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Floridi and Spinoza on global information ethics
Soraj Hongladarom
Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts,
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
E-mail: hsoraj@chula.ac.th
Abstract. Floridi’s ontocentric ethics is compared with Spinoza’s ethical and metaphysical system as found in
the Ethics. Floridi’s is a naturalistic ethics where he argues that an action is right or wrong primarily because the
action does decrease the ‘entropy’ of the infosphere or not. An action that decreases the amount entropy of the
infosphere is a good one, and one that increases it is a bad one. For Floridi, ‘entropy’ refers to destruction or
loss of diversity of the infosphere, or the total reality consisting of infor mational objects. The similarity with
Spinoza is that both philosophers refer to basic reality as a foundation for normative judgments. Hence they are
both ethical naturalists. An interpretation of both Floridi and Spinoza is offered that might begin to solve the
basic problems for any naturalistic ethics. The problems are how a value theory that is based on metaphysics
could maintain normative force and how normative force could be justified when there appear to be widely
differing metaphysical systems according to the many cultural traditions. I argue that in Spinoza’s and pre-
sumably in Floridi’s system, there is no separation between the normative and the natural from the beginning.
Normative terms derive their validity from their role in referring to action that leads to a richer and fuller
reality. As for the second problem, Spinoza’s God is such that He cannot be fully described by mere finite
intellect. What this translates to the contem porary situation of information ethics is that there are always bound
to be many different ways of conceptualizing one and the same reality, and it is the people’s needs, goals and
desires that often dictate how the conceptualizing is done. However, when different groups of people interact,
these systems become calibrated with one another. This is possible because they already belong to the same
reality.
Key words: Floridi, global information ethics, God, metaphysics, naturalism, nature, relativism, Spinoza,
universalism
Introduction
In ‘‘Global Information Ethics: The Importance of
Being Environmentally Earnest,’’
1
Luciano argues
that the current global situation – where globalization
has pervaded almost all aspects of life and where
there is a diversity of moral viewpoints, each making
competing claims against one another – calls for an
‘‘information ethics.’’ Basically, information ethics
solves the problem of diverse moral viewpoints by
positing a n underlying reality which is presupposed
and shared by all parties whose viewpoints are
diverse. The only necessary condition, according to
Floridi, is that these parties inhabit the ‘same world’
in the sense that they are able to share at least some
information together. This underlying reality, then, is
a back ground upon which successful cali bration of
diverse ethical viewpoints could be achieved.
In this paper I would like to reflect further on
Floridi’s argument. First of all, I would like to point
out certa in affinities between Floridi’s ethics and that
of Spinoza, something that Floridi himself acknowl-
edges.
2
Basically both systems could be categorized
as ethical naturalism. I shall point out these affinities
in the course of the paper. Furthermore, I shall
also point out some differences between the two
philosophers.
This paper, moreover, aims at shedding light on
the nature of ontocentrism as a theory of global
information ethics. I propose that Spinoza’s concep-
tion of ethical naturalism and his reliance on the
conception of God as being one and the same with
1
Luciano (2007, pp. 1–11).
2
Luciano, Global information ethics: the importance of
being environmentally earnest, n. 10.
Ethics and Information Technology (2008) 10:175–187 Springer 2008
DOI 10.1007/s10676-008-9164-8
Nature could provide further details to Floridi’s
sketchy conception. Basically put, Spinoza’s God
comes to rescue when God is the one reality that
pervades everyt hing and is beyond human concep-
tualization. This is shown when Spinoza speaks of
God, for example, having an infinite number of
attributes. Hence God cannot be fully described. It is
this situation that gives rise to the cultural differences
that the typical relativists argue to be the sole source
for normative judgments. Spinoza’s God, however,
overcomes relativism through His inclusion of
everything. In the system of thoroughgoing natural-
ism, differences in ethical judgments are to be
expected, as humans do not have the perfect vision of
God. So long as the judgments lead to joy or hap-
piness, they are all acceptable.
Floridi’s ontocentric ethics
Let us look at a key passage in Floridi’s paper:
… [B]iocentric 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 guiding the agent’s ethical decisions and
constraining 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.
Now substitute ‘‘existence’’ for ‘‘life’’ and it should
become clear what IE [information ethics] amounts
to. IE is an ecological ethics that replaces biocent-
rism with ontocentrism. It suggests that there is
something even more elemental than life, namely
being – that is, the existence and flourishi ng of all
entities and their global environm ent – and some-
thing mo re 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
corruption of entities understood as informational
objects (not as semantic information, take note),
that is, any form of impoverishment of being,
including nothingness, to phrase it more meta-
physically.
3
The idea is that ethical norms are governed by the
care not to cause harm or danger, not only toward
living be ings and their being able to live well, but also
to all entities. Since all beings are part of the global
environment and since they are, according to Floridi,
constituted through information – that is to say, their
being whatever entities they are consist in certain
amount of information – one is enjoined not to cause
harm or danger to these beings as that would reduce
the amount of information there is in the world.
‘‘Let all things flourish’’ could be a motto of Floridi’s
ethics.
It is quite clear to see how Floridi’s conception
here could form a basis for an environmental ethics,
for example. Everything has its own value and
deserves a certain level of respect. Not only humans
and animals, but also plants, rocks, trees, forests,
streams, and so on. They do have values simply
because they are ‘there.’ One might balk at such an
argument, claiming that it commits the naturalistic
fallacy. After all, one could not validly deduce a
statement of value from that of fact, or so the stan-
dard argument agains t naturalistic fallacy goes.
However, Floridi does not give a detailed argument
to this effect. In another pa per he states that there are
four principles of ‘‘universal information ethics,’’
namely (1) ‘‘information entropy ought not to be
caused in the infosphere;’’ (2) ‘‘information entropy
ought to be prevented in the infosphere;’’
(3) ‘‘information entropy ought to be removed from
the infosphere;’’ and (4) ‘‘information ought to be
promoted by extending, improving, enriching and
opening the infosphere, that is by ensuring informa-
tion quantity, quality, variety, security, ownership,
privacy, pluralism and access.’’
4
‘‘Infosphere’’ here
means the whole environment in which information
plays a key, constitutive role; that is, the sum total of
all information there is in a given environment. So
Floridi further says:
What is the best strategy to construct an informa-
tion society that is ethically sound? This is the
question I wish to discuss in this paper. Let me
anticipate my conclusion. The task is to formulate
an information ethics that can treat the world of
data, information, knowledge and communication
as a new environment, the infosphere. This infor-
mation ethics must be able to address and solve the
ethical challenges arising in the new environment
on the basis of the fundamental principles of
respect for information, its conservation and
3
Luciano, Global information ethics: the importance of
being environmentally earnest, pp. 11–12.
4
Luciano (2001, pp. 1–7). Floridi has also written a
piece on a proposal new model of telepresence in terms of
information and levels of abstractions from reality and its
consequences for privacy concerns; see Luciano (December
2005, pp. 656–667).
