Call for Papers

Topical Collection: Ethics of VR
For the journal Ethics and Information Technology
https://link.springer.com/collections/bgdgiebfai

Guest-Edited by Patrizia Breil & Jörg Noller

Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2025

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 special issue, we aim to open a broad discussion about the need for and imperatives of an ethics of VR that allows us to systematically respond to current and future potential, anecdotal and global (in)justice in VR. Thus, the special issue aims to analyze the technology and phenomenology of VR from an ethical point of view, addressing, among others, the following topics and questions:

• Overlap and demarcation: Which ethical paradigm (deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, contractualism) is best suited to evaluate virtual actions? How does the ethics of computer games (Sicart 2009) relate to the ethics of virtual reality? To what extent can the “cyberfeminist cyborg” be a cue for the ethics of VR?
• Living and Acting in VR: How do we act through virtual reality and how can these actions be evaluated? How can we use the Internet and the Metaverse as a virtual space for action and how should it be designed from an ethical point of view? Can we really live a good life in virtual reality, as David Chalmers (2022) has recently claimed, and if so, how? Is virtual rape possible, as Ray Kurzweil (2000) has asked, and if so, how can we criticize it from a moral and prevent it from a legal point of view?
• Virtualizing ethical concepts: How can we justify virtual values, and how do they relate to physically bound values? Do virtual avatars and identities have moral dignity? What are the characteristics and requirements of virtual morality, and what is the difference between human virtual morality and the artificial morality built into technological agents? What is the significance of material categories such as the ‘right to bodily integrity’ in VR?
• New ethical challenges in VR: What new ethical problems arise from virtual interaction and communication? What does the global hyperlinked structure of the Internet mean for the possibility and necessity of a universal morality? What is the ethical significance of phenomena such as virtual filter bubbles and virtual fake news? What ethical challenges arise from the combination of virtual reality with artificial intelligence?

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).