Humanity has organized its history according to many metrics. Some are natural and circular, relying on seasons and planetary
motions. Some are social or political and linear, being determined, for example, by the succession of Olympic Games, the number
of years since the founding of the city of Rome (
ab urbe condita), or the ascension of a king. Still others are religious and have a V-shape, counting years before and after a particular
event (e.g. the birth of Christ). There are larger periods that encompass smaller ones, named after influential styles (Baroque),
people (Victorian era), particular circumstances (Cold War) or some new technology (Nuclear age). What all these and many
other metrics have in common is that they are all
historical, in the strict sense that they all depend on the development of systems to record events and hence accumulate and transmit
information about the past. It follows that history is actually synonymous with the information age, since
prehistory is the age in human development that precedes the availability of recording systems. Hence, one may further argue that humanity
has been living in various kinds of information societies at least since the Bronze Age, the era that marks the invention
of writing in different regions of the world, and especially in Mesopotamia. Comparing the
computer revolution to the
printing revolution would be misleading not because they are unrelated, but because they are actually phases of a much wider,
macroscopic process that has spanned millennia: the slow emergence of
the information society since the fourth millennium BC. And yet, this is not what we normally mean when talking about the
information age. Typically, we have in mind something much more limited in scope and closer in time. There may be many explanations,
but one seems more convincing than any other: only very recently has human progress and welfare begun to depend mostly on
the successful and efficient management of the information life cycle.
1 So the long period of time that the information society has taken to surface should not be surprising. Imagine a historian
writing in a million years from now. She may consider it normal, and perhaps even elegantly symmetrical, that it took roughly
six millennia (from its beginning in the Neolithic, tenth millennium BC, until the Bronze Age) for the agricultural revolution
to produce its full effect, and then another six millennia (from the Bronze Age until the end of the second millennium AD)
for the information revolution to bear its main fruit. During this span of time, information technologies evolved from being
mainly
recording systems, to being also
communication systems (especially after Gutenberg), to being also
processing systems (especially after Turing). As I will explain below, they have begun to play the role of
re-ontologizing systems. Thanks to this evolution, nowadays the most advanced
economies are highly dependent, for their functioning and growth, upon the pivotal role played by information-based, intangible
assets, information-intensive services (especially business and property services, communications, finance and insurance,
and entertainment) as well as information-oriented public sectors (especially education, public administration and health
care). For example, all G7 members qualify as information societies because, in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United
Kingdom, and the United States of America, at least 70% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) depends on intangible goods, which
are 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 millennia of relatively quieter gestation, has generated
new and disruptive challenges, which were largely unforeseeable only a few decades ago. Needless to say, Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) have been changing the world profoundly, irreversibly and problematically since the fifties, at a breathtaking
pace, and with unprecedented scope, making the creation, management and utilization of information, communication and computational
resources vital issues. As a quick reminder, and in order to have some simple, quantitative measure of the transformations
experienced by our generation, consider the following findings.
In a recent study, researchers at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems estimated that humanity had accumulated
approximately 12 exabytes
2 of data in the course of its entire history until the commodification of computers, but that it had produced more than 5
exabytes of data just in 2002, ‘equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library
of Congress book collections’ (Lyman and Varian
2003). In 2002, this was almost 800 MB of recorded data produced per person. It is like saying that every newborn baby came into
the world with a
burden of 30 feet of books, the equivalent of 800 MB of data on paper. This exponential escalation has been relentless: ‘between
2006 and 2010. . .the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988
exabytes’.
3Not feeling under pressure would be abnormal. The development of ICT has not only brought enormous benefits and opportunities
but also greatly outpaced our understanding of its conceptual nature and implications, while raising problems whose complexity
and global dimensions are rapidly expanding, evolving and becoming increasingly serious. A simple analogy may help to make
sense of the current situation. Our technological tree has been growing its far-reaching branches much more widely, rapidly and chaotically than its conceptual,
ethical and cultural roots. The lack of balance is obvious and a matter of daily experience in the life of millions of citizens
dealing with information-related ethical issues. The risk is that, like a tree with weak roots, further and healthier growth
at the top might be impaired by a fragile foundation at the bottom. As a consequence, today, any advanced information society
faces the pressing task of equipping itself with a viable philosophy and ethics of information. Applying the previous analogy, while technology keeps growing bottom-up, it is high
time we start digging deeper, 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 anticipate difficulties, identify opportunities and resolve problems, conflicts and dilemmas.