S
ORAJ HONGLADAROM
176
valorisation. It must be an ecological ethics for the
information environment.
5
Taking life as having intrinsic value, biocentric ethics
argues that wantonly taking lives is unethical because
it endangers life itself, and in the same manner,
Floridi argues that wantonly reducing the amount of
information in the world is unethical because it
endangers information itself as something possessing
intrinsic value. The key premise is ‘‘One should not
reduce or eliminate something that possesses intrinsic
value.’’ Here Floridi’s harks back to the ancient tra-
dition that accords nature and the environment with
value and as such they deserve reverence and they
come to have an inviolable status. The opposite eth-
ical stance is utilitarianism, according to which
everything is expendable, so long as it serves to fur-
ther some more ultimate goals. Taking a cue from
ecology and environmental ethics, Floridi and
Sanders in their paper argue that an action that
harms the infosphere, that is, causes the infosphere to
become diminished or impoverished, is a negative
one, in the same way that an action that causes
impoverishment of the biosphere is a negative one. As
quantity and quality of information ought to be
promoted by, among others, ‘‘enriching’’ the info-
sphere, any act that impoverishes it thus is one that
cannot be ethically performed, all things being equal:
‘‘[A] process or action may be morally good or bad
irrespective of its consequences, motives, universality,
or virtuou s nature, but because it affects the info-
sphere positively or negatively.’’
6
In another passage, Floridi spells out still more
clearly the nature of his brand of ethics:
Capturing what is a pre-theoretical but very com-
mon intuition, non-standard ethics hold the broad
view that any form of life has some essential pro-
prieties or moral interests that deserve and demand
to be respected, even if not absolutely but mini-
mally, i.e. in a possibly overridable sense. They
argue that the nature and well-being of the patient
constitute its moral standing and that the latter
makes important claims on the interacting agent
and in principle ought to contribute to the guid-
ance of the agent’s ethic al decisions and the con-
straint of the agent’s moral behaviour.
7
These passages make clear that the key element in
Floridi’s ethic s is his ontocentrism, the idea that not
only human beings or animals deserve moral respect,
but so do inanimate objects, so long as their nature
and their well-being are concerned. The agent’s moral
behavior should be guided by the fact that his action
creates a negative or positive impact on the envi-
ronment. As we have already seen, it is not only life
forms that deserve respect and carry moral interests,
but also things in the environment.
Surprisingly, Floridi’s argument as to why it is the
case that the amount of information there is, or what
he calls the infosphere, should be accorded intrinsic
ethical value is Kantian in spirit. According to the
familiar picture, Kant said that human beings should
be treated as ends and never as means. What this
means is that human beings should be accorded the
ultimate ethical value; any act that harms human
beings and causes them to lose dignity qua human
beings are unethical because, as autonomous and
rational beings, humans deserve respect and moral
worth. Floridi would like to expand this picture so that
what de serves respect and possesses moral worth
includes not only animals, but everything there is,
namely the infosphere itself, according to his ontology:
At this point, two arguments support the attribu-
tion of an intrinsic moral value to information
objects. The first, positive argument consists in
showing that an information-object-oriented
approach can successfully deal with the problem
left unsolved by Kant. The second, negative argu-
ment consists in dismantling not only the Kantian
position but also any other position that adopts
some other LoA [level of abstraction] higher than
the Kantian-anthropocentric one but still lower
than LoA
i
[level of abstraction provided by an
information analysis], like a biocentric LoA.
8
The ‘‘problem left unsolved by Kant’’ occurs when the
level of abstraction of the locus of moral worth is
raised from the rational being in Kant’s case to
something more general, where Kant’s ethical system
appears to be unsatisfactory. According to Kant, only
rational beings have moral worth, but when the
rational beings are abstracted and the result be comes
something more general, such as a ‘‘brainless entity’’
and some other thing of that kind, Kant’s position is
unsatisfactory for Floridi because it cannot account
for the moral worth of such entities. When, for
example, a human being is considered at increasingly
levels of abstraction, Kant’s theory would be unsat-
isfactory because it is limited only to a being’s status as
rational, autonomous being in order to qualify for
moral worth, but in Floridi’s system an entity still
retains its moral worth no matter at how high a level of
abstraction it is considered. Nonetheless, in agreeing
5
Floridi, Information ethics: an environmental approach
to the digital divide, pp. 1–2; see http://www.blesok.com.mk/
tekst.asp?lang=eng&tekst=374.
6
Luciano and Sanders (2002, pp. 1–9).
7
Luciano and Sanders (2002, 1–9, pp. 7–8).
8
Luciano (2002, 287–304, p. 291).
F
LORIDI AND SPINOZA ON GLOBAL INFORMATION ETHICS 177
with Kant that moral worth is an intrinsic property of
some thing (humans included), Floridi’s position is
much closer to that of Kant than he perhaps admits.
The two argume nts that Floridi alludes to are,
firstly, one purporting to show that his own position
fares better than the Kantian one, and this has
already been shown in the paragraph above. The
second argument aims at showing that one cannot
stop at one level of abstraction and not higher ones;
once one moves up a level of abstraction, then one
cannot stop, on pain of contradiction, until one
reaches the highest level, which in this case is that of
an informational entity. Hence, for Floridi, all things
deserve respect and possess moral worth.
So the basis for normativi ty for Floridi is a thor-
oughgoing naturalism where the integrity of the info-
sphere itself is the foundation for all action to be either
positive or negative in terms of ethical value. If an
action causes the infosphere to become impoverished,
perhaps by enforcing restriction on the principle of
universal access to information, for example, then such
action is wrong, but if it enriches the infosphere, then
the action is right (See Rule 4 on page 4). One might
suspect that if Floridi’s account is correct, then the
world today must be a much better place than it was
only a few decades ago, because much more informa-
tion has been produced at a phenomenal rate, thus
greatly increasing the size of the infosphere.
9
Or if the
amount of matter happens to increa se dramatically –
perhaps some benevolent god would want to change
the world by dumping a large amount of new matter
onto the universe, then the world must be a better place
ethically, because the infosphere is increa sing.
Such conclusions, however, are not obviously true:
indeed, some would argue that in many ways, they
are exactly wrong,suggesting (via modus tollens) that
there is something amiss with Floridi’s ontocentrism
in the first place. I will argue, however, that Floridi
would find a lot of support from Spinoza’s philos o-
phy, as Spinoza offers a number of insights and
approaches that would fill up many of the lacunae
that seem to be there in Floridi’s own position.
As a first example of this, let us consider Floridi’s
answer to the problem of ethical relativism and univer-
salism, or in other words the problem of global infor-
mation ethics is that since all cultures share the same
infosphere, they all share a basic system of universal value
already, and this shared reality is the foundation from
which agreements or disagreements regarding first-order
normative judgments arises. For Floridi, this is the only
way agreements or disagreements are possible, because
even disagreements depend crucially on the ability to
understand each other. The naturalism in Floridi would
imply that any disagreements cannot go too far, for in the
endtheyhavetofallbackonthebasicreality.
