The privacy of the dead: Human dignity in digital afterlife: an information ethics perspective

Abstract

There are increasing numbers of products and services offered by the Digital Afterlife Industry that raise complicated questions about human dignity and the digital component of death. In most societies, we have refined moral and legal norms for how to treat someone’s remains showing respect for the person to whom it belonged. However, such norms are mostly absent when the treatment concerns someone’s digital remains. In particular, the approach to privacy issues has not been established. In this chapter, we explore how Information Ethics, as proposed by Luciano Floridi, can offer a meaningful framework to better understand the nature and importance of someone’s ‘informational body’. We will argue that Information Ethics as patient-oriented, ontocentric and e-nvironmental macro-ethics will lead to a radical rethinking of how to contribute to the realisation of human dignity in the digital afterlife. We briefly conclude with some thoughts on what this would mean for business ethics and law-making.