Introduction: in search of a unified approach to information ethics

In recent years, Information Ethics (IE) has come to mean different things to different researchers working in a variety of disciplines, including computer ethics, business ethics, medical ethics, computer science, the philosophy of information, social epistemology and library and information science. This is not surprising. Perhaps this Babel was always going to be inevitable, given the novelty of the field and the multifarious nature of the concept of information itself and of its related phenomena. It is, however, unfortunate, for it has generated some confusion about the specific nature and scope of IE. The problem, however, is not irremediable, for a unified approach can help to explain and relate the main senses in which IE has been discussed in the literature. The approach is best introduced schematically and by focusing our attention on a moral agent A.

Suppose A is interested in pursuing whatever she considers her best course of action, given her predicament. We shall assume that A's evaluations and actions have some moral value, but no specific value needs to be introduced. Intuitively, A can use some information (information as a resource) to generate some other information (information as a product) and in so doing affect her informational environment (information as target). Now, since the appearance of the first works in the eighties (for an early review see Smith 1996), Information Ethics has been claimed to be the study of moral issues arising from one or another of these three distinct ‘information arrows’ (see Figure 5.1).