  The pervasive use of information and communication technology (ICT) in modern
societies enables countless opportunities for individuals, institutions,
businesses and scientists, but also raises difficult ethical and social
problems. In particular, ICT helped to make societies more complex and thus
harder to understand, which impedes social and political interventions to avoid
harm and to increase the common good. To overcome this obstacle, the
large-scale EU flagship proposal FuturICT intends to create a platform for
accessing global human knowledge as a public good and instruments to increase
our understanding of the information society by making use of ICT-based
research. In this contribution, we outline the ethical justification for such
an endeavor. We argue that the ethical issues raised by FuturICT research
projects overlap substantially with many of the known ethical problems emerging
from ICT use in general. By referring to the notion of Value Sensitive Design,
we show for the example of privacy how this core value of responsible ICT can
be protected in pursuing research in the framework of FuturICT. In addition, we
discuss further ethical issues and outline the institutional design of FuturICT
allowing to address them.