It is from such a broad perspective that I would like to invite the reader to approach this volume. The chapters constituting
it perfectly complement each other. Written by leading experts in the area, they tackle some of the key issues in information
and computer ethics (ICE). Since the authors need no introduction, and the contents of the chapters are outlined in the preface,
in the rest of this introductory chapter my contribution will be to discuss some conceptual undercurrents, which flow beneath
the surface of the literature on ICE, and may be seen surfacing in different places throughout this book. In discussing them,
I shall focus, more generally, on the potential impact of ICT on our lives. And since there would be no merit in predicting
the obvious, I will avoid issues such as rising concerns about
privacy and identity theft, spamming, viruses, or the importance of semantic tagging, online shopping and virtual communities.
Nor will I try to steal ideas from those who know better than I do the future development of the actual technologies (see
for example O'Reilly
2005, Microsoft-Research
2005,
Nature 2006). I will, instead,
stick to what philosophers do better,
conceptual engineering, and seek to capture the silent
Weltanschauung that might be dawning on
us.
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, nanotechnologies and biotechnologies
are not merely re-engineering but actually re-ontologizing our world.
Using the two previous concepts, it becomes possible to formulate succinctly the following thesis: ICTs are re-ontologizing
the very nature of (and hence what we mean by) the infosphere, and here lies the source of some of the most profound transformations
and challenging problems that our information societies will experience in the close future, as far as technology is concerned.
The most obvious way in which ICTs are re-ontologizing the infosphere concerns the transition from analogue to digital data
and then the ever-increasing growth of our informational space. Both phenomena are very familiar and require no explanation,
but a brief comment may not go amiss.
Although the production of analogue data is still increasing, the infosphere is becoming more digital by the day. A simple
example may help to drive the point home: the new
Large Hadron Collider built at the CERN (
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/) to explore the physics of particles produces about 1.5
GB data per second, or about 10 petabytes of data annually, a quantity of data a thousand times larger than the Library of
Congress's print collection and at least twice as large as Google's whole data storage, reported to be approximately 5 petabytes
in 2004 (Mellor
2004).
This radical re-ontologization of the infosphere is largely due to the fundamental convergence between digital resources and
digital tools. The ontology of the information technologies available (e.g. software, databases, communication channels and
protocols, etc.) is now the same as (and hence fully compatible with) the ontology of their objects. This was one of Turing's most consequential intuitions: in the re-ontologized infosphere, there is no longer any substantial difference between
the processor and the processed, so the digital deals effortlessly and seamlessly with the digital. This potentially eliminates one of the most long-standing
bottlenecks in the infosphere and, as a result, there is a gradual erasure of ontological friction.
Ontological friction refers to the forces that oppose the flow of information within (a region of) the infosphere, and hence (as a coefficient)
to the amount of work and effort required to generate, obtain, process and transmit information in a given environment, e.g.
by establishing and maintaining channels of communication and by overcoming obstacles in the flow of information such as distance,
noise, lack of resources (especially time and memory), amount and complexity of the data to be processed, and so forth. Given
a certain amount of information available in (a region of) the infosphere, the lower the ontological friction within it, the higher the accessibility of that amount of information becomes. Thus, if one quantifies ontological friction from 0 to 1, a fully successful firewall
would produce a 1.0 degree of friction, i.e. a complete standstill in the flow of information through its ‘barrier’. On the
other hand, we describe our society as informationally porous the more it tends towards a 0 degree of informational friction.
Because of their
‘data superconductivity’, ICTs are well known for being among the most influential factors that affect the ontological friction
in the infosphere. We are all acquainted daily with aspects of a
frictionless infosphere, such as
spamming and
micrometering (every fraction of a penny counts). Other significant consequences include (a) a substantial erosion of the
right to ignore: in an increasingly porous society, it becomes progressively less credible to claim ignorance when confronted by easily predictable
events (e.g. as George W. Bush did with respect to Hurricane Katrina's disastrous effects on New Orleans's flood barriers)
and hardly ignorable facts (e.g. as Tessa Jowell, a British Labour MP, did with respect to her husband's finances). And therefore
(b) an exponential increase in
common knowledge: this is a technical term from epistemic logic, which basically refers to the case in which everybody not only knows that
p but also knows that everybody knows that everybody knows,. . ., that
p. In other words, (a) and (b) will also be the case because
meta-information about how much information is, was or should have been available will become overabundant. From (a) and (b)
it follows that, in the future, (c) we shall witness a steady increase in agents’
responsibilities. As I shall argue towards the end of this chapter, ICTs are making humanity increasingly responsible, morally speaking, for
the way the world is, will and should
be (Floridi and Sanders
2001, Floridi
2006b).
