Global Information Ethics and the Challenge of Cultural Relativism

The emergence of an information society, carried by information technologies such as the digital computer and the Internet, has lead to many questions in the West about the proper regulation of the production, use and transfer of information. In the West, a large part of this discussion has focused on individual rights: how to balance various rights of individuals against each other and against the rights and interests of corporations and the state. In nonwestern countries, however, discussions of regulation often have not focused on individual rights. It will be argued in this paper that there seems to be a different ethics underlying the discussion in Western and many nonwestern societies. The aim of this paper is to understand the differences between conceptions of ethics underlying the different discussions and to see whether there can be common ground between them. This will require an examination of whether ethics in general, and information ethics in particular, is culturally relative. Cultural differences will be studied between ethical attitudes towards privacy, freedom of information and intellectual property rights in Western and nonwestern cultures. It will then be discussed whether these differences justify different moral systems for different cultures, or whether we can have a universal and global information ethics. If so, it will be asked, what will be the status of human rights in such an information ethics?