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This is a revised version of an invited address at the UNESCO Executive Board 161st
Session Thematic debate “The New Information and Communication Technologies for the
Development of Education”, UNESCO, Paris, Thursday, 31 May 2001.
“Ethics in the Infosphere”, The Philosophers’ Magazine 6 (2001), pp. 18-19.
We call our society “the information society” because of the pivotal role played by
information-intensives services. As a social structure, it has been made possible only by
ICT (information and communication technologies). It has already posed fundamental
ethical problems, whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidly evolving.
What is the best strategy to construct an information society that is ethically sound? 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 information ethics must be able to solve the new ethical challenges arising
in the new environment on the basis of the fundamental principles of respect for
information, its conservation and valorisation. It must be the environmental ethics for the
information environment.
The digital divide (DD) is the source of most of the ethical problems emerging from
the evolution of the information society. It is the combination of a vertical gap and a
horizontal gap. The vertical gap separates ours from past generations. In less than a
century, we have moved from a state of submission to nature, through a state of power of
potential total destruction, to the present state, in which we have the means and tools to
engineer entire new realities, tailor them to our needs and invent the future. For the first time
in history, we are responsible for the very existence of whole new environments. Our
technological power is immense. It is also growing relentlessly. It is already so vast to have
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overcome the barrier between the natural and the artificial. Our moral responsibilities
towards the world and future generations are therefore equally enormous.
Unfortunately, technological power and moral responsibilities are not necessarily
followed by ethical intelligence and wisdom. We are still like children, light-heartedly and
dangerously toying with a marvellous universe. We may have almost demiurgic power over
it, but we can rely only on our fallible good wills to guide us in our constructions.
The vertical gap signals the end of modernity. The project of modernity was the full
control and mastery over reality understood as the physical environment. The information
age builds on the modern project, but its essence is no longer just the shaping of the
physical world. Rather, it is the creation and construction of alternative, non-natural
environments that replace or underpin it. The mechanical mind dealt with nature and tried to
control and modify it, the informational mind builds its own world and hence, in dealing with
it, it really deals with its own artefacts.
The DD, of course, is also a new horizontal gap within humanity, between insiders
and outsiders. The infosphere is not a geographical, political, social, or linguistic space. The
borders of the infosphere cut across North and South, East and West, industrialised and
developing countries, political systems and religious traditions, younger and older
generations, even members of the same family. It seems more accurate to say that the DD
occurs between individuals rather than countries or whole societies, between the computer
literate and the computer illiterate (e-analphabetism), between the information rich and the
information poor, whatever their nationality and neighbourhood.
The economic and socio-cultural roots of the DD problem are so dramatic and
indisputable that nobody can underestimate them. Two billion people have no access to
electricity; four billion people earn less than $1,500 a year, two billion people have never
made a telephone call. To call them digitally “disadvantaged” or “underprivileged” is a
pathetic and disrespectful understatement. On a global scale, it is fair to argue that basic
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food, health, education and the acceptance of elementary human rights should be among
our foremost priorities. What needs to be stressed here, however, is that underestimating
the importance of the DD, and hence letting it widen, means exacerbating these problems
as well. In a global context, where systemic synergies and interactions are escalating, no
significant problem comes in isolation. Bridging the DD is probably part of the solution,
leaving it unsolved is certainly part of the problem.
The DD disempowers, discriminates, and generates dependency. It can engender
new forms of colonialism and apartheid that must be prevented, opposed and ultimately
eradicated.
How can we cope with the new ethical challenges? Since the DD is a problem
affecting individuals rather than societies, solutions can be more effective if they are
grassroots-oriented and bottom-up, but unfortunately old solutions to past ethical problems
cannot be merely exported and mechanically re-applied to the infosphere. Technologies are
not only tools, but also vehicles of affordances, values and interpretations of the
surrounding reality. Any significant technology is always ethically charged. Naturally, other
technological innovations (the printing or industrial revolutions, for example) had their own
pressing ethical consequences. Some of them are still with us: think of universal literacy,
freedom of speech, sustainable development, or pollution. However, the ethical impact of
past technologies took place within a context in which nature played the queen and we
were her workers. Ethical problems developed on a much longer time scale, they did not
have the immediately global and pervasive nature we associate with ICT nowadays and
were not embedded in a context where the virtual has started to become more significant
and real than the physical. The problem is that our ethical development has been much
slower than our technological growth. We can do so much more than we can understand.