However, one might argue against Floridi that
disagreeing parties belonging to different ethical tra-
ditions might all agree that they inhabit the same
world and that the world is described in the physical
vocabulary that is agreed by both, but the point of
the disagreement is not how the physical world is
described, but whether an action is right or wrong,
something that putatively lies beyond the scope of
physical description. Hence, Floridi’s conception
appears to be too weak to be able to do the job of
reconciling and adjudicating between these two dif-
ferent parties. For example, the EU and the US have
been debating for some time about privacy and
intellectual property, where the EU favors the deon-
tological position and the US a more consequentialist
one.
10
Now both the EU and the US can readily agree
that they inhabit the same world, etc., but the point
of their disagreement is precisely, according to Burk,
on how such issues as privacy and intellectual prop-
erty rights are to be understood – whether privacy
and intellectual property rights are to be understood
as a means toward greater benefit or as something
that is intr insically and inherently part of the per-
sonality of the author or the individual. Now we can
have all the physical description we want, but the
disagreements appear to remain. It would seem that
the extent of the infosphere is not affected whether
one takes up the EU or the US position. But
according to Floridi that would mean that there is no
way to adjudicate between the two positions at all.
This important point will be discussed more fully
toward the end of the Section of the Problem of the
Lion. In the next section I will show how an under-
standing of Spinoza’s ethics could solve this problem.
Spinoza’s naturalistic ethics
Floridi himself acknowledges that his ethics is similar
to that of Spinoza.
11
However, to my knowledge
9
See ‘‘How Much Information,’’ available at http://
www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-
2003/.
10
Burk (2007, pp. 94–107).
11
Luciano, Global information ethics: the importance of
being environmentally earnest, n. 10. The notion of ontic
trust, discussed in Floridi, Global information ethics,
especially pp. 14–17, is also particularly relevant here. For
Floridi, an ontic trust comes into being when the current
generation of individuals are entrusted with the task of
taking care of the environment and all future genetions by
the past and present individuals. Since the ontic trust
refers to all things, this compares with Spinoza’s view of
Substance.
S
ORAJ HONGLADAROM
178
there has not been a study on how to understand this
similarity in detail. The basic point shared by both
Floridi and Spinoza appears to be their naturalism.
For Spinoza, the predicates ‘good’ or ‘bad’ describe
what obtains in reality. In his system where the only
one substance is all there is, and is identical to God,
what is good is actually what is in accordance with
the one substance, and what is bad is contrary to it.
More precisely, the ‘‘good’’ in Spinoza is what brings
one closer to the model of perfection of the thing
whose goodness is being described. Thus we call a pen
to be a good one when it does its function well, such
as enables one to write smoothly. For Spinoza there is
a close tie be tween perfection and goodness. And in
fact both are technical terms in his system. For
Spinoza, ‘‘... each one called perfect what he saw agreed
with the universal idea he had formed of this kind of
thing, and imperfect, what he saw agreed less with the
model he had conceived’’ (Spinoza 1985, p. 544).
12
And since Spinoza says in Part IV of his Ethics that
‘good’ refers to ‘‘what we know certainly is a means
by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the
model of human nature,’’ and ‘bad’ (or ‘evil’ in
Curley’s translation) as ‘‘what we certainly knows
prevents us from becoming like that model’’ (Spinoza
1985, p. 545), the line between perfection and good-
ness on the one han d and imperfection and badness
on the other is clear. The model of human nature
specifies what is good and bad, and what is pe rfect is
also good because it accords with the model, and vice
versa for the imperfect and the ba d.
However, before we proceed any further, it might
be advantageous to make clear at this point what
ethical naturalism actually is and whether, in fact,
both Floridi’s and Spinoza’s ethical system could
actually be regarded as naturalist. A definition of
ethical naturalism is that the moral predicates, such
as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do describe what obtains in fact ,
i.e., in reality itself. That is to say, being good or bad
would on this account be on a par with being tall or
short. Goodness and badness describe natural prop-
erties in the world. If we look closely at the ancient
conceptions of ethics, such as Aristotle’s and much of
the ethical theories of the East (such as the Confu-
cianist and the Buddhist), we find that these con-
ceptions are more or less naturalist. For Aristotle, the
goal of human endeavor is to achieve what he calls in
Greek eudaimonia. This is a rather difficult concept to
translate directly into English, but most standard
translations have it as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing.’
The idea is that one is ‘blessed with good life’ when
one fulfills one’s natural condition such that one
flows, so to speak, with the order of things and when
one, in other words, knows precisely what is to be
done in varying circumstances and fulfills one’s
potential as a human being. Hence the naturalistic
tendency in Aristotelian ethics can be seen in that
one’s moral character would be expressed through
one’s empirical or natural condition, or at least this
condition functions as a necessary condition for one’s
being able to achieve moral value. For instance, one
who knows well how to act and to behave in certain
circumstances and to function properly would be one
who is good. Here one finds the familiar sense of the
Greek sense of virtue (ar
et
e) as excellence, where the
virtues jointly define what it is for a thing to be good
or excellent qua the thing it is. In behaving in
accordance with what it is to be a human being, one
does good acts. The naturalistic tendency occurs
when there is a conceptual link between the ‘what it is
to be such and such a thing’ and ‘goodness’ or
‘badness’ as the case may be.
For Aristotle, then, ethics, as a naturalistic ethics,
is further based on a given metaphysics. Indeed, I
would venture to say that all pre-mod ern conceptions
of ethics are based on some kind of metaphysics. For
Aristotle and the Greeks, as well as the Eastern
philosophico-religious traditions, ethics and meta-
physics are intimately linked, and it is only the
moderns such as Hume, Mill, Moore and others who
severed the link in their attempts to rid value theory
of metaphysics altogether.
The standard criticism leveled by modern philos-
ophers against the naturalist tendency found in
Aristotle is that it is illogical to argue that statements
of value follow from those of facts. Hence Hume’s
famous dictum: One cannot imply ‘ought’ from ‘is.’
G. E. Moore then made the well known ‘naturalistic
fallacy,’ a kind of fallacy that occurs when one argues
in such a way. Viewed through the lens of formal
logic, this appears to be true. From statements
describing what is or is not the case in the world, one
would seem indeed to be committing the fallacy if one
were to argue from them that one should or should
not do something. After all, describing what reality is
like and telling someone to do or not to do certain
tasks are very different speech acts, and one woul d be
hard pressed to convince others of the necessary,
logical link between the two. Hence Kant has his
famous dictum that it is the ‘good will’ that trumps
over anything else in ethics when the question is
whether an act is moral or not. An act may incur a lot
of pleasure and good feelings in a very large number
of people, but that is inconsequen tial to the question
whether that act is moral or not. In the same way,
Kant might say, pace Aristotle, that one can be
blessed by the gods (eudaim
on) in every way possible,
yet one might not be acting morally. Being moral is a
12
Spinoza ([1677] 1985, 408–617, p. 544).
