1 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 nat-
ural 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 var-
ious 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 revolu-
tion 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

1
A typical life cycle includes the following phases: occurring (discovering, designing,
authoring, etc.), processing and managing (collecting, validating, modifying, organizing,
indexing, classifying, filtering, updating, sorting, storing, networking, distributing,
accessing, retrieving, transmitting, etc.) and using (monitoring, modelling, analysing,
explaining, planning, forecasting, decision-making, instructing, educating, learning, etc.).
4 Luciano Floridi

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 evo-
lution, nowadays the most advanced economies are highly dependent, for
their functioning and growth, upon the pivotal role played by information-
based, intangible assets, information-intensive services (especially business
and property services, communications, finance and insurance, and entertain-
ment) 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 information-
based, 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 mil-
lennia of relatively quieter gestation, has generated new and disruptive chal-
lenges, 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, man-
agement 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 Manage-
ment and Systems estimated that humanity had accumulated approximately
12 exabytes2 of data in the course of its entire history until the commodifi-
cation 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

2
One exabyte corresponds to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 1018 .
5 Ethics after the Information Revolution

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 expand-
ing, evolving and becoming increasingly serious. A simple analogy may help
to make sense of the current situation. Our technological tree has been grow-
ing 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 foun-
dation 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 technol-
ogy keeps growing bottom-up, it is high time we start digging deeper, top-
down, 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 antic-
ipate 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,

3
Source: ‘The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth
Through 2010’, white paper – sponsored by EMC – IDC, www.emc.com/about/destination/
digital universe/
6 Luciano Floridi

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 sub-
regions, 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, nano-
technologies and biotechnologies are not merely re-engineering but actually
re-ontologizing our world.
Using the two previous concepts, it becomes possible to formulate suc-
cinctly 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 infor-
mation 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 con-
cerns 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 info-
sphere 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).
7 Ethics after the Information Revolution

This radical re-ontologization of the infosphere is largely due to the funda-

mental convergence between digital resources and digital tools. The ontology
of the information technologies available (e.g. software, databases, commu-
nication 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 elim-
inates 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 informa-
tion 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 info-
sphere, 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 progres-
sively less credible to claim ignorance when confronted by easily predictable
events (e.g. as George W. Bush did with respect to Hurricane Katrina’s dis-
astrous 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).
8 Luciano Floridi

1.3 The global infosphere or how information is becoming

our ecosystem
During the last decade or so, we have become accustomed to conceptual-
izing our life online as a mixture between an evolutionary adaptation of
human agents to a digital environment, and a form of post-modern, neo-
colonization 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 develop-
ment of the information age.
The increasing re-ontologization of artefacts and of whole (social) environ-
ments 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 some-
thing 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 communi-
cating, learning or memorizing. But, as I shall argue in the next section, what
9 Ethics after the Information Revolution

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 har-
bour illusions about how widespread and inclusive the evolution of informa-
tion 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, gen-
erating or widening generational, geographic, socio-economic and cultural
divides. But the gap will not be reducible to the distance between industrial-
ized and developing countries, since it will cut across societies (Floridi 2002a).
We are preparing the ground for tomorrow’s informational slums.

1.4 The metaphysics of the infosphere

The previous transformations will invite us to understand the world as some-
thing ‘a-live’ (artificially live). Such animation of the world will, paradox-
ically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures which
interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces. The sec-
ond 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 increas-
ingly 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
4
In 2008, Thomas Schmidt, Alex French, Cameron Hughes and Angus Haines (four
12-year-old boys from Ashfold Primary School in Dorton, UK) were awarded the ‘Home
Invention of the Year’ Prize for their Speed Searcher, a device for finding lost items. It
attaches tags to valuables and enables a computer to pinpoint their location in the home.
10 Luciano Floridi

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

r the right of usage is at least as important as the right to ownership; and
r 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 dis-
pensable 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 mov-
ing 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 iden-
tity 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 con-
struct 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.

