Abstract

Recently, Floridi has proposed that ethics be centered on the notion of information, which would represent a value in itself. As anything contains information in some form, this stance would imply that anything has intrinsic value. While this perspective is intriguing as it would make information science an even more important domain, it needs to be refined by distinguishing between different levels of organized information. Instances of matter, of life, of minds, of civil society, and of cultural heritage all are different kinds of informational systems, each formed through an evolutionary path that has built on the previous levels, with a corresponding increase in what Bennett has defined as logical depth. This process makes the logically deepest phenomena especially valuable, as they could not be recreated without repeating the whole path. Personal experiences of individual humans, either shared orally or recorded in diaries, as well as collective knowledge and knowledge organization systems, that can be documented in texts or in images before disappearing, are especially precious sorts of information, and should be acknowledged the highest value. 1. Introduction Luciano Floridi's philosophy of information has been gaining a wide popularity in recent years. Among many important issues, Floridi's approach proposes a view of information as a value, which seems to be of special interest to this conference as a possible rationale to claim the objective value of information services and knowledge organization. Indeed, if information is a value in itself, then any activity aimed at the acquisition, conservation, and provision of information has to be considered and treated as intrinsically valuable, too. This paper discusses Floridi's basic claim in the light of notions provided by other theories of information, with special reference to the notion of logical depth, in order to attain a more detailed understanding of the value of information and of its implications for information services and knowledge organization.