Information technologies and the tragedy of the good will

Ethics and Information Technology 8 (4):253–262 (2006)
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Abstract

Information plays a major role in any moral action. ICT have revolutionized the life of information, from its production and management to its consumption, thus deeply affecting our moral lives. Amid the many issues they have raised, a very serious one, discussed in this paper, is labelled the tragedy of the Good Will. This is represented by the increasing pressure that ICT and their deluge of information are putting on any agent who would like to act morally, when informed about actual or potential evils, but who also lacks the resources to do much about them. In the paper, it is argued that the tragedy may be at least mitigated, if not solved, by seeking to re-establish some equilibrium, through ICT themselves, between what agents know about the world and what they can do to improve it.

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Luciano Floridi
Yale University

Citations of this work

Information ethics: a reappraisal.Luciano Floridi - 2008 - Ethics and Information Technology 10 (2–3):189–204.
On Floridi’s metaphysical foundation of information ecology.Rafael Capurro - 2008 - Ethics and Information Technology 10 (2-3):167-173.

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