Upgrading our moral sensibility is a slow process.
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The infosphere is an environment that is essentially intangible and immaterial but
not, for this reason, any less real or vital. The ethical problems it generates are best
understood as environmental problems. They include education as capacity-building
training; preservation, dissemination, quality control, reliability, free flow and security of
information; enlargement of universal access; technical support for the creation of new
digital “spaces”; the sharing and exchanging of contents; public awareness; respect for
diversity, pluralism, ownership and privacy; ethical use of ICT; integration of traditional and
new ICT. To alleviate these and similar problems we need a robust environmental
approach, which can provide a coherent guidance for the equitable development of this
new space for intellectual life. In short, we need an information ethics.
Information Ethics is the new environmental ethics for the information society. It
argues that the digital divide can be bridged. What we need to do is to fight any kind of
destruction, corruption, depletion (marked reduction in quantity, content, quality, value)
or closure of the infosphere, what shall be referred to here as information entropy. The
ethical use of ICT and the sustainable development of an equitable information society need
a safe and public infosphere for all, where communication and collaboration can flourish,
coherently with the application of human rights and the fundamental freedoms in the media.
Sustainable development means that our interest in the sound construction of the infosphere
must be associated with an equally important, ethical concern for the way in which the latter
affects and interacts with the physical environment, the biosphere and human life in general,
both positively and negatively.
Bridging the DD means developing an informational ecosystem management that
can implement four basic norms of a universal information ethics:
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
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4. information ought to be promoted by extending, improving, enriching and opening
the infosphere, that is by ensuring information quantity, quality, variety, security,
ownership, privacy, pluralism and access.
These universal principles represent a development of the ethical discourse in Western
culture, which has gradually abandoned its anthropocentric perspective. They re-evaluate
an ethics of respect for both the physical and the immaterial world. An information ethics
for the information society needs to take into serious consideration the value of what is
immaterial and intangible. This is the best way to foster care and respect for the infosphere.
Reality, both natural and immaterial, is not merely available for domination, control, and
exploitation. Reality should also be an object of respect in its autonomous existence. This is
what we can learn from an environmental approach. But history has its ironic twists, and
precisely those high-technology societies, which have brought about the information
revolution, seem to be the least able to cope with its ethical impact. Why? Because one of
the most fruitful contributions for developing an environmental approach comes from pre-
or non-industrial cultures, which have been able to maintain a non-materialistic and non-
consumerist approach to the world. These cultures are still spiritual enough to perceive in
both physical and immaterial realities something intrinsically worthy of respect, simply as
forms of existence. It is these cultures that can help us to make the infosphere a more
civilised space for all. The environmental ethics of the infosphere can be built by relying on
its outsiders.
In 2003, at the World Summit on the Information Society and at the 21st World
Congress of Philosophy, the task of the international community will be to build global
consensus around a core of ethical values and principles for the information society. There
is a profound and widespread need for analysis and ethical guidance. Fostering the
formulation of universally recognised principles and common ethical standards related to
the use of ICT and based on an environmental information ethics will be a major
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contribution to the construction of a better world. It is not a matter of imposing legislative
measures, strict regulations or empowering some controlling organisation. The goals are to
extend the ethical concern from the biosphere to the infosphere, to sensitise humanity to the
new ethical needs of intangible, intellectual environments, and to indicate how the DD can
be bridged. Our challenge is to collaborate to develop a coherent and robust environmental
information ethics for the future of humanity. Building an equitable information society for all
is a historical opportunity we cannot afford to miss.
This is a revised version of an invited address at the UNESCO Executive
Board 161st Session Thematic debate “The New Information and Communication
Technologies for the Development of Education”, UNESCO, Paris, Thursday, 31
May 2001. A longer version of this article, including internet links, is available at
www.philosophers.co.uk and www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/papers.htm