During the last decade or so, we have become accustomed to conceptualizing our life online as a mixture between an evolutionary
adaptation of human agents to a digital environment, and a form of post-modern, 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 development of the information age.
The increasing re-ontologization of artefacts and of whole (social) environments suggests that soon it will be difficult to
understand what life was like in predigital times and, in the near future, the very distinction between online and offline
will become blurred and then disappear. To someone who was born in 2000 the world will always have been wireless, for example.
To her, the peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by conventional modems while handshaking will be as alien as the sounds
made by a telegraph's Morse signals. To put it dramatically, the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other ontological
space. Let me explain.
In the (fast-approaching) future, more and more objects will be
ITentities able to learn, advise and communicate with each other. A good example (but it is only an example) is provided by
RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags, which can store and remotely retrieve data from an object and give it a unique
identity, like a barcode. Tags can measure 0.4 mm
2 and are thinner than paper. Incorporate this tiny microchip in everything, including humans and animals, and you have created
ITentities. This is not science fiction. According to a report by market research company InStat, the worldwide production of RFID will
increase more than 25-fold between 2005 and 2010 and reach 33 billion. Imagine networking these 33 billion ITentities together
with all the hundreds of millions of PCs, DVDs, iPods and ICT devices available and you see that the infosphere is no longer
‘there’ but ‘here’ and it is here to stay. Your Nike and iPod already talk to each other, with predictable (but amazingly
unforeseen) problems in terms of
privacy (Saponas
et al.
2007).
Nowadays, we are still used to considering the space of information as something we log-in to and log-out from. Our view of
the world (our metaphysics) is still modern or
Newtonian: it is made of ‘dead’ cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive and incapable
of communicating, learning or memorizing. But, as I shall argue in the
next section, what
we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and responsive environment of wireless, pervasive,
distributed,
a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that works
a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time. The day when we routinely google the location of physical objects (‘where are the car
keys?’) is very close.
4As a consequence of such re-ontologization of our ordinary environment, we shall be living in an infosphere that will become
increasingly
synchronized (time),
delocalized (space) and
correlated (interactions). Although this might be read, optimistically, as the friendly face of globalization, we should not harbour
illusions about how widespread and inclusive the evolution of information societies will be. The digital divide will become
a chasm, generating new forms of
discrimination between those who can be denizens of the infosphere and those who cannot, between insiders and outsiders, between
information rich and information poor. It will redesign the map of worldwide society, generating or widening generational,
geographic, socio-economic and cultural divides. But the gap will not be reducible to the distance between industrialized
and developing countries, since it will cut across societies (Floridi
2002a). We are preparing the ground for tomorrow's informational
slums.
The previous transformations will invite us to understand the world as something ‘a-live’ (artificially live). Such
animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures which interpreted
all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces. The second step will be a reconceptualization of our ontology in
informational terms. It will become normal to consider the world as part of the infosphere, not so much in the dystopian sense
expressed by a
Matrix-like scenario, where the ‘real reality’ is still as hard as the metal of the machines that inhabit it, but in the evolutionary,
hybrid sense represented by an environment such as New Port City, the fictional, post-cybernetic metropolis of
Ghost in the Shell. The infosphere will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely ‘material’ world behind; rather, it will be the
world itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood informationally, as part of the infosphere. At the end of
this shift, the infosphere will have moved from being a way to refer to the space of information to being synonymous with
Being. Thus, our way of conceptualizing and making sense of reality will keep shifting from a
materialist perspective, in which physical objects and processes still play a key role, to an
informational one, in which
• objects and processes are dephysicalized, typified and perfectly clonable;
• the right of usage is at least as important as the right to ownership; and
• the criterion for existence is no longer being immutable (Greek metaphysics) or being potentially subject to perception (modern
metaphysics) but being interactable.
