guns are perfect examples. It is the cyborg idea. The data and control panels of augmenting appliances are instead interfaces between different possible worlds: on the one hand, there is the human user’s Umwelt5, and on the other hand, there are the dynamic, watery, soapy, hot and dark world of the dishwasher; the equally watery, soapy, hot and dark but also spinning world of the washing machine; or the still, aseptic, soapless, cold and potentially luminous world of the refrigerator. These robots can be successful because they have their environments ‘wrapped’ and tailored around their capacities, not vice versa. Imagine someone trying to build a droid like C3PO capable of washing their dishes in the sink exactly in the same way as a human agent would. Now, despite some superficial appearances, ICTs are not enhancing nor augmenting in the sense just explained. They are re-ontologizing devices because they engineer environments that the user is then enabled to enter through (possibly friendly) gateways. It is a form of initiation. Looking at the history of the mouse, for example, one discovers that our technology has not only adapted to, but also educated, us as users. Douglas Engelbart once told me that he had even experimented with a mouse to be placed under the desk, to be operated with one’s leg, in order to leave the user’s hands free. HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is a symmetric relation. To return to our distinction, whilst a dishwasher interface is a panel through which the machine enters into the user’s world, a digital interface is a gate through which a user can be (tele)present in the infosphere (Floridi 2005c). This simple but fundamental difference underlies the many spatial metaphors of ‘cyberspace’, ‘virtual reality’, ‘being online’, ‘surfing the web’, ‘gateway’ and so forth. It follows that we are witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration of humanity from its Umwelt to the infosphere itself, not least because the latter is absorbing the former. As a result, humans will be inforgs among other (possibly artificial) inforgs and agents operating in an environment that is friendlier to informational creatures. As digital immigrants like us are replaced by digital natives like our children, the latter will come to appreciate that there is no ontological difference between infosphere and Umwelt, only a difference of levels of abstractions (Floridi 2008b). Moreover, when the migration is complete, we shall increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped or poor to the point of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever we are disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water. One day, being an inforg will be so natural that any disruption in our normal flow of information will make us sick. It seems that, in view of this important change in our self-understanding – and of the sort of ICT-mediated interactions that we will increasingly enjoy with other agents, whether biological or artificial, and the infosphere – the best way of tackling the new ethical challenges posed by ICTs may be from an environmental approach, one which does not privilege the natural or untouched, but treats as authentic and genuine all forms of existence and behaviour, even those based on artificial, synthetic or engineered artefacts. This sort of holistic or inclusive environmentalism will require a change in how we perceive ourselves and our roles with respect to reality and how we might negotiate a new alliance between the natural and the artificial. These are the topics of the next two sections. 

 

1.6   The constructionist values of Homo Poieticus 

 

