The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality

Building Worlds

Erick Jose Ramirez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367486266
• eBook ISBN: 9781000517354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book offers new ways of thinking about and assessing the impact of virtual reality on its users. It argues that we must go beyond traditional psychological concepts of VR "presence" to better understand the many varieties of virtual experiences.

The author provides compelling evidence that VR simulations are capable of producing "virtually real" experiences in people. He also provides a framework for understanding when and how simulations induce virtually real experiences. From these insights, the book shows that virtually real experiences are responsible for several unaddressed ethical issues in VR research and design. Experimental philosophers, moral psychologists, and institutional review boards must become sensitive to the ethical issues involved between designing "realistic" virtual dilemmas, for good data collection, and avoiding virtually real trauma. Ethicists and game designers must do more to ensure that their simulations don't inculcate harmful character traits. Virtually real experiences, the author claims, can make virtual relationships meaningful, productive, and conducive to welfare but they can also be used to systematically mislead and manipulate users about the nature of their experiences.

The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality will appeal to philosophers working in applied ethics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics, as well as researchers and students interested in game studies and game design.

1 Exploring Strange New Worlds

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042228-1

It’s a warm, not-too-hot, summer day. A slight breeze wafts through the air, hitting my face. I’m writing this paragraph while lying on a chic outdoor sofa on the terrace of a mid-century home in the Hollywood Hills. Los Angeles sprawls below. From here, the views are perfect. If I look to my left, I see downtown, with all of its construction cranes. To my right, I see Century City. Even Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean are visible, a pretty rare sight really considering the haze of the summer. Taking my eyes off this view for a second, I tap on a menu to move the 55-inch monitor I’m writing this paragraph on so that it floats more conveniently above my head. I shift my attention back to my work and write a few emails while listening to music.

Then I feel something touch my feet. It’s the very specific bump that I’ve come to associate with my dog, Woody, poking my foot with his nose. He probably wants attention, or more food, or to be let out. I look to my feet and, for a moment, am surprised when I don’t see the body I expected to see. I don’t see any body, actually. I don’t have any feet to be poked. Strangely, Woody isn’t there either. Wrapped up in the hillside views and the flow of writing, I’d forgotten that I’m not really lying on a sofa in a multi-million dollar home in Los Angeles. I’m hours away in my decidedly more modest apartment in San Jose. It’s also not the middle of a sunny day, it’s 11:00 pm. The sun set hours ago. I’m suddenly struck by the fact that I’ve been wearing what’s become a heavy HTC Vive virtual reality headset and that maybe I should leave my virtual Los Angeles terrace and get ready for bed!¹

For those of us who have had an experience like this, the immersive power of virtual reality worlds can seem fantastical. It’s uncanny how virtual worlds can so easily, so naturally, and so quickly trick us into feeling like we’re somewhere we really aren’t. My Los Angeles experience was made possible because I was using a VR application called Bigscreen. Using Bigscreen, and other applications like it, I’ve been able to experience things that, even 15 years ago, I would have thought were forever outside my reach.

To name just a few of the things I’ve done recently: I’ve had a whale encounter on a shipwreck on the ocean floor. I’ve explored the Martian surface and heard the real sounds of the Martian summer wind. I’ve been a navigator on a British bomber during the Berlin Blitz in the Second World War and seen the flashes of German antiaircraft artillery litter the skies around me. I’ve become a bit of coral and witnessed the damaging effects of ocean acidification and climate change. I’ve even experienced what it might be like to be kidnapped by a maniacal robot with seriously bad intentions. During the last academic term, I took an entire class of college students to a virtual movie theater where we saw films about virtual reality. During experiences like these, reality, and virtual reality, can start to blend together. Virtual experiences like these force us to ask interesting questions about what our lives, and values, might look like in the not-too-distant future and even ask questions about who we really are, how we choose to represent ourselves, and whether any of these ideas will last through the end of the 21st century. Virtual reality applications have been used to help train surgeons and football players, to treat patients with PTSD, to treat phobias of many kinds, and, at least according to some, to offer us the opportunity to experience what it might be like to be other people (and other animals) in ways that once seemed impossible. VR has enormous transformative potential, and the experiences I’ve described are only the tip of an interesting and, as we’ll see, ethically fraught iceberg.

Until recently, experiences like the ones I’m describing were limited to a select few. Traditionally, virtual reality was locked away behind the walls of large, well-endowed university laboratories or government research facilities. The devices, software development experience, and computing power required to create successful virtual reality simulations were simply too large or expensive for commercial audiences to really take advantage of. Although the technologies we now know as “virtual reality” have been in development since at least the 1950s, the first true commercially available virtual reality devices didn’t hit global markets until the early 1990s.² Even in these cases, technical limitations, and costs, combined to make it difficult for these early systems to find commercial success. The transformative potential of these early technologies ensured that development would continue.