F
LORIDI AND SPINOZA ON GLOBAL INFORMATION ETHICS 179
matter of the will, which is inside, not of any outside
circumstances.
Thus, one brand of naturalism in ethics argues that
one could derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ in one way or
another, and it is not fallacious to do so. Many phi-
losophers, when confronted with Spinoza’s ethics,
thought that Spinoza might not be doing ethics at all,
but simply proposing a metaphysical system. William
Frankena, for example, questioned whether Spinoza
was doing a kind of ‘prescriptive ethics’ at all.
13
On
the other hand, Paul Eisenberg, in agreement with
Edwin Curley, thought that Spinoza was not an
ethical naturalist, for many key passages in the Ethics
could be interpreted in such a way that terms such as
‘good’ or ‘model of human being’ do carry normative
meanings.
14
However, there is not enough space in
this paper to go into any details of interpretation of
Spinoza’s text. Here it suffices to note that the key
passages in the Ethics do point toward an apparent
naturalistic interpretation. However, I disagree with
Eisenberg and Curley in that I think Spinoza is
indeed a naturalist, if that is taken to mean that it is
permissible to deduce statements of value from those
of facts, but obviously not in the sense that Frankena
takes him to be naturalist.
Now let us look at the key passage in the Ethics.
Spinoza discusses ethics in Part IV of his monumental
work:
As far as good and evil is concerned, they also
indicate nothing positive in things, considered in
themselves, nor are they anything other than
modes of thinking, or notions we form because we
compare things to one another. For one and the
same thing can, at the same time, be good, and
bad, and also indifferent. For example, Music is
good for one who is Melancholy, bad for one who
is mourning, and neither good nor bad to one who
is deaf.
But thou gh this is so, still we must retain these
words. For because we desire to form an idea of
man, as a model of human nature which we may
look to, it will be useful to us to retain these same
words with the meaning I have indicated. In what
follows, therefore, I sha ll underst and by good what
we know certainly is a means by which we may
approach nearer and nearer to the model of human
nature that we set before ourselves. By evil, what
we certainly know prevents us from becoming like
that model. Next, we shall say that men are more
perfect or imperfect, insofar as they approach more
or less near to this model.
15
What does it mean for Spinoza to claim that both
good nor evil ‘‘indicate nothing positive in things’’? I
think what he has in mind is that predicates like
‘good,’ ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ do not describe properties as
they exist in themselves in nature, and here is perhaps
one sense where Spinoza may find sympathy from
non-naturalists and non-cognitivists. Things are bad
and good in so far as they related to human beings,
and in themselves, in their natural states, things are
neither good nor bad. An eruption of a volcano may
be very bad if it destroys a city nearby, but in itself it
is just a natural phenomenon . Someone who embez-
zles money indeed act wrongly, but the mere act of
putting some pieces of paper into one’s pocket is
neither good nor bad. Spinoza also expands the scope
of application of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ to include
those that are not action, such as music. Here music is
good for someone and is bad for an other, and is
neither good nor bad for yet another. The goodness
and badness of music, then, is entirely due to its effect
on us.
However, the apparent naturalistic sense of
Spinoza is evident in his music example also. Music is
good for someone because, presumably, it brings
about something desirable in his bodily constitut ion,
as Spinoza says that it is good for one who is mel-
ancholy. So what is good is what creates some change
toward what is de sirable. And are we to say that this
would mean that Spinoza is in fact arguing that
goodness is a natural property? In any case, it is clear
that music cannot be good or bad in itself, since for
the deaf it is neither. So the parallel in Spinoza and
Aristotle is that what is good is so because it con-
tributes toward the realization of some desired goal.
In both Spinoza and Aristotle, there is the exemplar,
the ideal of what it is to be a full human being, and an
action is good just in case it contributes to realization
of the ideal.
16
Floridi does argue along the same line, as we have
seen. An action would be considered a good one in
Floridi’s theory just in case it contributes in some way
toward the preservation and flourishing of the info-
sphere itself. Here goodness does possess at least
some feature of a natural property, since it refers to a
kind of property instantiation of which woul d bring
13
Quoted in Eisenberg (1977, 107–133, p. 109).
14
Eisenberg, Is Spinoza an ethical naturalist?, pp. 113–115.
15
Spinoza, Ethics, p. 545.
16
In ‘‘Spinoza’s Normative Ethics,’’ Michael LeBuffe
states that the model of human nature in Spinoza here is a
model of a free man. This ideal, according to LeBuffe, is
useful for diagnosing the condition of an ordinary human
being and serves as a standard by which his or her action is
judged. See LeBuffe (2007, 371–392, p. 389).
S
ORAJ HONGLADAROM
180
about something that is desired or is valuable. It
describes a property whose instantiation contributes
to the realization of the ideal. This seems to be at
work when Floridi says that ‘‘the ‘receiver’ of the
action is placed at the core of the ethical discourse.’’
17
Hence it is not only the agent’s deliberation or sub-
jective activity that is necessary for ethical values, but
the status of the ‘receiver’ or one who will be effected
by the decision and the action of the agent also.
When Floridi expands this conception of biocentric
ethics to the ontocentric one, the idea, then, is that
the whole of ontology needs to be considered. A
‘good’ action, then, is one that contributes to the
richness and fullness of the ontosphere or the info-
sphere, while a ‘bad’ action does the opposite. Sin ce
for the infosphere to become richer or poorer is a
natural phenomenon, goodness and badness for
Floridi are then natural properties in this sense. In
other words, realization of the ideal is a natural
phenomenon; here one talks about how the abstract
ideal becomes reality. Thus goodness, in virtue of its
being a property of any action that is efficacious
toward realizing or concretizing the ideal, is in fact a
natural property.
Now the objection against ethical naturalism of
this kind is quite familiar. Kant says at the beginning
of his Foundation for the Metaphysics of Morals that
of all things there are in the world, only good will
alone is capable of being good in itself.
18
This idea
points to a very basic intuition that we have in doing
ethics. Since Floridi argues that the infosphere should
be enhanced and not made impoverished, it seems
that the infosphere is a good, in the sense that the
healthy environment is a good in environmental
ethics. However, suppose God, or Nature in Spinoza,
or the infosphere in Floridi, is not good in itself, or is
only good because of some other thing, then what
would happen? Suppose the infosphere happens to be
an oppressi ve one, out of which one wants to escape?
Suppose it is a Big Brother that destroys our privacy,
keeping nothing to oursel ves? There would then be no
private information, as all information flows and
collects into the infosphere. What we are now getting
here is an attempt toward a justification of Floridi’s
four rules mentioned earlier in the essay. As Spinoza
justifies his normative judgments through his own
system of metaphysics, so, it seems that Floridi would
be in need of a justification in a parallel way. As
Substance is inherently good in Spinoza, so too is the
infosphere.
