Virtual Harms and Real Responsibility

2000

WELVE YEARS AGO, in the dead of winter, at the University of Oulu in Finland, a computer programmer named Jarkko Oikarinen created software for live, typed conversation among individuals and groups on the Internet. He called his software “Internet Relay Chat,” abbreviated as “IRC” (Oikarinen & Reed, 1993; see also Cheung, 1995; Reid, 1991; Surrat, 1996, pp. 27–29). Six years ago, in the dead of winter, at my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, I discovered Oikarinen’s creation and stumbled onto IRC for the first time. That fateful evening introduced me to life online in general, and in particular, to crime and punishment in virtual environments. What I encountered on IRC eventually led to the research I’m conducting for my doctoral dissertation. I’m studying the aspect of life in cyberspace that intrigues me the most: misbehavior in online environments. It seems that wherever people gather on the Internet to interact with each other, some folks make, follow, and enforce the rules of ci...

Philosophia

In this paper a new resolution to the gamer's dilemma (a paradox concerning the moral permissibility of virtual wrongdoings) is presented. The first part of the paper is devoted to strictly formulating the dilemma, and the second to establishing its resolution. The proposed resolution, the grave resolution, aims to resolve not only the gamer's dilemma, but also a wider set of analogous paradoxes-which together make up the paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly.

2015

Abstract. Some kinds of technological change not only trigger new ethical problems, but also give rise to questions about those very approaches to addressing ethical problems that have been relied upon in the past. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Hans Jonas called for a new “ethics of responsibility, ” based on the reasoning that modern technology dramatically divorces our moral condition from the assumptions under which standard ethical theories were first conceived. Can a similar claim be made about the technologies of cyberspace? Do online information technologies so alter our moral condition that standard ethical theories become ineffective in helping us address the moral problems they create? I approach this question from two angles. First, I look at the impact of online information technologies on our powers of causal efficacy. I then go on to consider their impact on self-identity. We have good reasons, I suggest, to be skeptical of any claim that there is a need fo...

in 'Preventing Sexual Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture' (Henry and Powell, eds.)., 2014

Although most massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) remain entrenched in a binary system of gendered avatars, the limited representational framework of avatar creation is only one among many different strategies for what sociologists refer to as "doing gender." This essay explores how a doing gender approach might be useful for analyzing the interactive dimensions of gender play in the rich communicative environments of MMOs. Specifically, this essay explores how players do (or do not) hold one another accountable to sex category membership through their interactions, in so doing either reproducing or resisting normative forms of gender. A doing gender approach, I argue, holds out the promise of being held accountable to a different set of rules for doing gender-of doing gender differently or, in a more utopian sense, perhaps doing away with it altogether.

The International Information & Library Review, 32: 423-435, 2000

Information ethics requires: (1) an ethical theory that recognizes the importance of the body; and (2) a materialist theory of information. Alasdair MacIntyre's ethics of acknowledged dependence is an example of the former. It holds that the virtues we need to achieve both personal and common moral goods recognize networks of dependence based upon bodily vulnerability and disability. Pierre Le¤ vy's theory of collective intelligence is an example of a view that disregards both requirements. Based upon a secular appropriation of medieval angelology, it holds that in cyberspace, social relations are dematerialized, and that information is an incorporeal substance £owing between disembodied minds. The new anthropological space of virtuality that Le¤ vy holds to be ushered in by new electronic information technologies proposes a radical rethinking of ethics. But on close inspection, his information ethics turns out to be stripped of any serious moral dimension. To address serious moral issues, information ethics cannot abstract from our bodily animal nature. Several recent studies recognize that information is an e¡ect of social relations between embodied subjects. They provide the materialist information theory required for meaningful information ethics. This paper pursues Capurro's theme of the connection between social relations, their mediation by electronic information technologies, and ethics. If taken without any quali¢cation, Le¤ vinas's dictum would seem to imply, as Capurro notes, that when human relations take the form of the interface, not presence, or face to face, they become morally bankrupt, or at least morally degraded, by a measure ethical re£ection on information technologies would be obliged to determine. But a strict dependence on face to face presence for the exercise of moral virtue towards others has the objectionable consequence that my relations with those I never directly see, whom I never touch, and with whom I never directly speak, 1 carry no ethical obligations. But surely, it is argued, communication technologies, whether smoke signals, carrier pigeons, the book, the telegraph, the telephone, and especially the electronic information technologies of the 21st century, mediate not only by intervening between persons, but also by creating bonds between us that would otherwise not exist. Insofar as we are thereby made aware of more persons than we could ever meet face to face, and of the consequences of our actions upon them, the range and complexities of our ethical obligations to others expand and deepen, rather than diminish. Capurro, it would seem, has it right: one of the main jobs of information ethics is to explore the di¡erences between modes of mediation, between the kinds of human relations that emerge from them, and between the ethical and moral dimensions of those relations.

Virtual Worlds and Criminality, 2011

The present chapter pursues the question if virtual violence is morally problematic behavior. Virtual violence is defined as any user behavior intended to do harm to perceived social agents who apparently try to avoid the harm-doing. The chapter reviews existing literature that suggests that users hurt themselves if they get engaged in virtual violence and that users may also do harm other users if they direct their violent acts against their avatars. Recent research is reviewed that further suggests that users may intuitively perceive virtual agents as social beings. They may thus intend to do harm to other social beings (instead of objects) when conducting virtual violence. The chapter also tackles (and denies) the idea that autonomous virtual agents are living entities that may suffer from virtual violence. In light of the reviewed evidence, virtual violence is considered morally problematic behavior.

This paper focuses on the role of punishment as a critical social mechanism for cheating prevention in MMORPGs. The role of punishment is empirically investigated in a case study of the MMORPG Tibia (http://www.tibia.com) and by focusing on the use of bots to cheat. We describe the failure of punishment in Tibia, which is perceived by players as one of the elements facilitating the proliferation of bots. In this process some players act as a moral enterprising group contributing to the reform of the game rules and in particular to the reform of the Tibia punishment system by the game company. In the conclusion we consider the ethical issues raised by our findings and we propose some general reflections on the role of punishment and social mechanisms for the governance of online worlds more generally

The Modern Law Review, 2019

This chapter provides a general overview and introduction to the law and ethics of virtual sexual assault. It offers a definition of the phenomenon and argues that there are six interesting types. It then asks and answers three questions: (i) should we criminalise virtual sexual assault? (ii) can you be held responsible for virtual sexual assault? and (iii) are there issues with 'consent' to virtual sexual activity that might make it difficult to prosecute or punish virtual sexual assault?