Emerging Ethical Issues of Life in Virtual Worlds (Hc)

A volume in Research in Management Education and DevelopmentSeries Editors: Charles Wankel, St. John's UniversityVirtual Worlds are being increasingly used in business and education. With each day more people are venturinginto computer generated online persistent worlds such as Second Life for increasingly diverse reasons such ascommerce, education, research, and entertainment. This book explores the emerging ethical issues associatedwith these novel environments for human interaction and cutting-edge approaches to these new ethicalproblems. This volume's goal is to put forward a number of these virtual world ethical issues of which researchis only commencing. The developing literature specifically regarding virtual world ethics is a recentphenomenon. Research based on the phenomenon of virtual world life has only been developing in the past fouryears. 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 asupplementary text in upper-division courses focused on the issues of applied ethics and new media. It is unique in being one of the first volumesspecifically 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 thecontroversial topic of "virtual rape" yield an increased understanding of how virtual worlds ought to be designed, the relationship between the ethicaland 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 withhealthcare services, the ethics of the collective action of virtual world communities, consideration of the virtue and potential of cosmopolitanism invirtual worlds, Deleuzian ethical approaches to the experience of the disabled in virtual worlds, the ethics of virtual world design, and the ethicalimplications of the "illusion of reality" presented by virtual worlds.