The questions listed in the above paragraph are
only possible because it is presupposed, as is indeed
the case with Kant, that we human beings and our
natural environment are separate. Once human
beings regard themselves as totally distinct from the
external reality, then the question them arises what
kind of ultimate good it is supposed to be there in the
external reality. Kant’s good will is only what is
happening inside someone’s mind. Someone might
say: ‘‘I have a good will and this will is good in virtue
of nothing whatsoever, and all things in the world are
only good because of it.’’ The picture is reminiscent
of Descartes , when he wanted to base all knowledge
on the subjectivity of the individual. What Descartes
wanted to do for epistemology, Kant was doing the
same for ethics.
What is noticeable in both Descartes and Kant is
that although they avowedly claim that metaphysics
(in the sense of a basic, bedrock reality that is ‘out
there’) has no role to play in either epistemology or
ethics, their conceptions do in fact depend on a kind
of metaphysics anyway. Descartes takes it for granted
that his thinking self could exist alone without any
connection on the environment, something that the
ancients would find very strange. Kant’s view on
good will would also seem a bit strange to them. They
might ask what the good will is good for. If it is to be
good at all, it has to lead to some desirable thing, or
more precisely it needs to enable things to become
better integrated with reality.
Here, then, is the basic difference between natu-
ralists like Spinoza and Floridi and non-naturalists
like Kant. For Kant, the good will is the cornerstone
of his whole system. In the end it is an individual
decision, his or her own conscience, that decides
whether an action is right or wrong. Naturalists like
Spinoza and Floridi would think, on the contrary,
that individual decision needs to be in tune with
larger reality in order for it to make sense at all.
Let us come back again to Spinoza’s definition of
‘good’ in Part IV of the Ethics: ‘‘I shall understand by
good what we know certainly is a means by which we
may approach nearer and nearer to the model of
human nature that we set before ourselves.’’ Eisenberg
has argued that Spinoza should not considered as an
ethical naturalist, if by ‘naturalist’ one means some-
one who view ethical predicates to be only ones
describing natural properties.
19
For Eisenberg, the
very use of the phrase ‘‘model of human nature’’ in
itself implies an ethical value and meaning which
shows that he is not a naturalist in the blatant sense.
According to Eisenberg, an ethical naturalist would
be one who has no idea how to commend human
17
Luciano, Global information ethics: the importance of
being environmentally earnest, pp. 11–12.
18
Kant (2002, p. 9).
19
Eisenberg, Is Spinoza an ethical naturalist?
F
LORIDI AND SPINOZA ON GLOBAL INFORMATION ETHICS 181
behavior. However, since Spinoza’s use of the phrase
‘‘model of human nature’’ shows, according to
Eisenberg, that Spinoza already has in mind the sta-
tus of the model (Latin, exemplar) such that there is
something more in the model than mere description
of human nature. That is to say, there is an element in
Spinoza’s use of this phrase that makes it possible to
commend or to blame behaviors, and that would
make Spinoza not a blatant naturalist.
It should be noted that Eisenberg’s and my use of
‘ethical naturalism’ are not exactly the same. For
Eisenberg one is a naturalist when the language one
uses does not lend itself in any way toward moral
judgment. If Spinoza were an ethic al naturalist in
Eisenberg’s sense, then he would presumably be using
terms such as ‘model’ and ‘perfection’ and others in
such a way as strictly to describe reality and no way
of providing any moral sanctions. But perhaps that
might be too strong a conception. One, I submit,
might indeed hold that moral terms like ‘good’ and
‘bad’ do describe natural properties, or putative
properties that eventually lead to consequences that
can be empirically discerned, while still maintaining
the sense of moral sanction or judgme nt that seems to
be required by Eisenberg. In short, one may hold that
moral terms describe natural properties, but still very
much retain the sense of moral terms which is used
for commending or criticizing behaviors. When one
says to another that what the latter has done is good,
one is indeed, according to the naturalist, describing a
natural property, but there is another, no less
important, sense. One is also commending the latter’s
action.
20
The speech acts are different. When one says
‘‘What you have done is good,’’ what she is saying is
not only that goodness does apply to what the latter
has done, but she is also praising what the other has
done, with an aim perhaps to show her appreciation
or to encourage the latter to continue doing the same
type of action. There being different speech acts here
seems to show that at least one can hold that moral
terms do describe natural properties while at the same
time retain their sanctioning and criticizing sense.
Spinoza would agree that to say of a certain action by
someone that it is good and to commend the person
who has done it is, for all intent and purposes, one
and the same.
So how does this discussion help us understand the
question raised earlier about the infosphere destroy-
ing individual privacy and is thus nothing good in
itself? The question is only a dramatization aimed at
showing a possible pitfall of a naturalism that bases
the source of goodness in ontology, a standard
argument against naturalism. When asked about
what is good about God being everything there is,
and what would be left of the individual person when
God includes everything and that everything is
identical with God – Spinoza would, I believe, reply
that one should think in terms of individual beings
being totally separated from Substance. So he says:
‘‘It is impossible that a man should not be a part of
Nature, and that he should be able to undergo no
changes except those which can be understood
through his own nature alone, and of which he is the
adequate cause,’’ says Spinoza in Proposition 4, Part
IV of the Ethics.
21
There is no separation between
man and nature; everything is part of one and same
reality. And if one were to ask for an argument in
support of this, Spinoza or the naturalist could turn
the table and ask the anti- naturalists for an argument
in support of their thesis for the radical separation of
man and nature that is presupposed in both
Descartes and Kant. And in fact Spinoza’s whole
system in the Ethics was designed to support this
particular Proposition and indeed other Propositions
in the system.
We are now also in a better position to discuss the
other problem mentioned earlier. Would merel y
increasing the size of the infosphere thereby a good
act according to Floridi? There does not seem to be
this discussion in his articles, but I would suggest that
adopting Spinoza’s insights might help him here. For
one thing Floridi could accept that sheer size of the
infosphere is a good thing in itself . But that seems
counterintuitive. For Spinoza, on the other hand,
‘good’ is defined in reference to the exemplar or the
model of human nature, and not to Substance as a
whole. It is likely that the exemplar of human nature
does not include merely increasing the size of the
universe for fun; thus Floridi could modify in system
accordingly.
The rather lengthy discussion of history of
Western philosophy above serves to show certain
parallelisms with Floridi’s ontocentric ethics. First of
all, Floridi’s is an adaptation of the ancient view (and
here Spinoza’s ethics is in accord with the ancients,
broadly speaking and especially in contrast with
Kant) on ethics. Nature is given the supreme impor-
tance. In fact we can call it ‘Nature’ or ‘Subst ance, or
‘God, and in Spinoza of course these are only labels
we put on the ultimate reality. According to Floridi it
is the infosphere. For Spinoza a good act is one that
is conducive to the flourishing of Substance. Viewed
in this way, such acts as deceiving and telling a lie
would not on the whole be so conducive because it
tends to lead to consequences that are very often
destructive. This is a straightforward teleological
20
See also LeBuffe, Spinoza’s normative ethics, p. 389.