1.5 The information turn as the fourth revolution

Oversimplifying more than a bit, one may say that science has two funda-
mental ways of changing our understanding. One may be called extrovert,
11 Ethics after the Information Revolution

or about the world, and the other introvert, or about ourselves. Three scien-
tific revolutions have had great impact in both ways. They changed not only
our understanding of the external world, but, in doing so, they also modi-
fied our conception of who we are. After Nicolaus Copernicus, the heliocentric
cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the Uni-
verse. 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 will-
ing 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 revolu-
tion), 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.

1.6 The evolution of inforgs

We have seen that we are probably the last generation to experience a clear dif-
ference between onlife and online. A further transformation worth highlight-
ing concerns precisely the emergence of artificial and hybrid (multi)agents,
i.e., partly artificial and partly human (consider, for example, a family as
12 Luciano Floridi

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 oper-
ate within it with much more freedom and control. We (shall) delegate or
outsource to artificial agents and companions (Floridi 2008a) memories, deci-
sions, 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 intrinsi-
cally 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 inter-
faces 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,

5
The outer world, or reality, as it affects the agent inhabiting it.
13 Ethics after the Information Revolution

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 tai-
lored 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 appear-
ances, 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 inter-
face 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 witness-
ing 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 ontologi-
cal 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 envi-
ronmental 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 holis-
tic 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
14 Luciano Floridi

new alliance between the natural and the artificial. These are the topics of the
next two sections.

1.7 The constructionist values of Homo Poieticus

Ethical issues are often discussed in terms of putative resolutions of hypo-
thetical 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 con-
cerns 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 incompatibili-
ties. A mature moral agent is commonly expected to be both a morally good
6
See, for example, ‘the trolley problem’ in Foot (1967); for a very entertaining parody do not
miss ‘the revised trolley problem’ in Patton (1988). On ‘George’s job’ and ‘Jim and the
Indians’ see Smart and Williams (1987). Contrary to the trolley problem, the last two cases
are meant to provide counterexamples against purely consequentialist positions.
7
For an entirely ‘situation-based ethics’ approach to the Internet see, for example, Dreyfus
(2001), who fails to appreciate any constructionist issue. His ‘anthropology’ includes only
single web users browsing the net.
15 Ethics after the Information Revolution

user and a morally good producer of the environment in which she oper-
ates, 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 proac-
tive 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 con-
structionist. The best known constructivist approach is virtue ethics. According
to it, an individual’s principal ethical aim is to live the good life by becom-
ing 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 back-
ground 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 Aris-
totle, 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
16 Luciano Floridi

kernel. This is not to say that they are all subjectivist but rather, more pre-
cisely, 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 influ-
ence, 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 excel-
lent 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 indi-
vidual 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. Exam-
ples 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 informa-
tion 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 cul-
turally 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
17 Ethics after the Information Revolution

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, physi-
ologically, neurologically and narratively), over human society (e.g. culturally,
politically, socially and economically) and over natural or artificial environ-
ments (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 press-
ing 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 envi-
ronment 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 supervi-
sor, 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 con-
sumer of wealth, and from homo ludens (Huizinga 1998), who embodies a
leisurely playfulness devoid of the ethical care and responsibility character-
izing 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.
18 Luciano Floridi

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 environ-
ment 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 habi-
tat. 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 emis-
sions 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. Unfor-
tunately, 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 necessar-
ily 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 infor-
mation management is, the less moral evil is caused. ICTs can help us in our

8
Source: The Economist, 22 May 2008.
9
Source: McKinsey’s Information Technology Report, October 2008, ‘How IT can cut carbon
emissions’, by Giulio Boccaletti, Markus Löffler and Jeremy M. Oppenheim.
19 Ethics after the Information Revolution

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 environ-
mentalism or e-nvironmentalism. We should resist any Greek epistemological
tendency to treat techne as the Cinderella of knowledge; any absolutist incli-
nation 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) cre-
ated macroscopic transformation in our social structures and physical envi-
ronments, 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 dimen-
sions 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.10 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.
10
This chapter is an updated synthesis of Floridi (forthcoming, a), Floridi and Sanders
(2005), Floridi (2007), and Floridi (2008a).