Several advances needed to come together before virtual reality systems would coalesce into something able to deliver the experiences I’ve been able to share with students. These advances only recently happened and they’ve begun to change how we think about the range of possible experiences available to us. In 2016 a trio of commercial VR hardware platforms were released. First, Oculus VR (a division of Facebook Inc.) released the Oculus Rift. Later the same year, HTC (in cooperation with the Valve Corporation) released their own VR headset, the HTC Vive (this is the device that made my Hollywood Hills experience possible). Near the end of 2016, the Sony Corporation also released its own VR hardware, the Playstation VR, for use with its proprietary Playstation gaming platform.

The latest generations of the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, both released in 2019, represent, as of this writing, the current state of the art in commercial virtual reality systems. However, brewing in the background behind these large hardware developments, we’ve also experienced a quieter revolution in virtual reality technology. With the increasing sophistication and processing power of smartphones, smartphone-based VR systems have exploded in availability and popularity. Smartphones are currently the most widely accessible way that people are experiencing virtual and augmented realities. Most people who have experienced a virtual world have done so via smartphone VR.

While smartphone systems are less technically capable, they are ubiquitous, and with that ubiquity comes a kind of transformative power. In 2019, an estimated 130 million people around the world regularly had access to and used VR technology, and the VR marketplace is projected to grow to over $160 billion USD by 2023, partially fueled by the widespread availability of smartphone VR applications (Dujmovic 2019). We might be tempted to think that the gaming industry is behind all of this growth. However, VR development is not limited to companies developing games. In 2019 there was a 33 percent increase in VR development for educational simulations and a 27 percent increase in simulations aimed at workplace and skill training (Rubin 2019). In late 2019, Facebook Inc. announced that they would be releasing VR social media spaces which, one day, might supplant more traditional PC-based social media platforms (Grubb 2019). These technologies, and those under development, have placed us on the cusp of some very interesting transformations.

Although I’ve written here primarily about virtual reality, this is probably not the best way of talking about the entire ecosphere of products aiming to augment or extend our sense of reality. Commercial augmented reality hardware got off to an interesting start with the popularization, and later cancellation, of Google’s “Glass” in 2012 (History 2012). I’ll argue later that the distinction between augmented and virtual reality is an artificial one and that it’s likely to disappear soon. What all of these technologies have in common is that they want to immerse us into experiences by adding simulated content (the distinction between augmented and virtual realities is really a way of signalling how much of that experience is made up of simulated content). More recently, in 2016 the Microsoft Corporation introduced the “Hololens,” a “mixed-reality” tool which has found a degree of industrial success. Microsoft is currently working on a third generation version of the Hololens for commercial production. Augmented and virtual realities blend together to paint a picture of a not-too-distant future where a lot of our concepts about who we are, where we live and work, and what it means to have relationships will look different than they do today.

This book is about these technologies and their philosophical implications. As a philosopher trained in moral psychology, my aims, expertise, and interests lead me to focus less on the technical hardware discoveries that made these devices possible (though these are interesting and worthy of attention) and more on the ethical implications that these technologies will have for our sense of self, our relationships, and on our understanding of harm. Although science-fiction authors and futurists have been writing about technologies that sound like modern VR since at least the 1950s, philosophical discussions of virtual reality have been dominated by a thought experiment first introduced by a philosopher named Robert Nozick in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). There, Nozick introduced the concept of an “experience machine” that could recreate any experiences a user could wish for and which could make those experiences feel as real as our real-life experiences feel. Nozick, in part driven by a desire to show that hedonistic (i.e., pleasure-based) theories of the good were false, believed that nobody would (and that nobody should) use such a machine.

In the 45 years that followed, philosophers have raised issues not only about Nozick’s assumptions about the value of experiences but also about the way he thought about his experience machine in the first place. It’s time, many believe, to move beyond Nozick’s understanding of experience machines and to consider virtual reality technologies as they’re actually emerging. In doing so, we might end up showing when, and why, Nozick was wrong to think that virtual experiences always lack value. In this book, I assess the psychological underpinnings of how VR experiences can fool us (to trigger the feeling of “presence,” in psychological parlance) but also the philosophical and ethical implications that these technologies introduce at the individual, institutional, and social levels. Because virtual reality devices like the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, the Playstation VR and AR technologies like Google’s Glass and Microsoft’s Hololens are so new, important technical, metaphysical, and ethical questions about them remain unanswered. In some cases, important ethical questions remain largely unasked as we experience what will likely be remembered as an early 21st century VR/AR gold rush.

I intend to answer some of these questions in this book. One set of questions I look at will deal with the psychological and ethical status of virtual experiences themselves. We might pause at this early point to ask what makes an experience virtual (the term might seem an oxymoron – what’s virtual about the experiences I’m actually having?!). Throughout the book, I’ll use the term “virtual experience” casually. That is, a virtual experience is an experience caused by virtual or augmented reality hardware. These experiences will share many features with other sorts of unreal experiences (dreaming, hallucinations, and so on) and I’ll note these similarities and differences when they become relevant.

