Emerging Ethical Issues of Life in Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds are being increasingly used in business and education. With each day more people are venturing into computer generated online persistent worlds such as Second Life for increasingly diverse reasons such as commerce, education, research, and entertainment. This book explores the emerging ethical issues associated with these novel environments for human interaction and cutting-edge approaches to these new ethical problems. This volume’s goal is to put forward a number of these virtual world ethical issues of which research is only commencing. The developing literature specifically regarding virtual world ethics is a recent phenomenon. Research based on the phenomenon of virtual world life has only been developing in the past four years. This volume introduces pathbreaking work in a field which is only just beginning to take shape. It is ideal as both as a library reference and a supplementary text in upper-division courses focused on the issues of applied ethics and new media. It is unique in being one of the first volumes specifically addressed to ethical problems of the “metaverse”.

This volume includes articles from authors from around the world exploring topics such as: employing rationalist and casuistic approaches to the controversial topic of “virtual rape” yield an increased understanding of how virtual worlds ought to be designed, the relationship between the ethical and legal dimensions of virtual world users’ participation in “paratexts”, utilitarian consideration of harm and freedom in the case of virtual pedophilia, norms of research ethics in virtual worlds, the ethical implications of employing virtual worlds as tools for medical education and experimenting with healthcare services, the ethics of the collective action of virtual world communities, consideration of the virtue and potential of cosmopolitanism in virtual worlds, Deleuzian ethical approaches to the experience of the disabled in virtual worlds, the ethics of virtual world design, and the ethical implications of the “illusion of reality” presented by virtual worlds.

Charles Wankel is Professor of Management at St. John's University, New York.He holds a doctorate from New York University, where he was admitted to the Beta Gamma Sigma national honor society for business disciplines. Columbia University's American Assembly identified him as one of the nation's top experts on Total Quality Management. He received the Outstanding Service in Management Education & Development Award at both the 2004 and 2005 meetings of the Academy of Management (AOM). AOM also presented its Best Paper in Management Education Award to him in 1991, and he has been selected to serve as an officer of AOM divisions every year for more than a decade.Along with Robert DeFillippi, he has been editing a multi-volume series for AOM on management education issues: the Research in Management Education & Development Series. Wankel is the leading founder and director of scholarly virtual communities for management professors, currently directing more than seven listservs with thousands of participants in more than 70 nations.(A Google search for "Charles Wankel" will provide you with an awareness of the scope of his online prominence.) He co-authored a bestselling undergraduate textbook, Management, in the 1980s with Prentice Hall, published a scholarly book on interorganizational strategy development in Poland, and numerous scholarly articles, monographs, and chapters.He has extensive international experience, ranging from the United Arab Emirates to Vietnam, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Singapore, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Mexico.He has been an invited lecturer to Harvard and Columbia, as well as the Czech Management Center, University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Malaysia, National University of Singapore, and University of Toronto, and he taught and researched at Kaunas Technical University in Lithuania in 1997 under a Fulbright Fellowship Grant.His current research interests include managing geographically and temporally distributed teams and new pedagogies of management education.