Ethical issues are often discussed in terms of putative resolutions of hypothetical situations, such as ‘what should one do on finding a wallet in the lavatory of a restaurant?’ Research and educational purposes may promote increasingly dramatic scenarios (sometimes reaching unrealistic excesses6), with available courses of action more polarized and less easily identifiable as right or wrong. But the general approach remains substantially the same: the agent is confronted by a moral dilemma and asked to make a principled decision by choosing from a menu of alternatives. Moral action is triggered by a situation. In ‘situated action ethics’ (to borrow an expression from AI), moral dilemma may give the false impression that the ethical discourse concerns primarily a posteriori reactions to problematic situations in which the agent unwillingly and unexpectedly finds herself. The agent is treated as a world user, a game player, a consumer of moral goods and evils, a browser,7 a guest, or a customer who reacts to pre-established and largely unmodifiable conditions, scenarios and choices. Only two temporal modes count: present and future. The past seems irrelevant (‘how did the agent found herself in such predicament?’), unless the approach is further expanded by a casuistry analysis. Yet ethics is not only a question of dealing morally well with a given world. It is also a question of constructing the world, improving its nature and shaping its development in the right way. This proactive approach treats the agent as a world owner, a game designer or referee, a producer of moral goods and evils, a provider, a host or a creator. The agent is supposed to be able to plan and initiate action responsibly, in anticipation of future events, in order to (try to) control their course by making something happen, or by preventing something from happening rather than waiting to respond (react) to a situation, once something has happened, or merely hoping that something positive will happen. There are significant differences between reactive and proactive approaches. There is no space to explore them here, but one may mention, as a simple example, the moral responsibilities of a webmaster as opposed to those of a user of a website. Yet, differences should not be confused with incompatibilities. A mature moral agent is commonly expected to be both a morally good user and a morally good producer of the environment in which she operates, not least because situated action ethics can be confronted by lose–lose situations, in which all options may turn out to be morally unpleasant and every choice may amount to failure. A proactive approach may help to avoid unrecoverable situations. It certainly reduces the agent’s reliance on moral luck. As a result, a large part of an ethical education consists in acquiring the kinds of traits, values and intellectual skills that may enable the agent to switch successfully between a reactive and a proactive approach to the world. All this is acknowledged by many ethical systems, albeit with different vocabulary, emphasis and levels of explicitness. Some more conservative ethical theories prefer to concentrate on the reactive nature of the agent’s behaviour. For example, deontologism embeds a reactive bias insofar as it supports duties on-demand. Another good example is the moral code implicit in the Ten Commandments, which is less proactive than that promoted in the New Testament. On a more secular level, the two versions of Asimov’s laws of robotics provide a simple case of evolution. The 1940 version is more reactive than the 1985 version, whose new zeroth law includes a substantially proactive requirement: ‘A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.’ Ethical theories that adopt a more proactive approach can be defined as constructionist. The best known constructivist approach is virtue ethics. According to it, an individual’s principal ethical aim is to live the good life by becoming a certain kind of person. The constructionist stance is expressed by the desire to mould oneself. The goal is achieved by implementing or improving some characteristics, while eradicating or controlling others. The stance itself is presupposed: it is simply assumed as uncontroversial that one does wish to live the good life by becoming the best person one can. Some degree of personal malleability and capacity to choose critically provide further background preconditions. The key question ‘what kind of person should I be?’ is rightly considered to be a reasonable and justified question. It grounds the question ‘what kind of life should I lead?’ and immediately translates into ‘what kind of character should I construct? What kind of virtues should I develop? What sort of vices should I avoid or eradicate?’ It is implicit that each agent strives to achieve that aim as an individual, with only incidental regard to the enveloping community. Different brands of virtue ethics disagree on the specific virtues and values identifying a person as morally good. The disagreement, say between Aristotle, Paul of Tarsus and Nietzsche, can be dramatic, not least because it is ultimately ontological, in that it regards the kind of entity that a human being should strive to become. In prototyping jargon, theories may disagree on the abstract specification of the model, not just on implementation details. Despite their divergences, all brands of virtue ethics share the same subject-oriented kernel. This is not to say that they are all subjectivist but rather, more precisely, that they are all concerned exclusively with the proper construction of the moral subject, be that a self-imposed task or an educational goal of a second party, like parents, teachers or society in general. To adopt a technical expression, virtue ethics is intrinsically egopoietic. Its sociopoietic nature is merely a by-product, in the following sense. Egopoietic practices that lead to the ethical construction of the subject inevitably interact with, and influence, the ethical construction of the