If all this seems a bit too ‘philosophical’, let me provide an illustrative example.
Despite some important exceptions (e.g. vases and metal tools in ancient civilizations or books after Gutenberg), it was the
industrial revolution that really marked the passage from a nominalist world of unique objects to a
Platonist world of types of objects, all perfectly reproducible as identical to each other, therefore epistemically indiscernible,
and hence pragmatically dispensable because replaceable without any loss. Today, we find it obvious that two automobiles may
be virtually identical and that we are invited to buy a model rather than a specific ‘incarnation’ of it. Indeed, we are fast
moving towards a
commodification of objects that considers repair as synonymous with replacement, even when it comes to entire buildings. This
has led, by way of compensation, to a prioritization of
branding – a process compared by Klein (
2000) to the creation of ‘cultural accessories and personal philosophies’ – and of
re-appropriation: the person who puts a sticker on the window of her car, which is otherwise perfectly identical to thousands of others, is
fighting an anti-Platonic battle. The information revolution has further exacerbated this process. Once our window-shopping
becomes
Windows-shopping and no longer means walking down the street but browsing through the Web, the problem caused by the dephysicalization
and typification of individuals as unique and irreplaceable entities starts eroding our sense of personal identity as well.
We become mass-produced, anonymous entities among other anonymous entities, exposed to billions of other similar inforgs online.
So we construct, self-brand and re-appropriate ourselves in the infosphere by blogs and FaceBook entries, homepages, YouTube
videos, flickr albums, fashionable clothes and choices of places we visit, types of holidays we take and cars we drive and
so forth. We use and expose information about ourselves to become less informationally indiscernible. We wish to maintain
a high level of informational
privacy almost as if that were the only way of saving a precious capital which can then be publicly invested by us in order
to construct ourselves as individuals discernible and easily re-identifiable by others. Now, processes such as the one I have
just sketched are part of a far deeper metaphysical drift caused by the information
revolution.
Oversimplifying more than a bit, one may say that science has two fundamental ways of changing our understanding. One may
be called
extrovert,
or about the world, and the other
introvert, or about ourselves. Three scientific revolutions have had great impact in both ways. They changed not only our understanding
of the external world, but, in doing so, they also modified our conception of who we are. After
Nicolaus Copernicus, the heliocentric cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the Universe.
Charles Darwin showed that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through natural selection, thus
displacing humanity from the centre of the biological kingdom. Thirdly, following
Sigmund Freud, we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious and subject to the defence mechanism of repression,
thus displacing it from the centre of pure rationality, a position that had been assumed as uncontroversial at least since
Descartes. The reader who, like Popper, would be reluctant to follow Freud in considering psychoanalysis a scientific enterprise,
might yet be willing to concede that contemporary neuroscience is a likely candidate for such a revolutionary role. Either
way, the result is that we are not immobile, at the centre of the Universe (Copernican revolution), we are not unnaturally
separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom (Darwinian revolution), and we are very far from being Cartesian
minds entirely transparent to ourselves (Freudian or Neuroscientific revolution).
Freud (
1917) was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of a single process of reassessment of human nature (see Weinert
2009). The hermeneutic manoeuvre was, admittedly, rather self-serving. But it did strike a reasonable note. In a similar way,
when we now perceive that something very significant and profound has happened to human life after the informational turn,
I would argue that our intuition is once again perceptive, because we are experiencing what may be described as a fourth revolution,
in the process of dislocation and reassessment of humanity's fundamental nature and role in the universe.
After Turing, computer science has not only provided unprecedented epistemic and engineering powers over natural and artificial
realities; it has also cast new light on who we are and how we are related to the world. Today, we are slowly accepting the
idea that we are not standalone and unique entities, but rather
informationally embodied organisms (inforgs), mutually connected and embedded in an informational environment, the infosphere,
which we share with both natural and artificial agents similar to us in many
respects.
We have seen that we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between onlife and online. A further
transformation worth highlighting concerns precisely the emergence of artificial and hybrid (multi)agents, i.e., partly artificial
and partly human (consider, for example, a family as
a single agent, equipped with digital cameras, laptops, palm pilots, iPods, mobiles, wireless network, digital TVs, DVDs,
CD players, etc.). These new agents already share the same ontology with their environment and can operate within it with
much more freedom and control. We (shall) delegate or outsource to artificial agents and companions (Floridi
2008a) memories, decisions, routine tasks and other activities in ways that will be increasingly integrated with us and with our
understanding of what it means to be an agent. This is rather well known, but one aspect of this transformation may be in
need of some clarification in this context.
