Abstract
In this paper, we argue that, under a specific set of circumstances, designing and employing certain kinds of virtual reality (VR) experiences can be unethical. After a general discussion of simulations and their ethical context, we begin our argument by distinguishing between the experiences generated by different media (text, film, computer game simulation, and VR simulation), and argue that VR experiences offer an unprecedented degree of what we call “perspectival fidelity” that prior modes of simulation lack. Additionally, we argue that when VR experiences couple this perspectival fidelity with what we call “context realism,” VR experiences have the ability to produce “virtually real experiences.” We claim that virtually real experiences generate ethical issues for VR technologies that are unique to the medium. Because subjects of these experiences treat them as if they were real, a higher degree of ethical scrutiny should be applied to any VR scenario with the potential to generate virtually real experiences. To mitigate this unique moral hazard, we propose and defend what we call “The Equivalence Principle.” This principle states that “if it would be wrong to allow subjects to have a certain experience in reality, then it would be wrong to allow subjects to have that experience in a virtually real setting.” We argue that such a principle, although limited in scope, should be part of the risk analysis conducted by any Institutional Review Boards, psychologists, empirically oriented philosophers, or game designers who are using VR technology in their work.
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Notes
VR technologies comprise a large class of hardware devices that can include room-sized projection systems into which subjects are placed, head-mounted displays, and augmented reality (AR) devices which overlay additional content onto a subject’s experience of the actual world (Parsons et al. 2017). We focus on head-mounted displays because such systems are, by far, the most widespread form of VR researchers and the public are likely to use. Although we focus our analysis on head-mounted VR displays, much of what we say will also apply to other forms of VR and AR interfaces.
The substantial philosophical literature on simulation is centered heavily around the role of simulations and models in experimental science, and the metaphysical and epistemological issues that are prominent in that discussion are not particularly germane to our concerns in this paper. However, we share some areas of overlapping interest. Frigg and Hartmann (2012) have a useful discussion of a range of views concerning what has to be true of a model for it to successfully “represent” its target. On the difference between models and simulations, see Krohs (2008) and Morrison (2009). Winsberg (2009) distinguishes some different sorts of simulation. Knuttila (2011) has a useful discussion of the senses in which scientific models may be said to represent the physical reality they model that could have some bearing on simulations and the things they simulate, particularly emphasizing the intentions of the creators/users of the simulation. Godfrey-Smith (2006, p. 733) points out how different scientists can construe the same model as having different success criteria in a way that tracks our point below concerning the context-dependent nature of success in simulation.
For example, the computer program Microsoft Flight Simulator, in simulating what it is like to fly an airplane, attempts to be relevantly like an actual airplane by providing the user of the simulation with visual and auditory feedbacks that are experientially similar to what an actual pilot would hear and see in her airplane (e.g. the clouds and horizon, the instrument panel, the roar of the engines), but it remains a simulation because there is no actual airplane involved, and the game “pilot” never leaves her desk chair. If one were to try to simulate flying an airplane by putting someone in an actual airplane and having them work the real controls to really fly the airplane, that person wouldn’t be simulating flying the plane, she would be actually flying it. On this view, while a digital environment could simulate a real environment, it could never be a reinstantiation or reproduction of that environment. It would lack the necessary substance. It may nevertheless be possible, however, that certain elements of the digital environment may be reinstantiations of elements of the real environment. The example of reproduced sounds that we discuss later in the paper would constitute such a case.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this issue and for helping us clarify the nature of our particular moral concern. Although we believe that encouraging users to simulate immoral actions raises concerns about the nature of simulation, our own concerns in this article focus on what we believe is a different and under-examined problem concerning the possibility of VR experience itself to cause subjects harm.
The literature on the possible social and psychological effects of media like films and video games is vast, and we do not propose to give a thorough survey here. The following sources are, however, representative of the sort of work we have in mind: Krahé and Möller (2010) finds some increase in violent behavior among adolescents who engage in violent gameplay while Fischer et al. (2009) finds an even larger increase in violent behavior from those who play games that allow you to customize your avatar. Valkenburg and Peter (2013) offers a general model that aims to explain how cognitive, emotional, and “excitative” features of games can help to explain why media, especially violent media, affect people differently. Two meta-analytic studies reach opposed conclusions about the correlation between violent media and aggression: Anderson et al. (2010) suggests such a correlation, while Savage and Yancey (2008) resists that conclusion.
Sanchez-Vives and Slater (2005). Psychologists call this sense of being actually transported into a virtual space “presence”; we discuss this concept of presence and its relationship to our concepts of perspectival fidelity and context-realism below.
Won et al. (2015). Though subjects may feel like their virtual avatars belong to them, we want to distinguish a subject’s perception that she has a tentacle from the perception she would have if she actually had a tentacle. VR may provide subjects with the former but not the latter perception.
We would like to distinguish experiences of presence from virtually real experiences. Although all virtually real experiences require a subject to experience presence, many experiences of presence will lack the context-realism and perspectival fidelity that we argue are distinctive of virtually real experiences. We say more on this distinction later.
We use the term “neurotypical” here as a descriptive statistical term to denote the range of sensory capacities available to the average adult human being. We embrace what some have referred to as ‘neurodiversity’ movements (Herrera and Perry 2013) and do not intend to use the term neurotypical normatively. Deafness is, by all accounts, not neurotypical though arguably it is not a disability or disease for those in the deaf community. An experience that lacks auditory inputs, however, is less perspectivally faithful than one that includes such inputs. Perspectival fidelity will relativize to the typical phenomenology of the subject population (e.g., perspectival fidelity for gorillas will look differently than for neurotypical humans and perspectival fidelity for the deaf will vary in many respects from that of hearing persons).