community inhabited by the subject. So, when the subjective microcosm and the socio-political macrocosm differ in scale but essentially not in nature or complexity – as one may assume in the idealized case of the Greek polis – egopoiesis can scale up to the role of general ethics and even political philosophy. Plato’s Republic is an excellent example. Plato finds it unproblematic to move seamlessly between the construction of the ideal self and the construction of the ideal city-state. But so does the Mafia, whose code of conduct and ‘virtuous ethics’ for the individual is based on the view that ‘the family’ is its members. Egopoiesis and sociopoiesis are interderivable only in sufficiently simple and closed societies, in which significant communal behaviour is ultimately derivable from that of its constituent individuals. In complex societies, sociopoiesis is no longer reducible to egopoiesis alone. This is the fundamental limit of virtue ethics. In autonomous, interactive and adaptive societies, virtue ethics positions acquire an individualistic value, previously inconceivable, and may result in moral escapism. The individual still cares about her own ethical construction and, at most, the construction of the community with which she is more closely involved, like the family, but the rest of the world falls beyond the horizon of her moral concern. Phrasing the point in terms of situated action ethics, new problematic hypothetical situations arise from emergent phenomena. Examples include issues of disarmament, the ozone level, pollution, famine and the digital divide. The difficulty becomes apparent in all its pressing urgency as the individual agent tries to reason using ‘local’ ethical principles to tackle a problem with ‘global’, ethical features and consequences. Because virtue ethics remains limited by its subject-oriented approach, it cannot provide, by itself, a satisfactory ethics for a globalized world in general and for the information society in particular. If misapplied, it fosters ethical individualism, as the agent is more likely to mind only her own self-construction. If it is uncritically adopted, it can be intolerant, since agents and theorists may forget the culturally over-determined nature of their foundationalist anthropologies, which often have religious roots. If it fosters tolerance, it may still spread relativism because any self-construction becomes acceptable, as long as it takes place in the enclave of one’s own private sphere, culture and cyber-niche, without bothering any neighbour. The inadequacy of virtue ethics is, of course, historical. The theory has aged well, but it can provide, at most, a local sociopoietic approach as a mere extension of its genuine vocation: egopoiesis. It intrinsically lacks the resources to go beyond the construction of the individual and the indirect role this may play in shaping her local community. Theoretically, however, the limits of virtue ethics should not lead to an overall rejection of any constructionist approach. On the contrary, the fundamentally constructionist lesson taught by virtue ethics (one of the features that makes virtue ethics appealing in the first place) is more important than ever before. In a global information society, the individual agent (often a multi-agent system) is like a demiurge (Plato’s god responsible for the design of the physical universe based on preexisting matter). Her powers can be variously exercised (in terms of control, creation or modelling) over herself (e.g. genetically, physiologically, neurologically and narratively), over human society (e.g. culturally, politically, socially and economically) and over natural or artificial environments (e.g. physically and informationally). Such an increasingly powerful agent has corresponding moral duties and responsibilities to oversee not only the development of her own character and habits but also the well-being of each of her spheres of influence. Clearly, a constructionist ethics should be retained and reinforced, but the kind of ethical constructionism needed today goes well beyond the education of the self and the political engineering of the simple and closed cyberpolis. It must also address the urgent and pressing question concerning the kind of global realities that are being built. This means decoupling constructionism from subjectivism and re-orienting it to the object, applying it also to society and the environment, the receivers of the agent’s actions. The term ‘ecopoiesis’ refers to the morally informed construction of the environment based on this object- or ecologically oriented perspective. To move from individual virtues to global values, an ecopoietic approach is needed that recognizes the agent’s responsibilities towards the environment (including present and future inhabitants) as its enlightened creator steward or supervisor, not just as its virtuous user and consumer. Constructionism is the drive to build physical and conceptual objects and, more subtly, to exercise control and stewardship on them. It manifests itself in the care of existing, and the creation of new, realities, these being material or conceptual. Thus, constructionism is ultimately best understood as a struggle against entropy. Existentially, it represents the strongest reaction against the destiny of death. In terms of a philosophical anthropology, constructionism is embodied by what I have termed elsewhere homo poieticus (Floridi 1999a). Homo poieticus is to be distinguished from homo faber, user and ‘exploitator’ of natural resources, from homo oeconomicus, producer, distributor and consumer of wealth, and from homo ludens (Huizinga 1998), who embodies a leisurely playfulness devoid of the ethical care and responsibility characterizing the constructionist attitude. Homo poieticus concentrates not merely on the final result, but on the dynamic, on-going process through which the result is achieved. One of the major challenges facing homo poieticus is the possibility of negotiating a new alliance between physis and techne. 

