Cyberspace consists of a world of beings that use their vast state spaces to perform complex and often far-reaching actions. The ethics of an action depends, amongst other things, on all its consequences (just as Consequentialism would argue in the standard case). But determination of those consequences is no more practically feasible in Cyberspace than it would in principle be in the standard world.
The approach of standard Ethics to the ethics of Cyberspace is to reason entirely outside Cyberspace, making whatever anthropic assumptions are necessary to do so. That has been found inappropriate and even misleading in its conclusions.
The formal methods approach is to reason rigorously from the specifications of all components involved to determine all consequences of a given action. Its advantage is that only with such methods can an exact understanding of actions in Cyberspace be completely understood. However, as we have observed, for large systems that is simply impractical: a system with two interacting components having p and q many states respectively has pq many states and so state explosion results.
We offer a simple alternative combining the beneficial aspects of both those approaches. Subjective judgements and consideration of common-sense values are explained by the definition of a particular entropy structure. Rigorous reasoning is employed to determine how an action affects the entropy pre-order. The result seems to afford an exceptional simplification of the formal-methods approach by concentrating on just one aspect of an action.
Thus the contribution of this paper can be seen as a decomposition of the task of discussing the morality of an action in Cyberspace into standard and rigorous components.