Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Introduction

While information ethics has grown over the years as a discipline in Library and Information Science, the field or phrase has evolved and been embraced by many other disciplines (Froehlich 2004:1). Froehlich observes that information ethics can now be seen as a confluence of the ethical concerns of Media, Journalism, Library and Information Science, Computer Ethics, Management Information Systems, Business, and the Internet. This paper looks at information ethics as a discipline in Library and Information Science. Floridi (1999) explains that information ethics deals with, among other things, the respect given to information when it is generated, processed, transferred, and most importantly, when it is used. He further points out that information ethics is said to provide a critical framework for considering moral issues concerning information privacy, moral agency , and new environmental issues (particularly how agents should behave in the infosphere, or problems arising from the life cycle - creation , collection, recording, distribution, processing, etc) of information, especially ownership and copyright. From this, it can be drawn that information ethics functions within the following contexts: privacy, intellectual property, accessibility, censorship, security, and intellectual freedom.
Chuang and Chen (1999: 3) believe that information ethics is an aspect of a much larger philosophy, known as social ethics. They observe that it deals with the moral conduct of information users based on their responsibility and their accountability. Chuang and Chen (1993:4) opine that as free moral agents, individuals and organizations ought to be responsible for the actions they take, and societies should be held accountable for the consequences of their actions.
According to Fallis (2005: 8), information ethics is concerned with the question of who should have access to what information. He states that the core issues of information ethics include intellectual freedom, equitable access to information, information privacy, and intellectual property. Fallis believes that some of the ethical dilemmas faced by information professionals have arisen due to advances in information technology. Even those ethical dilemmas that involve new information technology (e.g. whether to use internet filters) are clearly special cases of much broader issues in information ethics (such as intellectual freedom). He believes that the ethics of information technology (computer ethics) is only a small part of information ethics.