Let's get ethical, the philosophers urged
Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology
by Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger
Johannes Gutenberg – Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany
The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section “Plasticity in the Human Mind,” we cover some of the main results suggesting that one’s environment can influence one’s psychological states, as well as recent work on inducing illusions of embodiment. Then, in Section “Illusions of Embodiment and Their Lasting Effect,” we go on to discuss recent evidence indicating that immersion in VR can have psychological effects that last after leaving the virtual environment.
In the second part of the article, we turn to the risks and recommendations. We begin, in Section “The Research Ethics of VR,” with the research ethics of VR, covering six main topics: the limits of experimental environments, informed consent, clinical risks, dual-use, online research, and a general point about the limitations of a code of conduct for research.
Then, in Section “Risks for Individuals and Society,” we turn to the risks of VR for the general public, covering four main topics: long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, risky content, and privacy. We offer concrete recommendations for each of these 10 topics, summarized in Table 1.
Preliminary Remarks
Media reports indicate that virtual reality (VR) headsets will be commercially available in early 2016, or shortly thereafter, with offerings from, for example, Facebook (Oculus), HTC and Valve (Vive) Microsoft (HoloLens), and Sony (Morpheus). There has been a good bit of attention devoted to the exciting possibilities that this new technology and the research behind it have to offer, but there has been less attention devoted to novel ethical issues or the risks and dangers that are foreseeable with the widespread use of VR. Here, we wish to list some of the ethical issues, present a first, non-exhaustive list of those risks, and offer concrete recommendations for minimizing them. Of course, all this takes place in a wider sociocultural context: VR is a technology, and technologies change the objective world. Objective changes are subjectively perceived, and may lead to correlated shifts in value judgments.
VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as “conscious experience,” “selfhood,” “authenticity,” or “realness.” In addition, it will transform the structure of our life-world, bringing about entirely novel forms of everyday social interactions and changing the very relationship we have to our own minds. In short, there will be a complex and dynamic interaction between “normality” (in the descriptive sense) and “normalization” (in the normative sense), and it is hard to predict where the overall process will lead us (Metzinger and Hildt, 2011).
Before beginning, we should quickly situate this article within the larger field of the philosophy of technology...
