The
previous chapters have provided a detailed overview of the variety of ethical challenges posed by the development of ICTs. By way of conclusion,
in this epilogue I would like to invite the reader to look into the possible future of Information and Computer Ethics. More
specifically, I shall try to forecast how the convergence of two fundamental trends of our times, globalization and the development
of the information society, may interact with the ethical problems analysed in this book. The exercise will not be based on
some untenable technological determinism. Humanity is, and will remain, firmly in charge of its destiny and hence be responsible
for it. Rather, it will mean adopting the farmer's view that, with enough intelligence, toil and a bit of luck, one might
be able to tell today what one will probably reap tomorrow. Before trying to ‘look into the seeds of time, and say which grain
will grow and which will not’ (Shakespeare,
Macbeth, Act I, Scene III, 59–62), two clarifications might be in order.
First, the future of globalization is a phenomenon too complex even to sketch in this brief epilogue. For a synthetic, well-balanced
and informed overview, the reader may wish to consult Held and McGrew (
2001) and consider that this chapter is written from what Held
et al. (
1999)) have defined as a
‘transformationalist perspective’, according to which ‘globalization does not simply denote a shift in the extensity or scale
of social relations and activity. Much more significantly, argue the transformationalists, it also involves the spatial re-organization
and re-articulation of economic, political, military and cultural power.’
Second, in the rest of this chapter I will highlight six key transformations characterizing the processes of globalization.
I shall label them contraction, expansion, porosity, hybridization, synchronization and correlation. They provide the essential background for making sense of the suggestion that Information Ethics can provide a successful
approach for coping with the challenges posed by our increasingly globalized reality.
The world has gone through alternating stages of globalization, growing and shrinking, for as long as humanity can remember.
Here is a reminder:
in some respects the world economy was more integrated in the late 19th century than it is today.. . .Capital markets, too, were
well integrated. Only in the past few years, indeed, have international capital flows, relative to the size of the world economy,
recovered to the levels of the few decades before the first world war.
(The Economist, 18 December 1997)
The truth is that, after each ‘globalization backlash’ (think of the end of the Roman or British Empires), the world never
really went back to its previous state. Rather, by moving two steps forward and one step back, some time towards the end of
the last century the process of globalization reached a point of no return. Today, revolutions or the collapse of empires
can never shrink the world again, short of the complete unravelling of human life as we know it. Globalization is here to
stay.
Globalization has become irreversible mainly thanks to radical changes in worldwide transport and communications (Brandt and
Henning
2002). Atoms and bytes have been moving increasingly rapidly, frequently, cheaply, reliably and widely for the past fifty years
or so. This dramatic acceleration has shortened the time required for any interactions: economic exchanges, financial transactions,
social relations, information flows, movements of people and so forth (Hodel
et al.
1998). In turn, this acceleration has a more condensed life and a contracted physical space. Ours is a smaller world, in which
one may multi-task fast enough to give, and have, the impression of leading parallel lives. We may regain a nineteenth-century
sense of time and space only if, one day, we travel to Mars.
In a world in which information and material flows are becoming so tightly integrated and enmeshed, it is not surprising to
see global patterns emerging not only from well-orchestrated operations (consider the tedious experience of any launch of
a major blockbuster, with interviews in magazines, discussions on TV programmes, advertisements of merchandise and by-products
throughout the world, special food products in supermarkets and fast-foods, etc.), but also inadvertedly, as the result of
the accidental synchronization of otherwise chaotic trends.
All of a sudden, the world reads the same novel, or wears the same kind of trousers, or listens to the same music, or eats
the same sort of food, or is concerned about the same problems, or cherishes the same news, or is convinced that it has the
same disease. Some of this need not be the effect of any plan by some Big Brother, a secret agency, a powerful multinational or any other mysterious source scheming behind the curtains. After
all, world-wide attention span is very limited and flimsy, and it is very hard to compete for it. The truth is that at least
some global trends may merely arise from the constructive interference of waves of information that accidentally come into
phase, and hence reinforce each other to the point of becoming global, through the casual and entirely contingent interaction
of chaotic forces. It may happen with the stock markets or the fashion industry or dietary trends. The recurrent emergence
of temporarily synchronized patterns of human behaviour, both transculturally and transnationally, is a clear sign of globalization,
but not necessarily of masterminded organization. There is no intelligent plan, evil intention, autonomy or purposeful organization
in the billion snowflakes that become an avalanche. Social group behaviour is acquiring a global meaning. The distributed
power that generates Wikipedia is the other side of the dark, mindless stupidity of millions of slaves of fashions and trends.
