Between consenting avatars

Abstract

As virtual reality and virtual worlds in general take up more and more space in people’s everyday lives, the question of how virtual actions should be morally evaluated becomes increasingly pressing. One of the main challenges in the ethics of virtual worlds, in our view, is to find a normative framework, that is not overly restrictive but still accounts for common intuitions, such as the immorality of discrimination or harassment in virtual realms. In this paper we ask which criterion could be suitable to allow for a more nuanced evaluation of various potentially immoral virtual actions. First, we introduce a case to distinguish possible harms and immoral behaviors in virtual worlds. We then present a concept of consent inspired by principlism in research ethics and discuss criteria for valid consent and its limits. In applying this to our case, we find that consent can render many allegedly immoral actions in virtual worlds – such as virtual killing or theft – morally permissible, while it cannot be used to justify discrimination or violations of personal identity. A consent-based approach is thus shown to successfully reconstruct common moral intuitions, like those on the gamers’ dilemma. Finally, we address some objections to our argument, namely objections from deontological ethics and virtue ethics. The result of the paper is a framework for the moral evaluation of virtual actions, that allows for a more balanced approach and takes the particular purposes of virtual worlds and the interests of participating individuals into account.