21
Spinoza, Ethics, p. 548.
S
ORAJ HONGLADAROM
182
ethics. Modern critics have argued that teleological
ethics is untenable because it tends to presuppose
certain brands of metaphysical system which cannot
be accepted by the modern sensibility. However,
Floridi is, in my view, to be commended for bringing
back teleology and making it more palatable for our
contemporary age through his systems of information
ontology, ontic trust and the infophere.
Thus, applying Spinoza in this way to Floridi’s
conception of an infor mation ontology, we can see
that the answer is that the infosphere does not suck
up all information, destroying privacy. All informa-
tion is already there in the infosphere from the
beginning. Protection of privacy is needed in a cir-
cumstance where there is a possible encroachment of
personal information in such a way that threatens the
rights and dignity of the individual. And here we are
descending from the level of abstraction toward the
greater specificity of everyday reality. Even if we
believe that ontology is constituted by informat ion,
since reality can be described in more and more
details and at deeper levels of abstraction, thus
necessitating the need for more information,
22
the
need to protect privacy woul d not be affected because
there being the infosphere as basic reality does not
mean that all information should be in the hands of
the political authority. The question about infosphere
and privacy is designed to illustrate a challenge of the
anti-naturalist who emphasizes the putative possibil-
ity of the individual against the ontology, but the two
need not be in conflict with each other. And in case
there is conflict, that would show that there is
something bad or evil going on (‘‘Insofar as a thing
agrees with our nature, it is necessarily good’’
Proposition 31, Part IV
23
), something that is contrary
to the way things are.
In sum, then, Floridi and Spinoza share a natu-
ralism in ethic s in that they both allow a deduction of
statements of values from those of facts. Such
deduction, however, does not imply that statements
of values be reduced to mere description of reality
with no prescriptive or normative force. On the
contrary, the normative is alread y included in the
ontology and it does not make much sense to
separate the normative from the descriptive, as God
or Nature in Spinoza is a whole system in which the
normative arises from the relation between human
beings and the system itself in so far as it promotes
the ideal exemplar of human be ings.
Here, then, is one of the main differences between
Floridi and Spinoza. In Floridi, acts that promote the
well-being of human beings are not given much
attention. Acts are good more in so far as they pro-
mote the well-being of the infosphere and not because
they promote only human flourishings. In this way,
Spinoza still takes a rather anthropocentric stand-
point, even though according to his system there is
only one Substance so presumably the interest of
human beings should be on the same level of those of
the rest of reality. This may of course appear to be in
conflict with what we have seen so far, which is that
human beings are inseparably a part of nature. In
order to understand this point let us recall Spinoza’s
key definition of the term ‘good’ in Part IV of the
Ethics: ‘‘I shall understand by good what we know
certainly is a means by which we may approach
nearer and nearer to the model of human nature that
we set before ourselves.’’ The key phrase here is ‘the
model of human nature.’ As an action approaches the
model, then it is a good one. It is quite apparent that
what is good is judged against this anthropocentric
standard. Ther e is the model of the perfect human
being which for Spinoza obtains objectively and is
entirely accessible through cognition. The model
provides a benchmark against which any action could
be evaluated. But still it is a model of human nature.
Hence Spinoza is following a long line of tradition in
seeing that ethics is centered upon human beings.
Floridi, on the other hand, sees ethics in a much
broader term. As his conception of the infosphere
shows, the benchmark of what is to be evaluated as a
good does not include only a model of human nature,
but all nature taken as one single unity. An upshot of
this difference is that Floridi’s system appears to be
more straightforward in providing a justification for
the moral worth of all other parts of nature besides
humans.
24
Spinoza and Floridi on the problem of the lion
It would be interesting to learn what Spinoza
would say regarding the problem posed by ethical
22
Floridi provides a very useful exposition of his infor-
mation ontology in Floridi, Against digital ontology, forth-
coming from Synthese and available online as a preprint at
http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/preprints/ado.pdf
(retrieved April 2, 2008). He says: ‘‘the ultimate nature of
reality is informational, that is, it makes sense to adopt
LoAs that commit our theories to a view of reality as mind
independent and constituted by structural objects that are
neither substantial nor material’’ (Floridi, Against digital
ontology, p. 35).
23
Spinoza, Ethics, p. 560.
24
This, however, does not mean that Spinoza’s system is
inferior, for an exemplar of a good human being could well
include the awareness that the whole environment needs to
be protected. So it is possible that both Floridi’s and
Spinoza’s would be equally effective.
F
LORIDI AND SPINOZA ON GLOBAL INFORMATION ETHICS 183
relativism, or what Floridi terms the problem of the
lion. And more specifically, how would Spinoza’s and
Floridi’s systems answer the challenge posed by Dan
Burk mentioned earlier about the differences in
information ethics between the European Union and
the United States? Since Spinoza models his entire
system on a deductive, or geometrical system, one
would think that he could not allow there being more
than system apart from his own. As geometry and
mathematics are universally true, so is his system.
The divers ity of cultural tradi tions and ethical
judgments indeed post a serious challenge to any
ethical system that is based on metaphysics. For
different groups of people do have different ways to
conceptualize the underlying reality, to such an extent
that it might make sense to talk about their being
different realities. The Greeks might have one ethic al
system, but the Chinese do have another system, so
do other cultures in the world. As Floridi points out
at the beginning of his paper, globalization is per-
vading all corners of the globe now, so how should all
these differing ethical systems be reconciled?
For liberals like Kant and Mill, the solut ion is
straightforward. Get rid of all the metaphysics and
you will be left with the empirical realities and the
individual person. As ethics cannot be based on
empirical realities, because these too vary according
to so many factors such as geography, history and so
on, the only recourse left is the individual person
herself. So no matter whether one is a Greek, a
Chinese, an Indian, or any other, one is still an
individual, with one’s own subjectivity that she could
set apart from whatever falls under the objective part
of her thinking. In the same way, Mill seems to
equate personal pleasure with the good or the utility
which should always be maximized in the largest
number of people. As everyone is an individual, he or
she would want to enjoy pleasure, hence this becomes
a universal in M ill’s theory. What Mill shares with
Kant, then, is the belief that the most basic under-
pinning of ethical theory is the individual.
For the liberals, it would be irrelevant to see the
differences among the individuals. Of course, every-
one is different, so an imagined liberal would say, but
that is not exactly the point. The point is that they are
all individual beings, who are capable of their own
particular versions of life histories, subjectivities,
thoughts, desires, visions, and so on. When these are
calibrated together, one gets the familiar picture of
the liberal social and value theory such as John
Rawls’. However, the basic difference between these
liberal theories and that of Spinoza, and I would say,
Floridi, is that instead of basing the underpinning of
value on the individual – the whole ontic substance,
the whole of reality itself, undergirds that value. So
the Spinozistic theory would, presumably, counter
the charge of varying metaphysics by saying that all
these varying metaphysical systems, whether they be
Greek, Chinese, Indian, Mayan or whatever, do share
in the more basic, larger reality within which they all
live from the beginning.
