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Citation: Bawden, D. (2014). The Ethics of Information. Aslib Journal of Information
Management, 66(6), pp. 697-699. doi: 10.1108/ajim-06-2014-0075
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Luciano Floridi
The ethics of information
Oxford: Oxford University Press
xix plus 357 pages
isbn 987‐0‐19‐964132‐1, hardback, publishers price £30
Luciano Floridi is well‐known as the leading extant philosopher with a strong interest in
information, and his latest book extends his contributions into the area of information
ethics (hereafter, as in the book, IE).
IE became recognised as a concept in the 1980s, through pioneering writings such as
Koenig, Kostrewski and Oppenheim (1981), as Floridi notes. However, a main theme of
this book is that such treatments, and those which stemmed from them, lacked a full
philosophical underpinning. This, he seeks to remedy: “Today, philosophy faces the
challenge of providing a foundational treatment of the phenomena and the ideas
underlying the information revolution, in order to foster our understanding and guide
both the responsible construction of our society and the sustainable management of
our natural and synthetic environments, In short, we need a philosophy of information.
[This] investigates the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including
its ethical consequences.” (p. xii)
Floridi sees the philosophy of information as a branch of philosophy itself, rather than as
an adjunct to information and knowledge management or computer science.
Information, in this view is “something as fundamental and significant as knowledge,
being, validity, truth, meaning, mind, or good and evil, and so equally worthy of
autonomous, philosophical investigation” (p. xii). And therefore, as with other branches
of philosophy, ethics plays a major part. Floridi argues that considering the ethical
problems of information, and its technologies, can lead us to reconsider some basic
principles of ethics in general.
This book is therefore very much a work of serious philosophy, its task being “to
contribute to [the] conceptual foundations of IE as a new area of philosophical
research” (p. xiii). It is the second of a series of four monographs, entitled – just in case
of any doubt as to the status of this work as academic philosophy in the grand tradition ‐
Principia Philosophiae Informationis. It follows a monograph on the philosophy of
information (Floridi 2011), and will be followed in turn by a text on the politics of
information. Floridi locates this work in a merger of the rival traditions of analytical and
continental philosophy, and places it in a tradition from Plato and Plotinus through to
Augustine and Moore, with some relation to Spinoza, Confuscius and others.
The book’s arguments are situated in Floridi’s contention that we are living through an
‘informational turn’ or ‘fourth revolution’, following the scientific revolutions of
Copernicus, Darwin and Freud (Floridi 2014). This sees us regarding ourselves as
informationally embodied organisms, ‘inforgs’, embedded in an informational
environment, the ‘infosphere’, in which the boundaries between online and offline
environments merge, so that we live in a manner termed ‘onlife’ (European Commission
2014). The present book is therefore about the creation of a framework of ethics for
inforgs, including humans, but also artificial agents, living in the infosphere.
The books opens with chapters setting the scene by describing the information
revolution, and the nature and foundations of the IE which are needed as a
consequence. Subsequent chapters explore the moral implications of the actions inforgs
in the infosphere, while the closing chapters with issues such as privacy, information
and business ethics, and morality is distributed and global information societies.
Arguably the central idea, and one very different from that offered by other
philosophical approaches to ethics is the any expression of Being, that is any distinct
aspect of the infosphere, has intrinsic worth. This leads to the ‘four ethical principles of
IE’:
• entropy ought not to be caused in the infosphere
• entropy ought to be prevented in the infosphere
• entropy ought to be removed from the infosphere
• the flourishing of informational entities as well as of the whole infosphere ought
to be promote by preserving, cultivating, and enriching their well‐being
(Entropy is here understood in both the physical and information theoretic senses: a
‘mixed‐upness’ of physical or information systems.)
This book is not, as the author explicitly concedes, an introduction to information and
computer ethics, nor a textbook on professional ethics. “IE is not immediately useful”,
he tells us, “to solve specific ethical problems … but nor does a textbook on Newtonian
physics solve your car problems. IE is supposed to provide the conceptual grounds that
then guide problem‐solving procedures” (pp. 313‐314). However, there are some links
to the sort of ethical issues that occur in information management; librarians’ codes of
ethics get a mention, and there is a particularly interesting discussion of privacy from
the infosphere perspective.
With commendable honesty, Floridi concedes that the book “is not a page‐turner” (p.
xiv). However, it is, in my view, about as clearly written as a book of this kind can be,
and the author’s use of summaries and conclusions at the beginnings and ends of
chapters – which he charmingly relates to the Battlestar Galactica series – are of
considerable help to the philosophical tyro. It has to be admitted that those without a
strong background in philosophy will have to take much on trust, and will probably need
to skip some sections, but this is no excuse for not engaging with this excellent book.
For more immediate guidance on ethical problems in information management, the
reader would be better consult the chapters in Floridi’s edited text on information and
computer ethics (Floridi 2010), or the literature on library/information ethics
summarised by Bawden and Robinson (2012, chapter 11). This monograph will serve an
entirely different function: to act as a long‐lasting source for debate on our profession’s
ethical dilemmas, and to provide a novel basis for such debate.
The book is well‐produced, seems free from extensive errors, and has an adequate,
though not very exhaustive, index. It is also very reasonably priced, by today’s
standards, for a hardback book of this kind. It deserves to be widely read by advanced
students and researchers in the library/information sciences, and by the more reflective
kind of information practitioner.
David Bawden
Department of Library and Information Science
City University London
References
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2012), Information society, chapter 11 of Introduction to
information science, London: Facet, pp. 231‐249
European Commission (2014), The Onlife Manifesto [online], available at
https://ec.europa.eu/digital‐agenda/en/onlife‐manifesto, accessed 21 June 2014
Floridi, L. (2014), The fourth revolution: how the infosphere is reshaping human reality,
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Floridi, L. (2011), The Philosophy of Information, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Floridi, L. (ed.) (2010), The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Koenig, M.E.D., Kostrewski, B.J. and Oppenheim, C. (1981), Ethics in information science,
Journal of Information Science, 3, 45‐47
