Re: [Fis] ON INFORMATION ETHICS - more questions

John,

thanks for the news questions. My 're-marks' as follows:

>In a way all ethical action depends on sufficient information. But how is information grounded in traditional ethics, say in Aristotle's hexis, ithos and ethos (character and habit), which are in turn rooted in energeia? Is the Kantian categorical imperative an adequate ethic to account for the customs and morals of the posthuman Information Age? Manichean ethics has made a big comeback in recent times and meshes nicely with the I/O on/off switches of the digital world where bios is entangled with BIOS.

Yes, ethical action depends on (sufficient) information but this is not enough. There must be a source/force (that is not purely an intellectual one as Socrates conceived it?) that 'impels' us to act morally (or not). A difficult problem as you know (Rousseau vs. Hobbes etc.). For Aristotle ethical counseling/reflection was basic (Socratic roots but with more explicit (syllogistic/rhetoric) logic. The Kantian Imperative is not blind. It presupposes that we think about the possibility of universalizing the maxim. This implies information too (the imperative 'in-forms' our will).

>In a post-Kantian times the ethical complexity of our age has produced various 'ethical' responses to science and technology (e.g. Singer's utilitarianism, virtue ethics, moral luck, fragility of goodness). In medical ethics 'viability' and 'fragility' of life are key concepts but are they really issues of information ethics? (cf the issues of 'informed consent' or 'negligence' which do have an informational dimension). What is our frame of reference for 'information ethics'? Can we relate it one or all of Aristotle's four aitio's (causes) - possibly to the efficient cause - e.g. the man who gives advice? Can we have an information ethics
without an umbrella ontology (like Floridi's constructivist infosphere of 'data affordances') or an agreed definition of 'information'? Several people on this forum have acknowledged that Shannonist 'enformation' is only a limited case of the broader phenomenon 'information' - which is still to be identified.

Well utilitarianism, virtue ethics etc. are 'old' products... but I agree with you that "we" (!) live in a post-metaphysical context.
Informed consent is a key issue in information ethics (particularly in the bioethics debate).
There are, I think, different frames of reference for information ethics. This is why I think that we need an intercultural debate that will take a long time (as a scientific/philosophic debate) independently of the urgent need for consensus in practical matters (internet etc.). Information ethics as a field of reflection is in some regard a 'void space' as it allows to critize moral presuppositions in the field. Floridi develops more a "digital metaphysics' in the sense coined by Heidegger and less a (possible) horizong of defining the meaning of Being. Under this perspective the "broader phenomenon of information" is the view of human communication within the horizon of the digital (and on a broader perspective the view of all phenomena under this horizon: esse est computari, or: we believe that we understand something it its being when we are able to grasp it digitally). I believe that this kind of ontological reductionism is the "spirit of our time" (Zeitgeist) similarly to materialism in the 19th century.

Q1. What is the philosophic and ethical challenge of the physical, chemical, biological... sciences today with regard to human freedom and the 'laws' (?) that should regulate our actions? What is the meaning of 'natural law' today and can we take it as an analogy (?) in the field of morality? are there other alternatives?

>Is 'information' on the side of the natural or the artificial?

these are two sides of the same coin as far as we identify information with our interpretation of the natural

>here have been many movies and books exploring this issue generally suggesting that digital or virtual worlds obviate traditional ethical relationships and values - Ridley Scott's 'Bladerunner' and Spielberg's 'A.I.' spring to mind.

yes, indeed, not to forget Stanislav Lem and... Homer (Hephaistos), Hesiod, Greek engineers (but also Chinese ones...), Albertus Magus, Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie, Holbach etc.

>is information a law unto itself?

difficult to say

>Shannon claimed that humans are basically machines. Behind the Ego and the 'I' of humanism there may be only 'bundles of information' in the brain. This threatens the hegemony of consciousness and the psyche which have been the traditional conceptual guardians of 'human freedom and the laws.'

well this was said already (partly) by Descartes , La Mettrie...
The challenge to human psyche comes also from Freud...

>It may be that what we call 'information' is an ingredient of scientific doubt which allows us to continually question our environment, its natural laws and networks. It may reflect an organism's ability to 'turn back on itself' which runs like Ariadne's thread through the history of the mind - from Bateson's 'difference that makes a difference', Deleuze's 'difference et repetition', Von Weiszacker's 'Erstmaligkeit and Bestatigung', Geertz's 'repentance and reconciliation' , Gadamer's 'negative experience - consciousness reversing direction', Peirce's abduction, Nietzsche's 'What doesn't kill me makes me stronger', Aquinas's metanoia and Plato's periagoge in the parable of the cave.

yes, information in this sense (following Luhmann and others) is our answer to a 'meaning offer'

>If information ethics is about action that 'makes a difference' then understanding the dynamics of information (and its agential role in language and communication) is just as important as observing and defining it as an entity.