This may look like a simple picture, and the lib-
erals would be quick to point out that the empirical
reality of the earth on which all humans live is one
thing, but the conceptions different cultures have of
this one reality do differ very widely. And it is the
latter that figures in form ing some normative judg-
ments that do vary across cultures. The Spinozistic
philosopher could well accept that, but she might
want to counter that these differing conceptions,
instead of necessarily being in conflict with one
another, indeed do complement each other and all
contribute toward the more colorful and mu ch richer
picture of the one reality than the liberals do. After
all, Kant and Mill both try to reduce ethics to just a
handful of rules. Either follow the categorical
imperative, or follow the utilitarian maxim (which
are, when looked at this way, quite the same). These
rules should applicable everywhere, or so the liberals
think, but then the rich tapestry of different cultur es
that all together contribute to the colorful picture of
the whole world would be lost.
I am not, of course, appealing to colors in my
defense of the Spino zistic theory. What Spinoza would
say in this situation is to point out that in his large
system, all different ethical systems would have their
roles to play, and as they are functioning ethical sys-
tems in real cultures, they just cannot be a bunch of ad
hoc arbitrary rules. On the contrary they need to be
rational, and since Spinoza’s is nothing but a rational
system, then these differing systems would be part of
the bigger system: this means, in other words, that they
are part of God or Nature, from the beginning.
When this is translated to a more mundane lan-
guage, what emerges is a way of thinking about
information ethics that, on the one hand, pays respect
to the different cultural traditions of the world, and,
on the other, recognizes that these different systems
do belong to a larger system, a large r reality in which
they are parts, such that when needs be, these smaller
systems could be adapted and merged together in
order for them to serve our goals better. Since they
are already parts of the basic reality, they can be
changed, expanded and contracted without creating
an impact to reality at all.
In his 2007 paper, Floridi mentions the Problem of
the Lion. This is a problem that occurs when we
human beings cannot communicate with the lion, an
echo of Wittgenstein’s dictum in the Tractatus
that if lions could speak, we would not be able to
SORAJ HONGLADAROM
184
understand them. This is what happens when two
groups of symbol makers and interpreters just cannot
begin to understand each other in any way. However,
as Donald Davidson has famously argued,
25
this is
actually an incoherent picture. If the lion co uld
speak, there has to be a way to connect its symbols
with its meaning, and since that connection has to be
systematic (otherwise we would not be saying that the
lion has a language at all), then we will be able to
translate its language into our own. So there cannot
be the Problem of the Lion. What results is that all
cultures, understood as all groups of symbol makers
and interpreters and language users, can be calibrated
since they belong to the same basic reality, or
Spinoza’s God or Nature.
Hence, the EU and the US do have their different
ways of explaining and justifying their ethical systems,
which stem from their different traditions and histo-
ries. The EU typically regards author’s rights in a
more deontological way; the rights do belong to the
author in virtue of her being author or creator of the
work. The US, on the other hand, views the matter in
a more utilitarian or consequentialist way. It is ben-
eficial to have a legal system that respects author’ s
rights because that encourages more creative works. It
would be pointless to crash these two viewpoints
together to try to find out who is right. Instead,
Spinoza would recommend that these viewpoints do
have their own peculiar histories, and they have
worked well in their respective domains. When glob-
alization is in full force and there arises a question as
to the model of intellectual property rights that the
whole world should adopt, the solution is to be found
in a typically Spinozistic way, rational deliberation:
‘‘Insofar as men are torn by affects which are passions,
they can be contrary to one another,’’ and ‘‘Only
insofar as men live according to the guidance of rea-
son, must they always agree in nature’’ (Proposition 34,
35, Part IV
26
). So whenever there is conflict among
people, that conflict must be due to some lack of the
guidance of reason. Hence, there has to be a way to
rationally adjudicate between the two positions
through mutual dialogues, trust and understanding.
27
The difference between the US and the EU might
not be strong enough to illustrate the point I am
making, as they actually belong to the Western tra-
dition together. For a more dramatic illustration, let
us look at the different conceptions of privacy in the
Western and Chi nese traditions.
28
Charles Ess and
Lu
¨
Yao-huai have documented the difference in the
Western and the Chinese conceptions, noting that
justification of privacy started with one that regards
privacy as an intrinsic good, and then the just ification
became more consequentialist one, as many argu-
ments were put forward claiming that privacy was
needed for the full functioning of democracy and
electronic commerce.
29
Ess, quoting Lu
¨
, also noted
that the term ‘privacy’ is written in two different ways
in Chinese. The older, more traditional way, written
in one particular set of Chinese characters, means
more precisely ‘‘shameful secret’’ and it is only
recently that a neologism emerged that means more
like the modern concept of privacy in the data-
sphere.
30
Ess also noted that the justification for the
Chinese conc eption of modern privacy (not exactly
the same as shameful secret) is also business-
oriented.
31
While it is quite clear that, traditionally,
the Chinese, influenced by Confucianism, did not
have the exact counterpart of the Western concept of
privacy, but due to globalization and the opening up
of Chinese culture to the world, there is a change in
Chinese language and cultur e such that the Western
concept has found its way into it. Nonetheless, one is
quite sure that the term ‘Yinsi’ that is Chinese for
‘privacy’ would not have the exact meaning and
exactly the same uses as ‘privacy’ in the West. So
there are differences, and they belong to one and the
same unity. This could well be a Spino zistic picture.
What happened was that the Chinese opened them-
selves up to the world, and found that the Western
concept of ‘privacy’ was useful in its dealings with the
outside world. This caused a new word to be intro-
duced to the traditional Chinese vocabulary. This
does not mean that their old ethical system, one that
perhaps did not put as much value on privacy as did
the modern West, is replaced by that of the West, nor
does this imply that there is only one universal ethical
system that every culture should adopt. What this
means is only that when cultures interact with one
another, some content and presuppositions of the
cultures are bound to change to fit the everyday
efficacy of the functioning together.
So how is this discussion of the cultural concep-
tions of privacy related to Floridi’s ontocent ric
25
Davidson (2001).
26
Spinoza, Ethics, p. 562f.
27
See also Hampshire (2005, pp. 196–199).
28
For an attempt to justify privacy from a Buddhist
perspective, see Hongladarom (2007).
29
Ess (2007, 71–87, p. 81). See also Lu
¨
(2005, pp. 7–15).
30
Ess, Information ethics: Local approaches, global
potentials? or: Divergence, convergence, and ethical plu-
ralism as maintaining distinctive cultural identities and
(quasi?)-universal ethics, p. 81.
