DIGITAL ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY IN THE WORKS OF L. FLORIDI
Abstract
The article analyzes the transformation of the concept of responsibility in the digital age, particularly in the context of Luciano Floridi’s information ethics. Responsibility is examined as a key ethical category undergoing a profound shift under the influence of digital technologies. The authors emphasize that, in the digital era, responsibility should be understood not only as an individual moral choice but also as a collective obligation. Special attention is paid to the changing nature of ethical action in virtualized interactions, where classical notions of free will and moral autonomy are being revised. A central focus of the article is the concept of the “infosphere” – a global informational environment encompassing both digital and biosocial systems. Within this environment, responsibility emerges as a distributed and structural ethical function, shaped by a network of interactions between users, algorithms, and institutions.
The article addresses key challenges related to the development of artificial intelligence, particularly the issue of the “responsibility gap” and the social risks associated with algorithmic decision-making. It explores the foundations of sociotechnical pragmatism as an alternative to both utopianism and skepticism in evaluating digital technologies. A critical review is conducted of the AI4People initiative, which seeks to formulate universal ethical principles for a digital society. The analysis highlights five core principles of digital ethics: beneficence, autonomy, justice, explicability, and non-maleficence.
The study also examines the ethical implications of immersive digital environments (XR), which introduce new sensory and embodied dimensions of interaction. The article demonstrates that an ethical approach to digital reality must be interdisciplinary, reflexive, and oriented toward institutional responsibility. In this context, responsibility is interpreted as a multidimensional obligation encompassing technological, social, and normative aspects of interaction in a digitized world.
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References
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