If we consider now the profound transformations just sketched, it would be rather surprising if they did not have serious
implications for our moral lives (see Weckert
2001 and Ess
2002). In a reality that is more and more physically contracted, virtually expanded, porous, hybridized, synchronized and correlated,
the very nature of moral interactions, and hence of their ethical analysis, is significantly altered. Innovative forms of
agenthood are becoming possible; new values are developing and old ones are being reshaped or re-prioritized; cultural and
moral assumptions are ever more likely to come into contact when not into conflict; the very concepts of what constitutes
our ‘natural’ environment and our enhanced features as a biological species are changing; and unprecedented ethical challenges
have arisen (a reference to the notorious problem of privacy is
de rigueur here), just to mention some macroscopic transformations in which globalization factors, as sketched above, play an important
role.
What sort of ethical reflection can help us to cope successfully with a world that is undergoing such dramatic changes? Local
approaches are as satisfactory as burying one's head in home values and traditions. The ethical discourse appears to be in
need of an upgrade to cope with a globalized world. Each ethical theory is called upon to justify its worldwide and cross-cultural
suitability. This seems even more so if the theory in question seeks to address explicitly the new moral issues that arise
from the evolution of the information society, as it is the case with Information Ethics (IE).
I shall say more about IE in the next two sections. The specific question that I wish to address is whether, in a world that
is fast becoming more and more globalized, Information Ethics can provide a successful approach for dealing with its new challenges.
I shall argue in favour of a positive answer. But to make my case, let me first clarify what Global Information Ethics may mean.
If we look at the roots of the problem, it seems that,
(i) in an increasingly globalized world, successful interactions among micro and macro agents belonging to different cultures
call for a high level of successful communication; but
(ii) successful, cross-cultural communications among agents require, in their turn, not only the classic three ‘e's – embodiment, embeddedness and hence experience, that is, a sense of ‘us-here-now’ – but also a shared ontology (more on this presently); and yet
(iii) imposing a uniform ontology on all agents only seems to aggravate the problem, globalization becoming synonymous with ontological
imperialism.
By ‘ontology’ I do not mean to refer here to any metaphysical theory of being, of what there is or there isn't, of why there
is what there is, or of the ultimate nature of reality in itself. All this would require a form of epistemological realism
(some confidence in some privileged access to the essential nature of things) that is controversial and that, fortunately,
is unnecessary here.
Rather, I am using ‘ontology’ to cover the outcome of a variety of processes that allow an agent to appropriate (be successfully
embedded in), semanticize (give meaning to, and make sense of) and conceptualize (order, understand and explain) her environment.
In simplified terms, one's ontology is one's world, that is, the world as it appears to, is experienced by and interacted
with, the agent in question.
1Agents can talk to each other only if they can partake to some degree in a shared ontology anchored to a common reality to
which they can all refer.
2 Imagine two solipsistic minds, α and β, disembodied, unembedded and devoid of any experience. Suppose them living in two
entirely different universes. Even if α and β could telepathically exchange their data, they could still not
communicate with each other, for there would be absolutely nothing that would allow the receiver to interpret the sender. In fact, it
would not even be clear whether any message was being exchanged at all.
The impossibility of communication between α and β is what
Wittgenstein (
1953) had in mind, I take it, when he wrote that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’. The statement is obviously
false (because we share with lions a similar form of embeddedness and embodiment, and hence experiences like hunger or pain)
if one fails to realize that the lion is only a place-holder to indicate an agent utterly and radically different from us,
like our α and β. The lion is a Martian, someone you simply cannot talk to because it is ‘from another ontology’
.
3From this perspective, the famous Latin phrase
hic sunt leones (here there are lions) acquires a new meaning. The phrase occurred on Roman maps to indicate unknown and unexplored regions
beyond the southern, African borders of the empire.
4 In a Wittgensteinian sense, the Romans were mapping the threshold beyond which no further communication was possible at all.
They were drawing the limits of their ontology. What was beyond the border, the
locus inhabited by the lions, was nothing, a non-place. Globalization has often meant that what is not inglobate simply isn't,
i.e. fails to exist.
We can now formulate the difficulty confronting a Global Information-Ethics as
the problem of the lion: cross-cultural communication, which is the
necessary condition for any further moral interaction, is possible only if the interlocutors partake in a common ontology.
When Crusoe and Friday meet, after twenty-five years of Crusoe's solitude on the island, they can begin to communicate with
each other only because they share the most basic ontology of life and death, food and shelter, fear and safety. Agents may
be strangers to each other. They do not have to speak the same language, empathize or sympathize. But they do need to share
at least some basic appropriation, semanticization and conceptualization of their common environment, as a minimal condition
for the possibility of any further, moral interaction.
Can Information Ethics provide a solution to the problem of the lion?
We saw in
Chapter 5 that Information Ethics endorses an environmental approach. As such, it offers the following four advantages.
