Ethics in cyberspace

Over recent decades information technology has come to have an increasingly prominent role in our dealings with other people. The computer, in particular, has made available a host of new ways of interacting, which we have increasingly been able to use to our advantage. In the wake of this development a number of ethical questions have been raised and debated.

This book focuses on the possible consequences for moral agency of mediating interaction by means of computers. It seeks to clarify how the conditions governing certain kinds of interaction in cyberspace differ from face-to-face interaction, and how this difference may come to affect the behaviour of interacting agents in a way that has relevance for ethics. More specifically, the book endeavours to shed light on some of the factors influencing our conviction that a particular other person is real, to suggest how this conviction may be affected by moving the setting of interaction from outside to inside cyberspace, and finally to show how these changes may lead an agent to behave differently, ethically speaking, in the two settings.

In the process of addressing the topics mentioned we will focus our attention more specifically upon interaction in ordinary text-based chat-rooms, virtual worlds such as Second-Life and also, to a certain degree, telerobotics. As will become clear, however, the inquiries have a broader application. They may also tell at least part of the story of how, more generally, spatial and temporal distance may come to affect the behaviour of interacting agents in an ethically relevant way.