Floridi and Spinoza on global information ethics

Floridi’s ontocentric ethics is compared with Spinoza’s ethical and metaphysical system as found in the Ethics. Floridi’s is a naturalistic ethics where he argues that an action is right or wrong primarily because the action does decrease the ?entropy’ of the infosphere or not. An action that decreases the amount entropy of the infosphere is a good one, and one that increases it is a bad one. For Floridi, ?entropy’ refers to destruction or loss of diversity of the infosphere, or the total reality consisting of informational objects. The similarity with Spinoza is that both philosophers refer to basic reality as a foundation for normative judgments. Hence they are both ethical naturalists. An interpretation of both Floridi and Spinoza is offered that might begin to solve the basic problems for any naturalistic ethics. The problems are how a value theory that is based on metaphysics could maintain normative force and how normative force could be justified when there appear to be widely differing metaphysical systems according to the many cultural traditions. I argue that in Spinoza’s and presumably in Floridi’s system, there is no separation between the normative and the natural from the beginning. Normative terms derive their validity from their role in referring to action that leads to a richer and fuller reality. As for the second problem, Spinoza’s God is such that He cannot be fully described by mere finite intellect. What this translates to the contemporary situation of information ethics is that there are always bound to be many different ways of conceptualizing one and the same reality, and it is the people’s needs, goals and desires that often dictate how the conceptualizing is done. However, when different groups of people interact, these systems become calibrated with one another. This is possible because they already belong to the same reality.     

The Web of Time and the Dilemma of Globalization

Time is affected significantly by the spread of the Internet throughout the world. On the one hand, the new communication technologies provide for "round-the-clock" operation, threatening to obliterate time as a function of a culture's sense of identity. On the other hand, the Internet enables local cultures to resist the globalizing and homogenizing tide. The situation points to a dilemma. Local cultures find it hard to resist integrating itself with the world through the Internet, but at the same time they feel a real need to protect and to promote their identities. This article tries to show that local cultures find the medium an appropriate and effective one in putting forward their agenda. As the globalizing force signified by the Internet tends to occur at a superficial level, different conceptions of time can coexist at the same time. The emerging conception of time is thus characterized neither by the premodern one of identification of time with nature, nor by the modern one of an abstract entity pointing forward, but by a "web" allowing for different strands to go their own way while weaved together to create a coherent pattern, and this is how the dilemma is resolved. A case study of the Thai conceptions of time and the current debate on changing the time standard is presented in order to illustrate the point.