For similar reasons, such a soundtrack would diminish the degree of context-realism of the representation.
As augmented reality devices become more widespread and such meta-content becomes a standard component of lived experience, simulations that include this sort of meta-content may thereby become more context-real.
This is an empirical conjecture on our part. As we noted above, we do not wish to produce a view on the necessary and sufficient conditions for context-realism or perspectival fidelity. That is a task better suited to psychologists and neuroscientists. What we do wish to do is to mark out the concept of virtually real experience and its connection to VR experience in order to generate what we believe is a novel and underappreciated ethical concern about such experiences.
We are interested primarily in how subjects experience VR simulations in-the-moment, as it were. Our analysis, therefore, focuses on virtually real experiences and describes those as experiences that are treated as if they were real in the moment they are being experienced. A treats VR experience b as if it were real if A, either behaviorally, physiologically, neurologically, or psychologically reacts to b in a similar way as they would react to a real-life experience of b. It is entirely possible that subjects may re-frame these experiences after the fact (“it wasn’t real anyway”). We believe that moral issues can arise with respect to how subjects process their experiences after-the-fact, though these are outside the scope of this article. We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us clarify this concern.
Sanchez-Vives and Slater (2005, p. 333).
Feinberg (1985, p. 10).
Note that our analysis of the potential harms of a film would be different if the film were not a simulation of fictional events but a documentary of actual events; the ethics of filming and viewing a simulation of someone being stalked and killed, for instance, are, we assume, different from the ethics of filming and viewing an actual murder. In what follows we will be focusing our attention entirely on simulations.
Strictly speaking, the sounds of a nails on a blackboard or of insipid conversation would be recreations or instances of an aspect of an experience but would not by themselves rise to the level of a recreation or instance of the whole experience. This is because of the different situational factors (subdoxastic elements of experience) that would be missing from the film version of the experience relative to the first-personal experience of being on a bus. For example, while a threatening gesture aimed at the camera may be visually similar to the same threatening gesture aimed at you in reality, your experience of the two gestures is likely to be qualitatively different.
In assessing these offenses, we set aside the very real issues that others have raised with encouraging subjects to themselves engage in unethical behavior, concerns sometimes discussed in terms of the “Gamer’s Dilemma.” Although we agree that simulations which encourage subjects to rape, torture, or kill virtual persons raise important ethical issues (especially in terms of long-term effects on individual and societal norms), we sidestep this concern here to focus on the nature of the subjective trauma that may be experienced by the subject of the experience herself. Thanks go to an anonymous reviewer for asking us to clarify this concern.
As VR technology develops, it is possible that some things that are only simulatable now might become reproducible, and smells seem a likely candidate. If VR simulations someday include elements like reproducing the odor of flatulence, and if we arrive at a consensus that being exposed to reproduced flatulence is so unpleasant that people would reasonably want to be protected from the experience, we would have to consider moving such offenses into a different category.
Our point becomes even stronger if we assume olfactory elements can be introduced to these simulations. However, even if a reader thinks these particular cases are still not morally problematic when experienced as virtually real, so long as they can imagine a scenario in which an experience becomes morally problematic when it becomes virtually real, the argument progresses.
Also, for a modern audience watching a film, part of the phenomenology of viewing a film involves the consciousness that the events one is watching on-screen were filmed at some point in the past, and so are not genuinely present. This is not true of traditional and VR computer simulations.
Although the products of imagination are almost always incapable of the sort of perspective-taking that produces virtually real experiences, they are capable of triggering trauma in some subjects. This is a significant concern and we do not wish to downplay it. Such scenarios’ ability to induce trauma appears not to depend on their medium (text, film, VR), and so we do not focus on it in this paper. It should, however, remain a real concern for those who wish to expose naive subjects to potentially traumatic scenarios in any form.
For example, our concern, stated very generally, is about a form of “imaginative resistance”: “imaginative resistance occurs when an otherwise competent imaginer finds it difficult to engage in some sort of prompted imaginative activity” (Szabó and Liao 2016, p. 405). In our case, however, we argue that the problem runs deeper than finding it “difficult” to imagine the scenarios of these thought experiments. Specifically, we believe that features of first-personal perspectives themselves can make it all but impossible to carry out these thought experiments via the imagination (Goldie 2011; Ramirez 2017). We thank an anonymous reviewer for this clarification.
In fairness, Slater et al. (2006, p. 7) appear to appreciate this concern: “[t]he actual conditions of Milgram’s experiments can, of course, never be exactly replicated in virtual reality since the participants will always know that the situation is unreal—and if eventually virtual reality became so indistinguishable from reality that the participants could not readily discriminate between the two, then the ethics issue would arise again.” However, they fail to appreciate that virtually real experiences are dimensional and may be generated even without photorealistic environments. Their own research provides evidence for this claim.
While it would surely be wrong to amputate a subject’s healthy limbs in real life even if the subject consented, surely it is not wrong (at present) to simulate lopping off limbs in VR. On our view, this is true only given the limitations of existing VR technology. If in the future companies produce VR bodysuits with the capacity to, for instance, inflict high levels of pain on their wearers, we might well decide it is no longer morally acceptable to simulate experiences that cause extreme pain in VR. As the levels of context-realism and perspectival fidelity that technology permits increases, we will need to recalibrate our intuitions about what is and is not acceptable to simulate. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need for clarification on this point.
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Funding was provided by Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and Oculus Education Grant.
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Ramirez, E.J., LaBarge, S. Real moral problems in the use of virtual reality. Ethics Inf Technol 20, 249–263 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9473-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9473-5