Agents in Cyberspace perform actions with far-reaching consequences. Increasingly, they are embedded in larger systems that invoke them autonomously. Think of control of safety-critical systems (like fly-by-wire aircraft, train routing, power plants and air-traffic control), management of sensitive or even secret data (like the electoral register and commercial or government databases responsible for national security), communications systems (like email, file transfer and ecommerce) and expert systems (medical, scientific or legal).
Because they no longer need to be the result of a single programming project, and they may not be directly under control of a human, the morality of the actions of such agents seems to require new formulations and analyses. For example, was the action of the autopilot wrong? Who is to blame? Is the encryption software good? Ought an agent to be able to eavesdrop on this email conversation? Does my word processor behave correctly with respect to its autonomous duties concerning fonts, pagination, footnotes, spelling, cross referencing, and so on? Even a simple, non-moral question such as "did Deep Blue play well?" is loaded with evaluative assumptions.
A domain of discourse and set of values is required for the discussion of such questions. We are not here concerned so much with how that is used. We imagine it being employed much as in standard Ethics, to reason in levels of detail. ('Life is precious' is a standard ethical rule at a low level of detail; a particular murder might be judged moral by appeal to some rule at a finer level, like 'liberation of oppressed populations is good'. We shall see that entropy, in its most general form, provides a way of reasoning that viral action in Cyberspace is in general bad because it destroys structure; but entropy in a finer form must be used to reason for the benevolence of a virus that appears equally random but on closer analysis turns out to perpetrate patches to fix millennial bugs).
Initially, the approach has led to ignore the new nature of Cyberspace: anthropic principles have been used either to shift the burden of an agent's actions to its creators, or to treat it as if it were in some way sentient. Whilst for simple programs on a stand-alone machine that view may be partially acceptable, for those whose code accrues over the web, whose behaviour is modified over time (so called 'learning' programs [11]) and use probabilistic choices [12] it is simply not feasible (for a constantly updated supply of topical examples which demonstrate the inadequacy of standard macroethics in reasoning about evil in Cyberspace see [13] and the articles in this issue of Etica & Politica). Perhaps that is why some computer scientists have, for many years, explicitly resisted anthroporphism, claiming it to be the sign of an immature discipline [4].
Floridi [6] has suggested that information be elevated in status to 'being' and [5] that entropy be used to discuss moral claims concerning action on it. He argues that standard Ethics is unable, by itself, to provide an appropriate foundation for Computer Ethics. In the specific case represented by the non-sentient constitution of Cyberspace, this renders the laws of standard (inevitably anthropocentric) Ethics inapplicable and its conclusions remote whilst providing a vehicle for crime which may be victimless or of a characteristically ludic nature. Standard or classic macroethical theories like Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism and Deontologism, being anthropocentric and agent-oriented, take only a relative interest in the 'patient', which is on the receiving end of the action and endures its effects. Only non-standard approaches, like Medical Ethics, Bioethics and Environmental Ethics, attempt to develop full patient-oriented ethics in which the 'patient' may be any form of life. They argue that the nature and well-being of the patient of an action constitute its moral standing and that the latter makes vital claims on the interacting agent and ought to contribute to the guidance of the agent's ethical decisions and the constraint of the agent's moral behaviour. Compared with standard Ethics, non-standard Ethics are theories of nature and space -- their ethical analyses start from the moral properties and values of what there is -- no longer of history and time (human actions and their consequences). By placing the 'receiver' of the action at the centre of the ethical discourse, and displacing its 'transmitter' to its periphery, they help to widen further our anthropocentric view of who or what may qualify as a centre of moral concern. Classic Ethics is inevitably egocentric and logo-centric -- all theorising concerns a conscious and self-assessing agent whose behaviour must be supposed sufficiently free, reasonable and informed, for an ethical evaluation to be possible on the basis of his or her responsibility -- whereas non-classic ethics, being bio-centric and patient-oriented, are epistemologically allocentric -- i.e. they are centred on, and interested in, the entity itself that receives the action, rather than in its relation or relevance to the agent -- and morally altruistic, so they can include any form of life and all vulnerable human beings within the ethical sphere, not just foetuses, new-born babies and senile persons, but above all physically or mentally ill, disabled or disadvantaged people. From this perspective, we argue that Information Ethics is the last stage in the development of a non-standard approach, an ontocentric expansion of environmental ethics towards a fully non-biologically biased concept of a 'centre of moral worth' [6].