Alex Fisher (Cambridge University), “Emotion and Ethics in Virtual Reality”

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Forthcoming

By Alex Fisher

[Content warning: sexual assault]

Over the past ten years, a depressing problem in virtual reality has been the prevalence of harassment and assault of female-presenting users. (For recent media coverage, see Wong 2016, BBC News 2022, Camber 2024, Patel and Silverman 2024.) In some cases, victims report traumatic effects analogous to those of nonvirtual assault. Yet the objects that appear before us when we put on a virtual reality headset don’t really exist. And the events that appear to occur aren’t really happening. At least so says the commonsense metaphysical view of virtual fictionalism (McDonnell and Wildman 2019; Wildman and McDonnell 2020).

If what occurs in virtual reality isn’t real, then how can virtual actions have such a powerful emotional impact? And furthermore, if these actions don’t really happen, then how can we make sense of the serious wrongdoing that perpetrators of virtual harassment and assault are committing?

My paper, “Emotion and Ethics in Virtual Reality” (forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy), outlines how both our emotional responses to virtual actions and their ethical significance can be explained while maintaining that objects and events in virtual reality do not exist.

First, drawing from work in aesthetics on our emotional responses to fiction and to film, I illustrate how various aspects of virtual reality, such as its perceptually immersive appearance and social nature, render it a medium liable to generate potentially traumatic experiences, even in cases where users remain aware that what they perceive is not really happening.

Second, I outline how this capability for generating strong emotional responses offers the potential for serious wrongdoing in virtual reality. While the actions represented in virtual reality are not really happening, perpetrators do perform real actions in pressing buttons, saying hurtful things into their microphone, or making obscene gestures, and it is these actions that can be morally evaluated and criticised.

We can therefore explain both our emotional reactions towards, and our moral evaluation of, actions in virtual reality without taking what is represented to really exist.

References

BBC News. 2022. ‘Female Avatar Sexually Assaulted in Meta VR Platform, Campaigners Say’, 25 May 2022, sec. Technology. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61573661.

Camber, Rebecca. 2024. ‘Police Launch the First Investigation into “Virtual Rape”’. Mail Online, 1 January 2024, sec. News. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12917329/Police-launch-investigation-kind-virtual-rape-metaverse.html.

McDonnell, Neil, and Nathan Wildman. 2019. ‘Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional?’ Disputatio 11 (55): 371–97. https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2019-0004.

Patel, Nina Jane, and Rosa Silverman. 2024. ‘I Was Raped in Virtual Reality – Trust Me When I Say It’s Very Real’. The Telegraph, 3 January 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/03/raped-in-virtual-reality-metaverse-victim-blaming/.

Wong, Julia Carrie. 2016. ‘Sexual Harassment in Virtual Reality Feels All Too Real – `it’s Creepy beyond Creepy’’. The Guardian, 26 October 2016, sec. Technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/26/virtual-reality-sexual-harassment-online-groping-quivr.

Wildman, Nathan, and Neil McDonnell. 2020. ‘The Puzzle of Virtual Theft’. Analysis 80 (3): 493–99. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anaa005.