Virtual action
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Virtual action Jan‑Hendrik Heinrichs1 Accepted: 13 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In the debate about actions in virtual environments two interdependent types of question have been pondered: What is a person doing who acts in a virtual environment? Second, can virtual actions be evaluated morally? These questions have been discussed using examples from morally dubious computer games, which seem to revel in atrocities. The examples were introduced using the terminology of “virtual murder” “virtual rape” and “virtual pedophilia”. The terminological choice had a lasting impact on the debate, on the way action types are assigned and on how moral evaluation is supposed to be conducted. However, this terminology and its theoretical consequences, while sometimes resulting in correct results, lead to absurd results when applied across the board. It will be suggested that these absurd consequences can be avoided by a different answer to the question what people in virtual worlds are doing. Alleged virtual actions are first and foremost the creation and modification of data-structures and the resulting output in computer hardware. Such modifications of data structure and imagery can be performed with different intentions, purposes and styles, which will influence the type and moral evaluation of a user’s actions. This reinterpretation allows for a more complex analysis of the moral reasons for praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of actions in virtual environments. This analysis takes not just harm and effects on character into account but the peculiar ways in which speech acts can be morally wrong: e.g. agitatory, deceptive, bullshitting. Keywords Virtual world · Gamer’s dilemma · Virtual murder · Speech acts
Issue and question People increasingly act and interact ‘in’ virtual environments, chatting, dating, trading, as well as mining, crafting, fighting, looting etc. There were virtual environments before the advent of the computer, such as the theater (cf. Chalmers 2017), tabletop games, or maybe even immersive literature. Today, however, single- and multiplayer computer games are the most common version of virtual environments, followed by non-gaming social environments such as Second Life. Recent developments in computer hardware have significantly increased the immersiveness of these environments, adding visual and auditory depth, so-called open worlds, and, last but not least, real 3-D immersion with virtual reality devices (Bailenson 2018).
* Jan‑Hendrik Heinrichs J.Heinrichs@fz‑juelich.de 1
Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, INM‑8: Ethics in the Neurosciences, 52425 Jülich, Germany
Actions in virtual environments raise two types of urgent question: First, what is a person doing who, e.g., mines ores in a virtual environment? Is she ‘virtually mining’? Or more generally: Is an action in a virtual environment of an analogous type to its non-virtual counterpart1? Second, can virtual actions be evaluated morally? And if so, how can they be evalua
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