This is the first philosophical monograph entirely and exclusively dedicated to Information Ethics.Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, health care, industrial production and business, social relations, and conflicts.Therefore, they have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and on contemporary ethical debates. Privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, technological determinism, the digital divide, online pornography, are only some of t ... More

This is the first philosophical monograph entirely and exclusively dedicated to Information Ethics.Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, health care, industrial production and business, social relations, and conflicts.Therefore, they have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and on contemporary ethical debates. Privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, technological determinism, the digital divide, online pornography, are only some of the pressing issues that characterize the ethical discourse in the information society. They are the subject of Information Ethics (IE), the new philosophical area of research that investigates the ethical impact of ICTs on human life and society.The book lays down, for the first time, the conceptual foundations for Information Ethics. It does so systematically, by pursuing three goals:a). metatheoretical goal: it describes what Information Ethics is, its problems, approaches, and methods;b). introductory goal: it helps the reader to gain a better grasp of the complex and multifarious nature of the various concepts and phenomena related to Information Ethics;c) analytic goal: it answers several key theoretical questions of great philosophical interest, arising from the investigation of the ethical implications of ICTs.Although entirely independent of The Philosophy of Information (OUP, 2011), the previous book by the same author, it complements it as part of the tetralogy on the foundations of the philosophy of information (Principia Philosophiae Informationis)