Ethical Issues with Simulating the Bridge Problem in VR
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Ethical Issues with Simulating the Bridge Problem in VR Erick Jose Ramirez1 · Scott LaBarge1 Received: 29 January 2020 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We aim to generate a dilemma for virtual reality-based research that we motivate through an extended case study of Thomson’s (Yale Law J 94(6):1395–1415, 1985) Bridge variant of the trolley problem. Though the problem we generate applies more broadly than the Bridge problem, we believe it makes a good exemplar of the kind of case we believe is problematic. First, we argue that simulations of these thought experiments run into a practicality horn that makes it practically impossible to produce them. These problems revolve around concepts that we call “perspectival fidelity” and “context realism.” Moral dilemmas that include features present in the Bridge variant will, as a result, be practically impossible to simulate. We also argue that, should we be wrong about the practical impossibility of creating a VR simulation of Bridge, such a simulation must face an ethical horn which renders these simulations ethically impermissible to develop or use. For these reasons, we argue that it is virtually impossible to simulate the bridge problem (and other thought experiments with similar features) both practically and ethically in VR. Keywords Simulation ethics · Virtual reality · Applied ethics · Moral psychology · Philosophy of technology Philosophers and psychologists interested in moral decision-making have long turned to thought experiments to articulate, gather data on, and defend their theoretical claims. Thought experiments like the Trolley Problem (Foot 1978), and its many variants, have become staple tools in the study of moral psychology as well. The recent development of robust and accessible commercial virtual reality (VR) technologies offer researchers interested in these (and other) questions an exciting new tool for simulating these scenarios. Experiments built around these simulations, many researchers hope, can teach us a great deal about how people would really * Erick Jose Ramirez [email protected] Scott LaBarge [email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, USA
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make the difficult moral choices that thought experiments ask them to imagine. They promise, in other words, to shed interesting new light on long-standing philosophical debates over the nature of moral concepts, moral properties, and moral epistemology. However, designers of such simulations face difficult, and unrecognized, challenges. To see why, consider first many classical philosophical thought experiments. These thought experiments involving moral choice (e.g., the trolley problem, ticking time-bombs, children drowning in fountains, etc.) are typically presented as first-personal. They ask us to imagine what we ourselves would do in the situations described by the experiments.1 Would you pull the lever to divert the trolley? Would you torture the terrorist to prevent
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