 

1.8 E-nvironmentalism or the marriage of physis and techne 

 

Whether physis (nature, the world) and techne (applied knowledge, technology) may be reconcilable is not a question that has a predetermined answer, waiting to be divined. It is more like a practical problem, whose feasible solution needs to be devised. With an analogy, we are not asking whether two chemicals could mix but rather whether a marriage may be successful. There is plenty of room for a positive answer, provided the right sort of commitment is made. It seems beyond doubt that a successful marriage between physis and techne is vital and hence worth our effort. Information societies increasingly depend upon technology to thrive, but they equally need a healthy, natural environment to flourish. Try to imagine the world not tomorrow or next year, but next century, or next millennium: a divorce between physis and techne would be utterly disastrous both for our welfare and for the well-being of our habitat. This is something that technophiles and green fundamentalists must come to understand. Failing to negotiate a fruitful, symbiotic relationship between technology and nature is not an option. Fortunately, a successful marriage between physis and techne is achievable. True, much more progress needs to be made. The physics of information can be highly energy-consuming and hence potentially unfriendly towards the environment. In 2000, data centres consumed 0.6% of the world’s electricity. In 2005, the figure had risen to 1%. They are now responsible for more carbon-dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands and, if current trends hold, their emissions will have grown four-fold by 2020, reaching 670 million tonnes. By then, it is estimated that ICT’s carbon footprint will be higher than aviation’s.8 However, ICTs will also help ‘to eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020 equivalent to 15 percent of global emissions today and five times more than our estimate of the emissions from these technologies in 2020’.9 This positive (and improvable) balance leads me to a final comment. The greenest machine is a machine with 100% energy efficiency. Unfortunately, this is equivalent to a perpetual motion machine and the latter is simply a pipe dream. However, we also know that such an impossible limit can be increasingly approximated: energy waste can be dramatically reduced and energy efficiency can be highly increased (the two processes are not necessarily the same; compare recycling vs. doing more with less). Often, both kinds of processes may be fostered only by relying on significant improvements in the management of information (e.g. to build and run hardware and processes better). So here is how we may reinterpret Socrates’ ethical intellectualism: we do evil because we do not know better, in the sense that the better the information management is, the less moral evil is caused. ICTs can help us in our fight against the destruction, impoverishment, vandalism and waste of both natural and human (including historical and cultural) resources. So they can be a precious ally in what I have called, in Floridi (2008c), synthetic environmentalism or e-nvironmentalism. We should resist any Greek epistemological tendency to treat techne as the Cinderella of knowledge; any absolutist inclination to accept no moral balancing between some unavoidable evil and far more goodness; or any modern, reactionary, metaphysical temptation to drive a wedge between naturalism and constructionism by privileging the former as the only authentic dimension of human life. The challenge is to reconcile our roles as agents within nature and as stewards of nature. The good news is that it is a challenge we can meet. The odd thing is that we are slowly coming to realize that we have such a hybrid nature. 

 

1.9 Conclusion 

 

Previous revolutions (especially the agricultural and the industrial ones) created macroscopic transformation in our social structures and physical environments, often without much foresight. The informational revolution is no less dramatic and we shall be in serious trouble if we do not take seriously the fact that we are constructing the new environment that will be inhabited by future generations. As a social structure, the information society has been made possible by a cluster of information and communication technologies (ICTs). And as a full expression of techne, the information society has already posed fundamental ethical problems, whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidly evolving. The task is to formulate an ethical framework that can treat the infosphere as a new environment worth the moral attention and care of the human inforgs inhabiting it. Such an ethical framework must be able to address and solve the unprecedented challenges arising in the new environment. It must be an e-nvironmental ethics for the infosphere. In the following chapters, the reader will be able to appreciate both the complexity of the task and how far information and computer ethicists have managed to tackle it successfully. Unfortunately, I suspect it will take some time and a whole new kind of education and sensitivity to realize that the infosphere is a common space, which needs to be preserved to the advantage of all. My hope is that this book will contribute to such a change in perspective.