Our understanding of ourselves as agents will also be deeply affected. I am not referring here to the sci-fi vision of a
‘cyborged’ humanity. Walking around with something like a Bluetooth wireless headset implanted in your ear does not seem the
best way forward, not least because it contradicts the social message it is also meant to be sending: being on call 24/7 is
a form of slavery, and anyone so busy and important should have a personal assistant instead. The truth is rather that being
a sort of cyborg is not what people will embrace, but what they will try to avoid, unless it is inevitable. Nor am I referring
to a GM humanity, in charge of its informational DNA and hence of its future embodiments. This is something that we shall
probably see in the future, but it is still too far away, both technically (safely doable) and ethically (morally acceptable),
to be discussed at this stage. As I anticipated in the
previous section, I have in mind a quieter, less sensational and yet crucial and profound change in our conception of what it means to be
an agent. We have begun to see ourselves as
connected informational organisms (
inforgs), not through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically, through the re-ontologization
of our environment and of ourselves.
By re-ontologizing the infosphere, ICTs have brought to light the intrinsically informational nature of human agents. This
is not equivalent to saying that people have digital alter egos, some Messrs Hydes represented by their @s, blogs and https.
This trivial point only encourages us to mistake ICTs for merely
enhancing technologies. The informational nature of agents should not be confused with a
‘data shadow’ either, a term introduced by Westin (
1968) to describe a digital profile generated from data concerning a user's habits online. The change is more radical. To understand
it, consider the distinction between
enhancing and
augmenting appliances. The switches and dials of the former are interfaces meant to plug the appliance into the user's body ergonomically.
Drills and guns are perfect examples. It is the cyborg idea. The data and control panels of augmenting appliances are instead
interfaces between different possible worlds: on the one hand, there is the human user's
Umwelt5, and on the other hand, there are the dynamic, watery, soapy,
hot and dark world of the
dishwasher; the equally watery, soapy, hot and dark but also spinning world of the washing machine; or the still, aseptic,
soapless, cold and potentially luminous world of the refrigerator. These robots can be successful because they have their
environments ‘wrapped’ and tailored around their capacities, not vice versa. Imagine someone trying to build a droid like
C3PO capable of washing their dishes in the sink exactly in the same way as a human agent would. Now, despite some superficial
appearances, ICTs are not enhancing nor augmenting in the sense just explained. They are re-ontologizing devices because they
engineer environments that the user is then enabled to enter through (possibly friendly) gateways. It is a form of initiation.
Looking at the history of the mouse, for example, one discovers that our technology has not only adapted to, but also educated,
us as users. Douglas Engelbart once told me that he had even experimented with a mouse to be placed under the desk, to be
operated with one's leg, in order to leave the user's hands free.
HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is a symmetric relation. To return to our distinction, whilst a dishwasher interface is a
panel through which the machine enters into the user's world, a digital interface is a gate through which a user can be (tele)present
in the infosphere (Floridi
2005c). This simple but fundamental difference underlies the many spatial metaphors of ‘cyberspace’, ‘virtual reality’, ‘being
online’, ‘surfing the web’, ‘gateway’ and so forth. It follows that we are witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration
of humanity from its
Umwelt to the infosphere itself, not least because the latter is absorbing the former. As a result, humans will be inforgs among
other (possibly artificial) inforgs and agents operating in an environment that is friendlier to informational creatures.
As digital immigrants like us are replaced by digital natives like our children, the latter will come to appreciate that there
is no ontological difference between infosphere and
Umwelt, only a difference of levels of abstractions (Floridi
2008b). Moreover, when the migration is complete, we shall increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped or poor to the point
of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever we are disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water. One day, being
an inforg will be so natural that any disruption in our normal flow of information will make us
sick.
