Much has been achieved since Effy Oz upbraided the information technology profession in 1994, declaring with firm conviction and compelling evidence that 'ethical standards are lax' (Oz, 1994, p. 29). One amongst many tangible improvements that have been achieved since then is that the adoption, promotion and regular review of a formal code of ethics and/or code of conduct have become standard procedure for professional associations and societies that represent information and communication technologists (ICT). Yet, even there, more work remains to be done: professional codes of ethics now need to reconcile the values of all 21 st Century ICT professionals working anywhere in the global community. This need has been well documented in the work of a number of philosophers who have argued that Western ethics are not universally applicable or even acceptable to many non-Western cultures (Bynum, 1998, Ess, 2005, Gorniak-Kocikowska, 2001). The work of these and other scholars of Computer Ethics seems to indicate that the professional stance towards standard Computer Ethics issues, such as privacy, intellectual property and regulation on the internet, is due for re-evaluation.

The various critiques mentioned above can be seen to move along the continuum of traditional Computer Ethics that has gradually brought about recognition of an expanding circle of people as stakeholders in computer projects, ultimately adhering to the framework suggested by the research of Effy Oz (1993) that recommended a list of six major types of stakeholders. A more radical proposal than any of those just mentioned is provided in this paper, however, where it is claimed that Computer Ethics should evolve to become Information Ethics. In particular, the environmental aspect of Information Ethics (Floridi, 1998 and 1999) is suggested as the basis for determining additional ethical responsibilities for ICT professionals.

Despite some well-justified skepticism (Cowton and Thompson, 2000, Pearson, Crosby and Shim, 1997, Schwartz, 2000), it has been shown that professional codes of ethics are efficacious and should be taken seriously. There is evidence that an official organisational policy requiring ethical behaviour will favourably influence employee perception of standards in the organisation, and is more likely to bring about ethical behaviour than in companies where no code is in place (Adams, Tashchian and Stone, 2001). When the work culture is one in which regard for social responsibility is valued, then individuals are more likely to strive for behaviour that is above reproach, (Barnett and Vaicys, 2000). Therefore, codes of ethics should keep pace with contemporary intellectual views on ethics in relevant disciplines, and ICT professional associations should be open to new ways of thinking about their products, services and actions.

ICT professionals, in applying for membership of their professional associations, accept a duty of care towards a wide variety of different communities, such as their colleagues, their user groups, their clients, the ICT profession, society at large and so on.  Even so, within the growing academic discipline of the Philosophy of Information ((Adriaans & van Benthem, 2006) there can be found justification for claiming that another, larger community must be added to the list of ICT professionals' stakeholders, providing a new dimension in which ICT professionals must acknowledge that they have a duty of care. This new stakeholder resembles the environmentalists' concept of an intricate community, which they refer to as 'the environment as a whole' (Johnson, 1991, Callicott, 2005). Employing a similar model, Floridian Information Ethics describes the information environment as a single whole, the infosphere (Floridi, 1999). According to this view of Information Ethics the nature of information is such that all entities that exist can be defined as information objects (Floridi, 1998) inhabiting the information environment and there they form a mutually interdependent community from which there is no escape. As software engineers will appreciate, by using the right degree of abstraction, every entity can be defined as an information object, and this approach provides the ontological justification offered by the Floridian view. Thus the information environment constitutes a class of everything; and as Elliot (1991, p. 288) notes, this view culminates in the 'everything ethic'. Accepting that the infosphere qualifies as this environmentalist type of holistic entity leads to seeing it as a community with its own ecology that can be damaged to the detriment of all participants. As such, the information environment becomes one more very important community towards which ICT professionals have moral responsibilities: they must avoid causing harm in the infosphere (Floridi, 1999).

Since the work of Arne Naess on morally deep ecology (Naess, 1989), environmental philosophers have engaged with the problems generated by the claim that an ecological entity is worthy of moral respect in its own right. The answers developed by environmental philosophers such as Callicott (2005) are invoked in this paper to assist in the detection of what the new responsibilities of ICT professionals would be if they were to acknowledge the infosphere as one of their stakeholders.

Finally, the proposal put forward by Floridi (1999) as to what constitutes harm in the information environment is analysed and contributes to the detailed development of new rules to enhance ICT professional codes of ethics that will provide a normative approach to information and the information environment.

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