CMC Magazine January 1996: Wizards, Toads, and Ethics

The Need to Create Rights in Cyberspace

Why must rights for cyberspace avatars be created rather than discovered? Rights are protections against harms, and harm is, in its most primitive and fundamental form, damage to the body. But damage to the body is never a threat in cyberspace, one's avatar having no body to be damaged. So the most basic reason why rights must be planted is that the harms suffered there are not bodily harms.

Still, there are non-bodily harms, harms, including the variety recognized in law and specifically the distress Mr. Bungle caused his victims. The distress is real enough, and it is not out of the question that it should be grounds for claiming that one's real-life rights have been violated. The lingering question, touched upon earlier and unique to cyberspace, is whether the real-life sufferer has "projected" sufficiently into the cyberspace character that, as that character X, X feels sufficient distress to ground a claim that X's rights have been violated. Is the player sufficiently there, in the virtual reality, that he or she can suffer harms comparable to those which would involve violation of rights? Is the comparability sufficient to warrant the claim that X actually has such rights?

I think it is not improbable that there are cases of such projection even now, though they are surely somewhat pathological cases. Non-pathological projection can be predicted on a large scale for the future, but that will happen only if people are provided with the freedom and security for their characters that the protections of rights would bring. Hence the need for construction of moral rights in cyberspace: These rights are a precondition for our flourishing there, in our virtual avatars.

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CMC Magazine / January 1, 1996

Wizards, Toads, and Ethics, by Wes Cooper

The Need to Create Rights in Cyberspace
Why must rights for cyberspace avatars be created rather than discovered? Rights are protections against harms, and harm is, in its most primitive and fundamental form, damage to the body. But damage to the body is never a threat in cyberspace, one's avatar having no body to be damaged. So the most basic reason why rights must be planted is that the harms suffered there are not bodily harms.
Still, there are non-bodily harms, harms, including the variety recognized in law and specifically the distress Mr. Bungle caused his victims. The distress is real enough, and it is not out of the question that it should be grounds for claiming that one's real-life rights have been violated. The lingering question, touched upon earlier and unique to cyberspace, is whether the real-life sufferer has "projected" sufficiently into the cyberspace character that, as that character X, X feels sufficient distress to ground a claim that X's rights have been violated. Is the player sufficiently there, in the virtual reality, that he or she can suffer harms comparable to those which would involve violation of rights? Is the comparability sufficient to warrant the claim that X actually has such rights?
I think it is not improbable that there are cases of such projection even now, though they are surely somewhat pathological cases. Non-pathological projection can be predicted on a large scale for the future, but that will happen only if people are provided with the freedom and security for their characters that the protections of rights would bring. Hence the need for construction of moral rights in cyberspace: These rights are a precondition for our flourishing there, in our virtual avatars.

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