It seems that, in view of this important change in our self-understanding – and of the sort of ICT-mediated interactions that
we will increasingly enjoy with other agents, whether biological or artificial, and the infosphere – the best way of tackling
the new ethical challenges posed by ICTs may be from an environmental approach, one which does not privilege the natural or
untouched, but treats as authentic and genuine all forms of existence and behaviour, even those based on artificial, synthetic
or engineered artefacts. This sort of holistic or inclusive environmentalism will require a change in how we perceive ourselves
and our roles with respect to reality and how we might negotiate a
new alliance between the natural and the artificial. These are the topics of the next two
sections.
Ethical issues are often discussed in terms of putative resolutions of hypothetical situations, such as ‘what should one do
on finding a wallet in the lavatory of a restaurant?’ Research and educational purposes may promote increasingly dramatic
scenarios (sometimes reaching unrealistic excesses
6), with available courses of action more polarized and less easily identifiable as right or wrong. But the general approach
remains substantially the same: the agent is confronted by a
moral dilemma and asked to make a principled decision by choosing from a menu of alternatives. Moral action is triggered by
a situation. In ‘situated action ethics’ (to borrow an expression from AI), moral dilemma may give the false impression that
the ethical discourse concerns primarily
a posteriori reactions to problematic situations in which the agent unwillingly and unexpectedly finds herself. The agent is treated as
a world user, a game player, a consumer of moral goods and evils, a browser,
7 a guest, or a customer who reacts to pre-established and largely unmodifiable conditions, scenarios and choices. Only two
temporal modes count: present and future. The past seems irrelevant (‘how did the agent found herself in such predicament?’),
unless the approach is further expanded by a casuistry analysis. Yet ethics is not only a question of dealing morally well
with a given world. It is also a question of constructing the world, improving its nature and shaping its development in the
right way. This
proactive approach treats the agent as a world owner, a game designer or referee, a producer of moral goods and evils, a provider,
a host or a creator. The agent is supposed to be able to plan and initiate action responsibly, in anticipation of future events,
in order to (try to) control their course by making something happen, or by preventing something from happening rather than
waiting to respond (
react) to a situation, once something has happened, or merely hoping that something positive will happen.
There are significant differences between reactive and proactive approaches. There is no space to explore them here, but one
may mention, as a simple example, the moral responsibilities of a webmaster as opposed to those of a user of a website. Yet,
differences should not be confused with incompatibilities. A mature moral agent is commonly expected to be both a morally
good
user and a morally good producer of the environment in which she operates, not least because situated action ethics can be
confronted by lose–lose situations, in which all options may turn out to be morally unpleasant and every choice may amount
to failure. A proactive approach may help to avoid unrecoverable situations. It certainly reduces the agent's reliance on
moral luck. As a result, a large part of an ethical education consists in acquiring the kinds of traits, values and intellectual
skills that may enable the agent to switch successfully between a reactive and a proactive approach to the world.
All this is acknowledged by many ethical systems, albeit with different vocabulary, emphasis and levels of explicitness. Some
more conservative ethical theories prefer to concentrate on the reactive nature of the agent's behaviour. For example, deontologism
embeds a reactive bias insofar as it supports duties on-demand. Another good example is the moral code implicit in the Ten Commandments, which is less proactive than that promoted in the New Testament. On a more secular level, the two versions
of Asimov's laws of robotics provide a simple case of evolution. The 1940 version is more reactive than the 1985 version, whose new zeroth
law includes a substantially proactive requirement: ‘A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity
to come to harm.’
Ethical theories that adopt a more proactive approach can be defined as constructionist. The best known constructivist approach is virtue ethics. According to it, an individual's principal ethical aim is to live the good life by becoming a certain kind
of person. The constructionist stance is expressed by the desire to mould oneself. The goal is achieved by implementing or
improving some characteristics, while eradicating or controlling others. The stance itself is presupposed: it is simply assumed
as uncontroversial that one does wish to live the good life by becoming the best person one can. Some degree of personal malleability
and capacity to choose critically provide further background preconditions. The key question ‘what kind of person should I
be?’ is rightly considered to be a reasonable and justified question. It grounds the question ‘what kind of life should I
lead?’ and immediately translates into ‘what kind of character should I construct? What kind of virtues should I develop?
What sort of vices should I avoid or eradicate?’ It is implicit that each agent strives to achieve that aim as an individual, with only incidental regard to the enveloping community.
