Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore an emerging ethical theory for the Digital Age – Flourishing Ethics – which will likely be applicable in many different cultures worldwide, addressing not only human concerns but also activities, decisions and consequences of robots, cyborgs, artificially intelligent agents and other new digital technologies. Design/methodology/approach In the past, a number of influential ethical theories in Western philosophy have focused upon choice and autonomy, or pleasure and pain or fairness and justice. These (...) are important ethical concepts, but we consider “flourishing” to be a broader “umbrella concept” under which all of the above ideas can be included, plus additional ethical ideas from cultures in other regions of the world. Before explaining the applied approach, this study discusses relevant ideas of four example thinkers who emphasize flourishing in their ethics writings: Aristotle, Norbert Wiener, James Moor and Simon Rogerson. Findings Flourishing Ethics is not a single ethical theory. It is “an approach,” a “family” of similar ethical theories which can be successfully applied to humans in many different cultures, as well as to non-human agents arising from new digital technologies. Originality/value This appears to be the first extended analysis of the emerging flourishing ethics “family” of theories. (shrink)

The present paper uses a Flourishing Ethics analysis to address the question of which ethical values and principles should be “instilled” into artificially intelligent agents. This is an urgent question that is still being asked seven decades after philosopher/scientist Norbert Wiener first asked it. An answer is developed by assuming that human flourishing is the central ethical value, which other ethical values, and related principles, can be used to defend and advance. The upshot is that Flourishing Ethics can provide a (...) common underlying ethical foundation for a wide diversity of cultures and communities around the globe; and the members of each specific culture or community can add their own specific cultural values—ones which they treasure, and which help them to make sense of their moral lives. (shrink)

Like all other inventions, advances in the field of digital computational technologies, which we will briefly describe as the information world, have also played an essential role in humanity life. These advances have brought some ethical debates to our individual and social life, as well as the industrial benefit obtained by the digital and analog technological developments that positively or negatively affect and transform all economic and cultural paradigms surrounding human life. The branch of the philosophy of information, which questions (...) the basic issues and discussions of the information age through philosophical paradigms, deals with the ontological, epistemological, and axiological problems of the information age. The subject deals with the analysis and new results of an Aristotelian information ethics theory, which is a theory first proposed to the world of thought in the field of the philosophy of information. The main reason for dealing with this subject in the thesis is to examine the scientific, technological, and philosophical bases of the information revolution. (shrink)