Guest-Edited by Patrizia Breil & Jörg Noller
For Ethics and Information Technology
Like artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. It is a major factor in media and communication, technological interaction, economic production, and simulation. Recently, David Chalmers (2022) has argued that virtual reality is as real as physical reality and that we can live a good life in virtual reality. Chalmers therefore raises the question of “[h]ow you should behave in a virtual world”. However, unlike AI and the resulting challenges of human-machine and machine-machine interaction, VR and the particularities of interpersonal communication that takes place exclusively or predominantly in and through VR have received little attention in current ethics. With this topical collection, we aim to open a broad discussion about the need for and imperatives of an ethics of VR that allows us to respond systematically to current and future potential, anecdotal and global (in)justice in VR. Thus, the collection aims to analyze the technology and phenomenology of VR from an ethical point of view, addressing, among others, the following issues and questions:
· Overlap and demarcation: Which ethical paradigm is best suited to evaluate virtual actions? …
· Living and Acting in VR: How do we act through virtual reality and how can these actions be evaluated and designed? …
· Virtualizing ethical concepts: How can we justify virtual values, and how do they relate to physically bound values? ...
· New ethical challenges in VR: What new ethical problems arise from virtual interaction and communication? …
Submission deadline: 31 July 2025
Please submit your manuscripts through the journal’s online submission system. All submissions will undergo a double-blind peer review process. For more information please visit: https://link.springer.com/collections/bgdgiebfai
If you have any questions, please contact the editors: Patrizia Breil (patrizia.breil@rub.de) and Jörg Noller (joerg.noller@lrz.uni-muenchen.de).