Abstract

Abstract: Extended reality (XR) technologies superimpose content onto a user’s experience of the world. This chapter argues that XR technologies, once incorporated into the basic structures of society, introduce three connected but distinct classes of ethical problems related to the self. It begins by analyzing contemporary (Western) accounts about the ethics of body modification especially as it connects to autonomy, competence, and the body. It then shows that although it may seem natural to extend ethical principles governing body modification onto XR technologies that allow users to radically alter their embodiment, such an extension would produce an incomplete ethics of XR embodiment. Three ethical issues about XR embodiment follow. The first is a question about who is empowered to determine how users appear to others. Second, such uses of XR will also pose challenges related to the self and the epistemology of self recognition. Humans have evolved to largely recognize selves in connection with their forms of embodiment. Because XR disrupts the heuristics humans have developed to identify someone across time, new heuristics must be created. Finally, the chapter introduces a third issue about human-like bots. Bots are likely to regularly inhabit future AR spaces. Because Human-like bots can be the bearers of any of the sticky and stable identities argued for, they pose unique problems of their own. The chapter ends with a call for urgency and continued research on these issues before AR applications become widespread.