Different brands of virtue ethics disagree on the specific virtues and values identifying a person as morally good. The disagreement,
say between
Aristotle, Paul of Tarsus and Nietzsche, can be dramatic, not least because it is ultimately ontological, in that it regards
the kind of entity that a human being should strive to become. In prototyping jargon, theories may disagree on the abstract
specification of the model, not just on implementation details. Despite their divergences, all brands of virtue ethics share
the same subject-oriented
kernel. This is not to say that they are all subjectivist but rather, more precisely, that they are all concerned exclusively
with the proper
construction of the moral subject, be that a self-imposed task or an educational goal of a second party, like parents, teachers or society
in general. To adopt a technical expression, virtue ethics is intrinsically
egopoietic. Its
sociopoietic nature is merely a by-product, in the following sense. Egopoietic practices that lead to the ethical construction of the
subject inevitably interact with, and influence, the ethical construction of the community inhabited by the subject. So, when
the subjective microcosm and the socio-political macrocosm differ in scale but essentially not in nature or complexity – as
one may assume in the idealized case of the Greek
polis – egopoiesis can scale up to the role of general ethics and even political philosophy.
Plato's
Republic is an excellent example. Plato finds it unproblematic to move seamlessly between the construction of the ideal self and the
construction of the ideal city-state. But so does the Mafia, whose code of conduct and ‘virtuous ethics’ for the individual
is based on the view that ‘the family’ is its members. Egopoiesis and sociopoiesis are interderivable only in sufficiently
simple and
closed societies, in which significant communal behaviour is ultimately derivable from that of its constituent individuals. In complex
societies, sociopoiesis is no longer reducible to egopoiesis alone. This is the fundamental limit of virtue ethics. In autonomous,
interactive and adaptive societies, virtue ethics positions acquire an
individualistic value, previously inconceivable, and may result in moral escapism. The individual still cares about her own
ethical construction and, at most, the construction of the community with which she is more closely involved, like the family,
but the rest of the world falls beyond the horizon of her moral concern. Phrasing the point in terms of situated action ethics,
new problematic hypothetical situations arise from emergent phenomena. Examples include issues of disarmament, the ozone level,
pollution, famine and the digital divide. The difficulty becomes apparent in all its pressing urgency as the individual agent
tries to reason using ‘local’ ethical principles to tackle a problem with ‘global’, ethical features and consequences. Because
virtue ethics remains limited by its subject-oriented approach, it cannot provide, by itself, a satisfactory ethics for a
globalized world in general and for the information society in particular. If misapplied, it fosters ethical individualism,
as the agent is more likely to mind only her own self-construction. If it is uncritically adopted, it can be intolerant, since
agents and theorists may forget the culturally over-determined nature of their foundationalist anthropologies, which often
have religious roots. If it fosters tolerance, it may still spread relativism because any self-construction becomes acceptable,
as long as it takes place in the enclave of one's own private sphere, culture and cyber-niche, without bothering any neighbour.
The inadequacy of virtue ethics is, of course, historical. The theory has aged well, but it can provide, at most, a local
sociopoietic approach as a mere extension of its genuine vocation: egopoiesis. It intrinsically lacks the
resources to go beyond the construction of the individual and the indirect role this may play in shaping her local community.
Theoretically, however, the limits of virtue ethics should not lead to an overall rejection of any constructionist approach.
On the contrary, the fundamentally constructionist lesson taught by virtue ethics (one of the features that makes virtue ethics
appealing in the first place) is more important than ever
before.
In a global information society, the individual agent (often a multi-agent system) is like a demiurge (Plato's god responsible for the design of the physical universe based on preexisting matter). Her powers can be variously
exercised (in terms of control, creation or modelling) over herself (e.g. genetically, physiologically, neurologically and
narratively), over human society (e.g. culturally, politically, socially and economically) and over natural or artificial
environments (e.g. physically and informationally). Such an increasingly powerful agent has corresponding moral duties and
responsibilities to oversee not only the development of her own character and habits but also the well-being of each of her
spheres of influence. Clearly, a constructionist ethics should be retained and reinforced, but the kind of ethical constructionism
needed today goes well beyond the education of the self and the political engineering of the simple and closed cyberpolis.
It must also address the urgent and pressing question concerning the kind of global realities that are being built. This means
decoupling constructionism from subjectivism and re-orienting it to the object, applying it also to society and the environment, the receivers of the agent's actions.
