Even if Virtual reality technologies can be utilized for humans in
relation to some positive affects of entertainment, business,
communication and mental health service, it is need to monitor various
its facets in terms of negative affections. Dibbell emphasized that
ethical consideration plays an important role in virtual communities
(1). This is because VR can be misused to gratify human beings’ being
corrupted desires and violated another’s privacy and rights without
moral consciousness. For example, cyber-rape or crimes in LambdaMOO (a virtual reality
community) may create individual’s psychological damage like
humiliation, shame or fear through avatars’ social activities (ibid).
!http://www.indypendent.org/wp-content/photos/Second_Life_1.jpg!
Nevertheless, most virtual worlds, especially Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game , could be considered to have
their own culture. Within a virtual world culture, the community often
dictates and manage what types of practices and rules are considered
freely allowed (2). That means codified rules in MMORPG
communities should not be ignored and responsible for any kind of
users’ actions that might be escaped by communities (ibid).
Powers argues that ‘real’ wrongs might be happened when using moral relativism in conjunction with community practices (3). For example, as mentioned earlier ‘cyber-rape’ incident described in Dibbell “Rape in Cyberspace” was wrong and did cause harm. In this ‘cyber-rape’ case, what is the most significant problem is that although there was violated in virtual communities, the ‘cyber-rape’ incident was not constituted an ethical problem and the attacker did not cause significant psychological and emotional distress on the victim as well as the other participants did not, either (ibid). This is because there was not occurred any physical harms and eventually may lead to insensibility to the feelings of other users in communities. It must be required Cyber Ethics!
As a consequence, it may result in people’s emotional confusion
between real-life and virtual-life, and actions in virtual life may lead
to real-life dormant consequences (4). Hence, it is inevitable to new
policies and ethics of virtual world to prevent individual’s erroneous
behavior.
Bibliography
(1) Dibbell, J. (1998) My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. London: Fourth Estate.
(2) Justin M. Grimes, Kenneth R. Fleischman, and Paul T. Jaeger (2009) Virtual Guinea Pigs: Ethical implications of Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds, Internationals Journal of Internet Research Ethics, Vol. 2(1) Feb
(3) Powers, T. M. (2003). Real wrongs in virtual communities. Ethics and Information Technology, 5, 191-198.
(4) Slouka, M. (1995) War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and high-tech assault on reality. New York: Basic Books.
URL References
Reader Roundtable: “Virtual Rape” Claim Brings Belgian Police to Second Life
Virtual Rape Is Traumatic, but Is It a Crime?
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