Does a high level of information increase the moral worth of an entity?

Philosopher David Rice draws my attention to a recent paper by another philosopher who argues that a high level of information increases the moral worth of an entity - living or otherwise. He writes,

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Luciano Floridi, a philosopher from the UK wrote a paper in which he maintains that objects of information count as objects of moral considerability. ("On the intrinsic value of information objects and the infosphere", Ethics and Information Technology, 2002, 4: 287-304.) These objects make up the 'infosphere'... Environmental ethicists at least understand that information is in nature and that it is valuable.
In the paper he cites, Mark Rowlands, "There is value in the environment. This value consists in a certain sort of information, information that exists in the relation between affordances of the environment and their indices. This information exists independently of...sentient beings...The information is there. It is in the world. What makes this information value, however, is the fact that it is valued by valuing creatures (because of evolutionary reasons), or that it would be valued by valuing creatures if there were any around."
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Rice thinks that this point of view is incompatible with materialism or Darwinian evolution:

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The problem with Rowlands account, however, is that he does not provide any criteria for WHY information should be counted as valuable. If it is for "evolutionary reasons" we could just as easily have NOT cared about information.

In fact, many environmentalists claim that the reason that we are in the current state of ecological crisis that we are in is precisely because we don't ( or didn't) care about other species as carriers of information (I guess natural selection must have selected that)...
The environmental ethicists project, however, has always been to establish value in nature regardless of how we feel about it or what we think about it. Under the lights of natural selection, it is pointless for the environmental ethicist to claim that we should be otherwise.
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Materialist theories of evolution leave no room for "oughts" or "shoulds". But if we set them aside for a moment, we can consider the information in the Bamyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban and the information in a spider as both part of the design of life, and worthy of moral respect. For example, Rice suggests,

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Floridi says that viewing informational objects as being morally considerable, "now fosters moral respect not only for a spider, but also for God (if God exists), for the two Buddha statues, for Mary's corpse and for the database." The implications are clear...if a database and a Buddha statue are designed, and a database and a Buddha statue are morally considerable, then why continue to think that the morally-considerable spider was not also designed (or at the very least, could have been designed)?...
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He goes on to argue,

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I submit that the reason why we consider informational objects to be morally considerable is that 1) we are beings that are capable of generating information that we don't want lost and 2) (more importantly) we ourselves are objects of information - this information is not the result of an evolutionary blind walk but is itself the result of a conscious mind that is also a moral agent.

After reading Floridi's paper I am convinced, even more, that we are on the right track. Information in nature not only comes from an agent but information also informs our intuitions about how we should regard such objects.
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Myself, I suspect that many of us want to live halfway between two worlds, one in which we are simply meat puppets ruled but our selfish genes, and another in which we - and many other life forms and entities - are intrinsically valuable. But this other world requires a lot of self-restraint in return for significance. So we dither. Of course, if the second world is the true one, then the first is simply a dangerous illusion. And vice versa. That is why we live in interesting times.