Information Ethics – A Position Paper

Abstract

The paper describes some of the main ethical challenges of information society as currently discussed within the framework of the World Summit on the Information Society. It addresses the question of ‘what is information ethics?’ under a twofold perspective. In a large sense information ethics is said to deal with ethical questions related to all kinds of digital phenomena including all non-digital but digitalized or digitalizable phenomena. In a narrower sense information ethics deals with ethical questions of human communication within a digital environment. A non-metaphysical foundation of information ethics in the narrower sense (‘nethics’ or Internet ethics) is given. Curricula targets are briefly outlined.