31
Ess, Information ethics: Local approaches, global
potentials? or: Divergence, convergence, and ethical plu-
ralism as maintaining distinctive cultural identities and
(quasi?)-universal ethics, p. 82.
F
LORIDI AND SPINOZA ON GLOBAL INFORMATION ETHICS 185
ethics? For one thing, both examples about the US
and EU and about the Chinese conception of privacy
do not seem to show that the Problem of the Lion is
at work here. The US and the EU do understand each
other to a large extent, and those of us who are non
Chinese appear, I believe, to understand what the
Chinese are up to regarding informational privacy
relatively well. We are after all human beings, and the
problem is not as unsurmountable as the hypo thetical
one on communicating with the lion. But if this is the
case, then for Floridi all cultures do share a system of
normative judgment up to a certain level. We might
call it, following Floridi, a level of abstraction. Up to
a certain level, things are the same for the Europeans,
Americans and Chinese. But when one digs deeper
then one finds cultural differences. These differences ,
however, do not imply that Floridi’s ethics is rela-
tivist, because the injunction to enrich the infosphere
would be tenable anywhe re there are human beings
who interact with the infosphere.
Now that we have en tered a deeper level of
abstraction, then there is the problem of how we are
to prioritize differing value systems. For example,
how are we to prioritize the American or the
European model of informational privacy? There is
no clear cut or simple answer at this point.
According to Floridi’s system, so long as the US
and the EU models are absolutely equal in pre-
serving the integrity of the infosphere, then there
would be no means by which one could adjudicate
between the two. However, that does not mean that
there is no way at all to choose between the two. As
a thoroughgoing naturalistic ethics, Floridi’s would
presumably lead us to solve this problem empiri-
cally, and this requires that we have objective indi-
cators of richness of the infosphere which is agreed
to by all, and which could eventually show up which
one among the two should be the preferred one,
since it accords better with the preservation and
richness of the infosphere itself. Nonetheless, in the
case (perhaps a hypothet ical one) in which no win-
ner emerges after a practicable period, people could
then come to the table and discuss this over. This is
possible in Floridi’s system as all human beings do
share the same ontology. One thing is clear, though;
any disagreements that both parties feel that they
need to be resolved often are those practical ones
such as the actual content of rules and regulations
that affect both sides. Agreements as to what justify
those rules and regulations, however, are much
harder to come by. Ther e is of course not enough
space in this present paper to discuss all the impli-
cations of Floridi’s ethics fully, but at least I believe
we have had a glimpse of a picture of what his ethics
is like and how it is comparable to Spinoza’s.
Conclusion
Spinoza says that action that leads to Joy is a good
one and action leading to Suffering a bad one
(Proposition 8, Part IV
32
). He officially defines ‘Joy’
in the Part III of the Ethics as ‘‘a man’s passage from
a lesser to a greater perfection,’’ and ‘Suffering ’ in a
diametrically opposite way.
33
So whatever leads to
more perfection is good and what leads to more
imperfection is bad. This corresponds to Flo ridi’s
idea of the good being what increases the quantity
and richness of the infosphere. Hence, when one is
confronted with two ethical systems from two cul-
tures, one way to test them would be to see how much
Joy or Suffering each incurs. This sounds like utili-
tarianism, but actually it is not, for in utilitarianism
the emphasis would be on the pleasure of a quanti-
fiable number of people and the pleasure itself has to
be quantifiable too. Joy (Latin, laetitia) in Spinoza,
on the other hand, is an ethical concept from the
beginning, and it is also at the same time metaphys-
ical. Presumably the deontological conception of the
Europeans and the consequentialist position of the
Americans do work well in their respective environ-
ments. In that case both do maintain and increase the
integrity and the ‘perfection’ of their own environ-
ments, hence both are good in Spinoza’s conception,
as well as Floridi’s. Joy or happiness is inext ricably
bound up with perfection of nature. The individual
cannot extricate herself from her own specific and
fine-grained details of her social and phy sical envi-
ronment.
In the case of the Chinese conception of privacy,
things are a bit more complicated. The Chinese do
have their own meta physics which holds that the
individual is more understood as a web of relations
rather than an atomic, self-subsisting entity com-
monly accepted in the West. In my explication of
Spinoza and Floridi, am I implying that their ways of
doing ethics and metaphysics should trump over the
other ways, includi ng the Chinese? Am I saying that a
set of ideas originating from an obscure Jewish lens
polisher in Amsterdam somehow superior to those in
Chinese culture? Nothing is further from the truth.
Actually we do not even have to mention Spinoza’s
name because the one Substance can be called in
many ways, and Spinoza himself sometimes calls it
‘God,’ ‘Substance’ or ‘Nature,’ while Floridi calls it
‘the infosphere.’ Thus, the whole system does not
have to bear Spinoza’s name, and can be understood
in many languages. So the system here could be
Indian, or European, or Greek, or any other, as long
32
Spinoza, Ethics, p. 550.
33
Spinoza, Ethics, p. 531.
S
ORAJ HONGLADAROM
186
as it is maintained that, beyond the different
languages and ways of conceptualizing, there is one
Reality to which everything absolutely belongs.
If we keep this in mind, then we should begin to
understand the Chinese problem. (For the Lion
Problem, it is not possible at all, since we cannot talk
with the lion, as we have seen.) Since individ ual
things in the world are all parts of the one Substance,
and since strictly speaking there is only one thing,
namely the Substance, or God – individual things are
only modes of God’s thought. Or, to put it plainly,
individual things are only created and are necessarily
limited, and since all there is only one, the individual
things are. strictly speaking, modifications of the one
Substance itself. This is a very important vision, and
it is a vision that played an important part in many
religious traditions of the East as well. There is not
enough space in this paper to delve into any detail
comparing Spinoza with the Eastern religious tradi-
tions, and the mystical vision of there being only one
thing. But in any case, if what Spinoza is saying
makes sense, what is Chinese or Western are only
modifications of the one Substance. So the system in
which the individuals are regarded as webs of rela-
tions is part of one particular culture and has clear
roles to play in that culture, and the system that
regards the individual more atomically also has its
own place in history: but when we focus ourselves on
the vision of the one Substance, then these differences
fade away. This is definitely not to say that the dif-
ferences are not important; far from it, both are
inalienable parts of the one Substance. And if there is
no need to calibrate the two systems in one umbrella
system (in fact in many cases it has seemed that the
Chinese conception of the individual has more
advantages), then the two could be left as is, each
enriching the one Substance.
Acknowledgments
Research for this paper is partially supported by a
grant from the Thailand Research Fund, Grant no.
BRG4980016. I would like to thank Charles Ess for
his insightful comments on this paper, which led to
many improvements and saved me from numerous
mistakes. I would also like to thank Paul Eisenberg,
whose course on Spinoza that I took in Fall of 1987
at Indiana University led to a lifelong interest in and
deep appreciation of his philosophy. The author also
wishes to thank the anynomous referees for this
paper, whose comments led to many improvement.
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