(1) Embracing the new informational ontology.
Not only do we live in a world that is moving towards a common informational ontology, we also experience our environment
and talk and make sense of our experiences in increasingly informational ways.
Information is the medium. This calls for an ethics, like IE, that, by prioritizing an informational ontology, may provide a valuable approach to decoding
current moral phenomena and orienting our choices.
(2) Sharing a minimal, horizontal, lite ontology.
There is a risk, by adopting an ontocentric perspective, as IE suggests, that one may be merely exchanging one form of ‘centrism’
(American, Athenian, bio, European, Greek, male, Western, you name it) with just another, perhaps inadvertently, thus failing
to acknowledge the ultimate complexity, diversity and fragility of the multicultural, ethical landscape with which one is
interacting. We saw how the problem of the lion may become a dilemma. This justified concern, however, does not apply here
because IE advocates a
minimal informational ontology, which is not only timely, as we have just seen, but also tolerant of, and interfaceable with, other
local ontologies. Thick cultures with robust, vertical ontologies – that is, deeply seated, often irreconcilable, fundamental
conceptions about human nature, the value and meaning of life, the nature of the Universe and our place in it, society and
its fair organization, religious beliefs, and so forth – can more easily interact with each other if they can share a lite,
horizontal ontology, as little committed to any particular vision of reality as possible. The identification of an absolute,
ultimate, monistic ontology, capable of making all other ontologies merge, is just a myth, and a violent one at that. There
is no such thing as a commitment-free
position with respect to the way in which a variety of continuously changing agents appropriate, conceptualize and semanticize
their environment. Yet the alternative cannot be some form of relativism. This is no longer sustainable in a globalized world
in which choices, actions and events are delocalized. There simply is not enough room for ‘minding one's own business’ in
a network in which the behaviour of each node may affect the behaviour of all nodes. The approach to be pursued seems rather
to be along the lines of what IE proposes: respect for and tolerance towards diversity and pluralism and identification of
a minimal common ontology, which does not try to be platform independent (i.e. absolute), but cross-platform (i.e. portable)
.
As in
Queneau's
Exercises in Style, we need to be able to appreciate both the ninety-nine variations of the same story and the fact that it is, after all, the
same story that is being recounted again and again.
5 This plurality of narratives need not turn into a Babel of fragmented voices. It may well be a source of pluralism that enriches
one's ontology. More eyes simply see better and appreciate more angles, and a thousand languages can express semantic nuances
that no global Esperanto may ever hope to grasp.
(3) Informational Environmentalism.
The ontocentrism supported by IE means that at least some of the weight of the ethical interpretations may be carried by (outsourced
to) the informational ontology shared by the agents, not only by the different cultural or intellectual traditions (vertical
ontologies) to which they may belong. Two further advantages are that all agents, whether human, artificial, social or hybrid,
may be able to share the same minimal ontology and conceptual vocabulary; and then that any agent may take into account ecological
concerns that are not limited to the biosphere.
(4) Identifying the sources and targets of moral interactions.
One of the serious obstacles in sharing an ontology is often how the sources and targets of moral interactions (including
communication) are identified. The concept of person or human individual, and the corresponding features that are considered
essential to his or her definition, might be central in some ontologies, marginal in others, and different in most. IE may
help foster communication and fruitful interactions among different, thick, vertical ontologies by approaching the problem
with conceptual tools that are less pre-committed. For when IE speaks of agents and patients, these are neutral elements in
the ethical analysis that different cultures or macroethics may
be able to appropriate, enrich and make more complex, depending on their conceptual requirements and orientations. It is like
having an ontology of agency that is open source, and that anyone can adapt to its own proprietary metaphysics
.
It would be silly to conclude at this point that a Global-Information Ethics may provide an answer to any challenge posed
by the various phenomena of globalization. This would be impossible. Of course, there will be many issues and difficulties
that will require substantial extensions and adaptations of IE, of its methodology and of its principles. The point is that
such a great effort to apply IE as a global ethics would be fruitful and hence worth making.
It would be equally wrong to assume that the adoption of IE as a fruitful approach to global challenges may come at no conceptual
cost. Every ethical approach requires some concession on the part of those who decide to share it and IE is no exception.
The cost imposed by IE is summarizable in terms of the postulation of what I shall define as the ontic trust binding agents and patients. A straightforward way of clarifying the concept of ontic trust is by drawing an analogy with
the concept of ‘social contract’.