The term ‘ecopoiesis’ refers to the morally informed construction of the environment based on this object- or ecologically oriented
perspective. To move from individual virtues to global values, an ecopoietic approach is needed that recognizes the agent's responsibilities towards the environment (including present and future inhabitants)
as its enlightened creator steward or supervisor, not just as its virtuous user and consumer.
Constructionism is the drive to build physical and conceptual objects and, more subtly, to exercise control and stewardship
on them. It manifests itself in the care of existing, and the creation of new, realities, these being material or conceptual.
Thus, constructionism is ultimately best understood as a struggle against entropy. Existentially, it represents the strongest
reaction against the destiny of death. In terms of a philosophical anthropology, constructionism is embodied by what I have
termed elsewhere
homo poieticus (Floridi
1999a).
Homo poieticus is to be distinguished from
homo faber, user and ‘exploitator’ of natural resources, from
homo oeconomicus, producer, distributor and consumer of wealth, and from
homo ludens (Huizinga
1998), who embodies a leisurely playfulness devoid of the ethical care and responsibility characterizing the constructionist attitude.
Homo poieticus concentrates not merely on the final result, but on the dynamic, on-going process through which the result is achieved. One
of the major challenges facing
homo poieticus is the possibility of negotiating a new alliance between
physis and
techne.
Whether physis (nature, the world) and techne (applied knowledge, technology) may be reconcilable is not a question that has a predetermined answer, waiting to be divined.
It is more like a practical problem, whose feasible solution needs to be devised. With an analogy, we are not asking whether
two chemicals could mix but rather whether a marriage may be successful. There is plenty of room for a positive answer, provided
the right sort of commitment is made.
It seems beyond doubt that a successful marriage between
physis and
techne is vital and hence worth our effort. Information societies increasingly depend upon technology to thrive, but they equally
need a healthy, natural environment to flourish. Try to imagine the world not tomorrow or next year, but next century, or
next millennium: a divorce between
physis and
techne would be utterly disastrous both for our welfare and for the well-being of our habitat. This is something that technophiles
and green fundamentalists must come to understand. Failing to negotiate a fruitful, symbiotic relationship between technology
and nature is not an option. Fortunately, a successful marriage between
physis and
techne is achievable. True, much more progress needs to be made. The physics of information can be highly energy-consuming and hence
potentially unfriendly towards the environment.
In 2000, data centres consumed 0.6% of the world's electricity. In 2005, the figure had risen to 1%. They are now responsible
for more carbon-dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands and, if current trends hold, their emissions
will have grown four-fold by 2020, reaching 670 million tonnes. By then, it is estimated that ICT's carbon footprint will
be higher than aviation's.
8 However, ICTs will also help ‘to eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020 equivalent to
15 percent of global emissions today and five times more than our estimate of the emissions from these technologies in 2020’.
9 This positive (and improvable) balance leads me to a final comment.
The greenest machine is a machine with 100% energy efficiency. Unfortunately, this is equivalent to a perpetual motion machine
and the latter is simply a pipe dream. However, we also know that such an impossible limit can be increasingly approximated:
energy waste can be dramatically reduced and energy efficiency can be highly increased (the two processes are not necessarily
the same; compare recycling vs. doing more with less). Often, both kinds of processes may be fostered only by relying on significant
improvements in the management of information (e.g. to build and run hardware and processes better). So here is how we may
reinterpret
Socrates’ ethical intellectualism: we do evil because we do not know better, in the sense that the better the information
management is, the less moral evil is caused. ICTs can help us in our
fight against the destruction, impoverishment, vandalism and waste of both natural and human (including historical and cultural)
resources. So they can be a precious ally in what I have called, in Floridi (
2008c),
synthetic environmentalism or
e-nvironmentalism. We should resist any Greek epistemological tendency to treat
techne as the Cinderella of knowledge; any absolutist inclination to accept no moral balancing between some unavoidable evil and
far more goodness; or any modern, reactionary, metaphysical temptation to drive a wedge between naturalism and constructionism
by privileging the former as the only authentic dimension of human life. The challenge is to reconcile our roles as agents
within nature and as stewards of nature. The good news is that it is a challenge we can meet. The odd thing is that we are
slowly coming to realize that we have such a hybrid
nature.