Our reasons for being good are fundamental to understanding what it is that makes us moral or indeed whether any of us truly are moral. Plato grapples with this problem in book two of The Republic where Socrates is challenged by his brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon (Plato 1993). They argue that people are moral only because of the costs to them of being immoral; the external constraints of morality.
Glaucon asks us to imagine a magical ring that enables its wearers to become invisible at will, and capable of acting anonymously. He relates a fiction in which a shepherd named Gyges discovers this ring and uses its powers to seduce the queen of the kingdom, kill her husband, and take control of the kingdom. Glaucon claims that if there were two such ‘rings of Gyges’ and one was worn by a previously moral person and the other worn by a previously immoral person that the moral person would end up committing immoral actions too. So, the central point of this thought experiment is to claim that people only do the right thing because of the potential rewards of identifiable right action and the potential punishments of wrong action, which we refer to as the sanctions of morality. The internal constraints of morality or moral reasons are weak or nonexistent, causally jumping castle ineffective.
The ring of Gyges enables its wearers to act without fear of detection and punishment. It doesn’t make them omnipotent or omniscient. However, it is in some relevant respects analogous to the possibilities created by online virtual worlds such as Second Life. These worlds are three dimensional partially user-created environments where people who are members of the social network control avatars that ‘live’ virtual lives. These avatars and the ‘lives’ they lead need bear no relation at all to the person controlling them, or their life outside of the virtual world. Avatars can perform a very wide range of actions, interact with others in the virtual word, attend lectures or performances, and engage in many other activities.
Launched in 2003 by Linden Labs, Second Life is one of the earliest and arguably most successful online virtual worlds, with an estimated 1 million regular users in recent years (Levy 2014). Linden Labs has recently announced Project Sansar, which claims to give a higher level of freedom to users to create their own highly detailed virtual content, and to incorporate virtual reality headset technology to create a more realistic experience for users (Linden Labs 2016a). As well as virtual worlds being a very important social phenomenon, the way people use their avatars within these worlds may shed light on what people might do when fear of sanction is diminished.
This paper begins by explaining the traditional challenge to morality as posed by Plato. Then it considers whether the anonymity and avoidance of external sanction possible in virtual worlds is a useful test case for the challenge to Socrates. We argue that although virtual worlds do exhibit the problems of reduced prudential reason to be moral, virtual worlds raise more acutely the question of whether there is any moral reason to act beyond mere prudence. Then the paper will consider the following skeptical objection. As Kant observed, a precondition of all moral requirements is the ability to act. The acts of avatars occurring within virtual worlds are not, and cannot be, acts in the sense intended by Kant. Since it is impossible to act in a morally relevant way in a virtual world, there can be no moral requirements constraining the actions of avatars in virtual worlds. We counter this objection by arguing that it is possible for avatars to act in ways that are relevant for morality, and suggest a number of moral requirements that might plausibly be thought to result. However, since avatars are different from physically embodied people in morally relevant ways these moral requirements are interestingly different from those of real life. While immoral actions such as rape lack some of their physical consequences in a virtual world, their psychological impact and what they express about the attitudes of those who perform them, are good reasons for viewing them as immoral.