Luciano Floridi — director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University (previously Oxford) — is one of the most influential contemporary philosophers in the field of information and AI ethics. His Information Ethics (built up between 1999 and 2013) offers an original counter-proposal, though one that is problematic from the standpoint of the ontology of the person.
Key Contribution
Floridi designs Information Ethics as an ontologically centered, non-anthropocentric ethics. The basic idea: everything that is can be described informationally. From this ontology Floridi derives a minimal duty of regard toward all that exists — the so-called entropic harm principle: one ought not unnecessarily reduce the information sphere (infosphere) entropically.
In his book The Ethics of Information (2013), Floridi differentiates four principles of ascending ethical strength: 0. entropy ought not to be caused in the infosphere
- entropy ought to be prevented
- entropy ought to be removed
- the flourishing of informational entities ought to be promoted
The result is a gradualist moral status that extends from a slab of stone to the human person — with differing weights, but without any categorial barrier.
Significance for the Ontology of the Person — Critical Assessment
The ontology of the person acknowledges Floridi’s attempt to ground ethics ontologically — it shares that concern. But it rejects the underlying ontology. The thesis being = information is reductive: it levels precisely that distinction of levels of being (entity — substance — animate substance — spiritual substance — person) which is constitutive for the ontology of the person.
The concrete danger: if even stones, data objects, and programs possess a — however minimal — moral status, then the distinction of the person loses its categorial sharpness. The result is once again a form of the oblivion of the person: the person becomes a particularly complex case of information, not the categorially other. Dignity is gradualized; Spaemann’s someone–something distinction dissolves.
Floridi’s approach is methodologically instructive — it shows that a non-personalist fundamental ontology in roboethics tends toward extending moral status to machines. Conversely, this consequence illustrates why the personalist ontology remains indispensable.
Place in the Book
In the book, Floridi represents the philosophically most ambitious counter-position: not relativist, not utilitarian, but ontologically grounded — yet with the wrong fundamental ontology. The engagement with him is the sharpest test of the necessity of substance-ontological stratification.
See also
- AI Ethics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Personhood
- Dignity
- Oblivion of the Person
- Substance
- Someone
- Joanna Bryson
- Mark Coeckelbergh
- Robert Spaemann
Sources: Floridi, Luciano (2013): The Ethics of Information. Oxford University Press.
Further sources:
- Floridi, Luciano (1999): “Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics”. Ethics and Information Technology 1(1), pp. 33–52.
- Floridi, Luciano (2011): The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press.
- Floridi, Luciano (2014): The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press.
- Floridi, Luciano / Sanders, J. W. (2004): “On the Morality of Artificial Agents”. Minds and Machines 14(3), pp. 349–379.