We call our society “the infor mation socie ty” because of the pivo tal ro le pl ayed by informationintensives services (business and property services, commun ications, finance and insurance), public sector (education, public ad ministration , health care) and intellectual, intangible assets (knowledge-based econo my). As a social structure, the information society has been made possible by a cluster of information and com municatio n techno logies (ICT). As a full expr essio n of techn, the information society has already posed fundamental ethical problems, whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidly evolving. What is the best strategy to con struct an information society that is ethically sound? This is the question I wish to discuss in this paper. Let me anticipate my conclu sion. Th e task is to formulate an information ethics that can treat the wo rld of data, information, knowledge 2 and commu nication as a new environment, the infosphere . This information ethics must be able to address and solve the ethical challenges arising in the new environment on the basis of the fundamental principles of respect for information, its conservation and valorisation. It must be an ecological ethics for the information environment. In the rest of this paper, I shall defe nd and explain this view.
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Luciano Floridi (2002) studied this question.