Various forms of contractualism (in ethics) and contractarianism (in political philosophy) argue that moral obligation, the
duty of political obedience, or the justice of social institutions, have their roots in, and gain their support from, a so-called
‘social contract’. This may be a real, implicit or merely hypothetical agreement between the parties constituting a society, e.g. the people and the sovereign, the members of a community, or the
individual and the state. The parties accept to agree to the terms of the contract, and thus obtain some rights, in exchange
for some freedoms that, allegedly, they would enjoy in a hypothetical state of nature. The rights and responsibilities of
the parties subscribing to the agreement are the terms of the social contract, whereas the society, state, group etc. is the
entity created for the purpose of enforcing the agreement. Both rights and freedoms are not fixed and may vary, depending
on the interpretation of the social contract.
Interpretations of the theory of the social contract tend to be highly (and often unknowingly)
anthropocentric (the focus is only on human rational agents) and stress the coercive nature of the agreement. These two aspects
are not characteristic of the concept of ontic trust, but the basic idea of a fundamental agreement between parties as a foundation
of moral interactions is sensible. In the case of the ontic trust, it is transformed into a primeval, entirely hypothetical
pact, logically predating the social contract, which all
agents cannot but sign when they come into existence, and that is constantly renewed in successive generations.
6 The sort of pact in question can be understood more precisely in terms of an actual trust
.
Generally speaking, a trust in the English legal system is an entity in which someone (the trustee) holds and manages the
former assets of a person (the trustor, or donor) for the benefit of certain persons or entities (the beneficiaries). Strictly
speaking, nobody owns the assets, since the trustor has donated them, the trustee has only legal ownership and the beneficiary
has only equitable ownership. Now, the logical form of this sort of agreement can be used to model the ontic trust, in the
following way:
• the assets or ‘corpus’ is represented by the world, including all existing agents and patients;
• the donors are all past and current generations of agents;
• the trustees are all current individual agents;
• the beneficiaries are all current and future individual agents and patients.
By coming into being, an agent is made possible thanks to the existence of other entities. It
is therefore bound to all that already is, both
unwillingly and
inescapably. It
should be so also
caringly.
Unwillingly, because no agent wills itself into existence, though every agent can, in theory, will itself out of it.
Inescapably, because the ontic bond may be broken by an agent only at the cost of ceasing to exist as an agent. Moral life does not begin
with an act of freedom, but it may end with one.
Caringly, because participation in reality by any entity, including an agent – that is, the fact that any entity is an expression
of what exists – provides a right to existence and an invitation (not a duty) to respect and take care of other entities.
The pact then involves no coercion, but a mutual relation of appreciation, gratitude and care, which is fostered by the recognition
of the dependence of all entities on each other. A simple example may help to clarify further the meaning of the ontic trust.
Existence begins with a gift, even if possibly an unwanted one. A foetus will be initially only a beneficiary of the world.
Once she is born and has become a full moral agent, she will be, as an individual, both a beneficiary and a trustee of the
world. She will be in charge of taking care of the world, and, insofar as she is a member of the generation of living agents,
she will also be a donor of the world. Once dead, she will leave the world to other
agents after her, and thus become a member of the generation of donors. In short, the life of an agent becomes a journey from
being only a beneficiary to being only a donor, passing through the stage of being a responsible trustee of the world. We
begin our career as moral agents as strangers to the world; we should end it as friends of the world.
The obligations and responsibilities imposed by the ontic trust will vary depending on circumstances but, fundamentally, the
expectation is that actions will be taken or avoided in view of the welfare of the whole world.
The ontic trust is what is postulated by the approach supported by IE. According to IE, the ethical discourse concerns any
entity, understood informationally, that is, not only all persons, their cultivation, well-being and social interactions,
not only animals, plants and their proper natural life, but also anything that exists, from buildings and other artefacts
to rivers and sand. Indeed, according to IE, nothing is too humble to deserve no respect at all. In this way, IE brings to
ultimate completion the process of enlargement of the concept of what may count as a centre of a (no matter how minimal) moral
claim, which now includes every instance of being understood informationally, no matter whether physically implemented or not. IE holds that every entity, as an expression
of being, has a dignity, constituted by its mode of existence and essence (the collection of all the elementary proprieties that constitute
it for what it is), which deserve to be respected (at least in a minimal and overridable sense) and hence place moral claims
on the interacting agent and ought to contribute to guiding and constraining his ethical decisions and behaviour whenever
possible. The ontic trust (and the corresponding ontological equality principle among entities) means that any form of reality
(any instance of information/being), simply by the fact of being what it is, enjoys a minimal, initial, overridable, equal right to exist and develop in a way which is appropriate to its
nature. In the history of philosophy, a similar view can be found advocated by Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers, and by
Spinoza.
The acceptance of the ontic trust requires a disinterested judgement of the moral situation from an objective perspective,
that is, a perspective which is as non-anthropocentric as possible. Moral behaviour is less likely without this epistemic
virtue. The ontic trust is respected whenever actions are impartial, universal and ‘caring’ towards the world.