With that concept in place, we can ask a few questions about virtual experiences. For example, are virtual experiences different from experiences generated by other kinds of media? Are there interesting (philosophical or psychological) differences between reading a story, watching a story, and immersing ourselves in that same story by experiencing it as part of a virtual or augmented reality simulation? I’ll argue that the answer is almost certainly yes. Virtual and augmented reality simulations can (though they don’t always) offer a distinctly unique kind of experience that other forms of media cannot. I’ll call these experiences “virtually real experiences” and their importance is central to the ethical issues I introduce and evaluate throughout the book.

Relatedly, there are questions we must ask about dealing with the effects of virtually real experiences. Can virtually real experiences harm the people experiencing them? Can virtually real experiences have value? If so, is that value different from our non-virtual, real-life, experiences? I’ll argue that virtual experiences generally, and virtually real experiences in particular, are misunderstood by most psychologists and by some philosophers. I’ll have to first show that virtual experiences can sometimes be “virtually real”; however, if I’m right about the existence of virtually real experiences then we’ll see that they can be just as harmful (or just as valuable) as real-life experiences. It’s not clear, in other words, that Nozick was right to so quickly conclude that the experiences people have in his experience machine lack value or that it would be wrong to want to have them. Many of the features that determine whether any given simulation produces virtually real experiences are also under our control. This fact should make us more cautious about how we think about the ethics of simulated worlds we design or play in. It will sometimes, I will argue, be wrong to create, and sometimes wrong to use, these kinds of virtual and augmented reality simulations.

There’s another set of issues that VR and AR introduce. These issues revolve around our sense of self, the psychology of experience, and the nature of identity (what I’ll call structural intersectionality later on). Currently, it’s possible to download, in many cases freely, VR simulations designed to “expand” our moral horizons by giving us access to the inner lives of other people. The intention behind most of these simulations is to make us more empathetic by giving us a sense of what it’s like to be someone very different from us. I’ll spend a lot of time arguing that these simulations raise ethical issues of their own. For example, 1,000 Cut Journey (Cogburn et al. 2018) is a VR simulation that claims to give its users insight into what it’s like to experience anti-Black racism first-hand. Its creators claim that, in experiencing 1,000 Cut Journey, “the viewer becomes Michael Sterling, a black man, encountering racism as a young child, adolescent, and young adult” (1,000 Cut Journey 2018). Some readers might already have qualms about the ability of a VR simulation to provide such an experience. According to its creators, even if you don’t identify as male or Black, and even if you haven’t experienced anti-Black racism first-hand, a simulation like 1,000 Cut Journey can be designed to show you what it’s like to be such a person, to experience such acts.

There are many simulations that claim to provide this sort of first-person, “in-their-shoes” sense of empathy. One simulation, called Becoming Homeless (Ogle, Asher, & Bailenson 2018), as the name suggests, claims that it gives its users a first-person experience of what it’s like to lose your job and experience homelessness in a city very similar to San Francisco. Such experiences, assuming they’re possible, can thus give us access to points-of-view otherwise inaccessible to us, and such access might even make us better, more empathic people if they can make us more understanding of why some people’s lives are different and that include challenges different from our own. Some researchers have even argued that VR simulations can go further than this and give us some sense of what it might be like to be a non-human animal like a cow at a slaughterhouse (Ahn et al. 2016). Simulations like these, and many others, raise interesting questions about VR and AR’s ability to change us (for good or for ill) and also force us to consider what metaphysical limits VR and AR technology can have. What is it like to be us, and can VR or AR simulations show us what it’s like to be someone or something else?

But it’s important that we don’t take these simulations at face value. Can virtual reality simulations like Becoming Homeless or 1,000 Cut Journey live up to their promises to make us more empathetic, more moral, people by showing us what it’s like to be on the receiving end of injustice? I’ll argue that in order to answer these questions we’ll need to first have a better understanding of what empathy itself is so that we can make sense of what needs to be true for us to have an experience of “what it’s like” to be anything at all – including yourself! Empathy, it will turn out, is an imprecise concept that names at least five neurologically and psychologically distinct capacities, and not all of these capacities are relevant to questions about knowing what it’s like to be someone (or something). Once we have an understanding of empathy in hand, we’ll see why VR and AR simulations, regardless of their cinematic ingenuity, can never give us access to the first-personal experiences of others.

Virtual and augmented reality can’t show us what it’s like to be a bat, or a cow, but it also can’t show us what it’s like to be Michael Sterling (that is, of course, unless we are Michael Sterling or very much like him).³ This means, I’ll argue, that we’re often wrong about the content of our virtual experiences and we can thus be led by such simulations to make inferential, even ethical, mistakes because of these errors. Given that developers have a great degree of control over the content and structure of their simulations, I’ll argue that it can be wrong to design certain sorts of VR experiences which, intentionally or unintentionally, are likely to mislead people about the nature of their experiences.

However, this doesn’t mean that VR and AR can’t give us new experiences and it doesn’t mean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Exploring Strange New Worlds
• 2. Imagination and the Limits of Empathy
• 3. When Being There Is Not Enough
• 4. Virtual Experience, Real Harm
• 5. Why It’s Unethical to Use VR and AR as “Empathy” Machines
• 6. Putting It All Together: A Code of Ethics for VR/AR
• 7. AR and the Future of Selves
• Index