Infraethics–on the Conditions of Possibility of Morality

Philosophy & Technology, Oct 2017

Luciano Floridi

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Infraethics–on the Conditions of Possibility of Morality

Philos. Technol. Infraethics-on the Conditions of Possibility of Morality 0 Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford , 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS , UK It is a sign of our times that, when politicians speak of infrastructure nowadays, they often have in mind information and communication technologies (ICTs). They are not wrong. From success in business to cyber-conflicts, what makes contemporary societies work depends increasingly on bits rather than atoms. Depending on their digital infrastructures, societies may grow and prosper. And it is their ICTs that often represent one of their weakest sides, in terms of cyber security. We know all this. What is less obvious, and philosophically more interesting, is that ICTs also seem to have unveiled a new sort of equation. Consider the unprecedented emphasis that ICTs place on crucial phenomena such as accountability, intellectual property right, neutrality, openness, privacy, transparency, and trust. These are probably better understood in terms of a platform or infrastructure of social norms, expectations and rules that is there to facilitate or hinder the moral or immoral behaviour of the agents involved. By placing at the core of our life our informational interactions so significantly, ICTs have uncovered something that, of course, has always been there, but less visibly so in the past: the fact that moral behaviour is also a matter of Bethical infrastructure^, or what I have simply called infraethics. The idea of an infraethics is simple, but the following Bnew equation^ may help to clarify it further. In the same way as business and administration systems, in economically mature societies, increasingly require physical infrastructures (transport, communication, services etc.) to succeed, likewise human interactions, in informationally mature societies, increasingly require an infraethics to flourish. The equation is a bit more than just an analogy between infrastructure and infraethics. When economists and political scientists speak of a Bfailed state^, they may refer to the failure of a state-as-astructure to fulfil its basic roles, such as exercising control over its borders, collecting taxes, enforcing laws, administering justice, providing schooling and so forth. Or they may refer to the collapse of a state-as-an-infrastructure or environment, which makes - possible and fosters the right sort of social interactions. This means that they may be referring to the collapse of a substratum of default, accepted ways of living together in terms of economic, political and social conditions, such as the rule of law, respect for civil rights, a sense of political community, civilised dialogue among differentlyminded people, ways to reach peaceful resolutions of tensions and so forth. All these expectations, attitudes, rules, norms and practices, in short, such an implicit Bsociopolitical infrastructure^, which one may take for granted, provides a vital ingredient for the success of any complex society. It plays a vital role in human interactions, comparable to the one that we are now accustomed to attributing to physical infrastructures in economics. The idea of an infraethics can be misleading because, despite the economic analogy, an infraethics should not be understood in terms of Marxist theory, as if it were a mere update of the old Bbase and superstructure^ idea. The elements in question are entirely different. We are dealing with immoral/moral actions and not-yet-ethical facilitators of such immoral/moral actions. Nor should infraethics be understood, conceptually, in terms of a kind of second-order or metaethical discourse about ethics because it is rather the not-yet-ethical framework that can facilitate or hinder evaluations, decisions, actions, or situations, which are then moral or immoral. At the same time, it would also be wrong to think that an infraethics is either ethically neutral or simply has an ethical dual-use, because its dual-use is always oriented. If it were just neutral, this would mean that an infraethics would not affect either ethical or unethical behaviour, a mere logical possibility that is utterly unrealistic. In philosophy of technology, it is now commonly agreed that design—in any context, society included—is never ethically neutral but always embeds some values, whether implicitly or implicitly. Yet this does not mean that an infraethics is simply dual-use, as if it could both facilitate and hinder morally good as well as evil behaviour in equal degree, depending on other external factors. The textbook example is the knife that can save a life or murder someone. And the trivial comment is that its use and hence moral evaluation depends on the circumstances. This is true, but insufficiently perceptive because not all knives are born equal. The very short, blunt and round knife that an airline provides to spread butter has a dual-use hugely oriented to fulfil a purpose that the butcher knife can also fulfil, but much (...truncated)


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Luciano Floridi. Infraethics–on the Conditions of Possibility of Morality, Philosophy & Technology, 2017, pp. 391-394, Volume 30, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s13347-017-0291-1