'making a difference' is I think a necessary but not a sufficient condition for moral action upon which information ethics reflects. How do "we" define what makes a "good" or a "bad" difference?

Q2. What is the philosophic and ethical challenge of modern information technology with regard to human freedom? How far do we conceive the 'cyberspace' or, more generally speaking, the potential digitization of all phenomena (human and non human) as a (the?) condition for understanding them, and what does this mean with regard to human behavior? More specifically: do we conceive ourselves eventually as information processing devices?, and if yes, what follows with regard to artificial digital devices that we are creating now and in the future?

>Do you accept the Hayles doctrine of posthumanism? Is there no more conscious "I" there - only microtubular circuits in the brain leaking information?

Katherine Hayles makes a credible critics of 'disembodied information' (or 'digital metaphysics') and consequently of the 'posthuman' vision. I think she is right.

>Are there really such things as the 'data panopticon' (Foucault) or the 'stochastic prison' (Rene Thom)?

there are worse things than that!

>Q3. What does it mean for human beings to be able to behave in a global digital world in which time and space seem to disappear? What are the consequences of our doing for the whole planet? How can we create rules of action that are accepted by all human beings in order to achieve a global sustainable (physical and cultural and economic...) development without deleting all differences that makes human life worth living?
 
How is information ethics related to computer ethics (netiquette, software piracy, hacking and cracking etc)?

information ethics in a narrower sense has to to with ethical problems of the internet. This goes back to questions rised in the informatic field (in the 1960s) under the label "computer ethics"
In a broader sense information ethics deals with all aspects of dealing with information also in non-human phenomena (and not only related to the digital)

>What are the ethics of misinformation and disinformation? Are they merely other forms of lying?

in the specific framwork of human interaction, yes (or we should better say that lying is a form of mis/desinformation?)

>Since Jean Francois Revel's 'Without Marx or Jesus' in 1972 the concept of 'Freedom of Information' and a view of the state as the bureaucratic custodian of privileged information have dominated French thought (Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, Lyotard etc). Is Information really a bad guy guarding state secrets or just a stool pigeon of politics and a henchman of technology (spreading stories about WMDs)? Does FOI reflect the traditional paranoia of the Left or dies it represent a natural democratic right of the individual?

difficult to say, as within the new conditions of a generalized (well 1 billion people at the moment) horizontal and interactive communication the situation is different as, say, the one envisaged by Baudrillard (TV in the 1980s) But the 'hype' of the internet (late 1990s) is gone and "we" do not know what comes next...

>Q4. What does it mean that knowledge should be free? is it only a problem of freedom of access? And what does it mean for scientific communication? How does this principle collide with, for instance, the economic principles underlying a market economy?

By knowledge do you mean 'justified true belief' per se or the artefacts of cognition - books, journals articles etc?

the discussion deals at the moment more with the artefact I think.

Freedom for what? Freedom from what? Freedom for whom?

This comes out in the Public Library of Science's battle with the publishing industry, digital agenda bills, sharing v ownership of knowledge, public versus private data debate(cf http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1726229,00.html)
Are we presupposing that information has an intrinsic relationship with knowledge?

yes, as far knowledge presupposes to be in-formed in some way.

>Since Hume this has always been assumed but not proven. As a phenomenon information may have closer affinities to time and language than to human cognition. We can be informed that x without consciously knowing that x. For example, our information about WMD's is contingent on what we are told about them through language and on the time frame of political statements about them (after a few years we may no longer be interested in or ever know the truth.) If knowledge (and science as a body of knowledge) is (as Godel, Kuhn, Von Forster and Rorty have suggested) largely a subjective story then we are left with probabilities, prepositional statements, statistics, rumour - information - as a basis for ethical decisions.

In the Middle Ages there was a distinction between 'informatio sensus' and 'informatio intellectus (possibilis)' that shows that the concept of information deals with both aspects

kind regards

Rafael

>Q5. What does it mean that not only information distributed in a one-to-many structure (like the case of the mass media of the 20th century) but also that everybody is able to communicate with everybody including also the possibilities of one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, some-to-many? Are there ethical and legal regulations for this process? If legal regulations presuppose central power and this is not desirable at a global level, what are the alternatives? Can we learn from nature in this regard? and if yes, how far?

We need to answer Questions 1-4 first.
    John H

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Received on Fri Mar 24 19:43:53 2006