Where are the business ethicists when you need them? The task of the business ethicist in the present period of transition - and a task in which few are engaged - is to help anticipate the developments and ease the transition by not losing sight of the effects on people.

The transition is from the industrial age to the information age. The ethical issues in business of the industrial age are those with which we are familiar. The development of the information age came about without conscious direction. As technology developed, the transition came along as a handmaiden. One consequence is that businesses and society as a whole are following the technological imperative - what can be developed is developed and implemented. Because the transition to the information age is currently taking place, many of the ethical issues have not clearly jelled. The task of the business ethicist in this instance is to at least keep up with the technological and social developments and identify problems and potential problems before they cause great harm, and before they become embedded ways of doing business that are difficult to change.

Business ethicists and society in general could wait for ethical problems and injustices of the information age to arise, and do analysis after the fact. Far preferable, however, is to anticipate injustice, prevent it from appearing, and form structures that are ethically justifiable, rather than having to undo and attempt to reform structures that are unfair, socially disruptive, and harmful to some of the parties. We of course cannot anticipate all the ethical issues that will arise. Experience and the empirical approach are also necessary. But we can anticipate more than we might expect, and I suggest that now is the time to start this analysis as we enter the information age. We do not need a new ethics framework, but we have to apply and possibly revise our ethical concepts and norms to fit the new environment. We need an imaginative analysis of the potential harms to people - be they in the realm of privacy, property, the new surveillance sweatshops, or other areas.

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