My paper about our confused intuitions on moral status of virtual avatars is up in the latest edition of Stillpoint Magazine.
A reader just emailed me asking about the moral dimensions of avatar use explored by James Cameron in his engaging movie Avatar. In this film an other-world tribe of native humanoids, the Na'vi, adopt an "avatar" (what the Na'vi call a "dream walker") of a paraplegic marine named Jake Sully into their culture.
Sully's avatar is a cyborg of sorts, a biologically engineered physical being. Hence, Sully's avatar is more akin to the cyborgs in Bruce Willis' film Surrogates than to digital-based avatars which exist on a digital plane of existence. Sully and his avatar are two bodies in the same "analogue" world, whereas a digital avatar inhabits a distinct world from their user. This small point has, I think, a large effect on our intuitions.
Sully's cyborg avatar is clearly just an extension of his body, and thus it is Sully himself who is adopted by the Na'vi people and who (spoiler alert!) marries the Na'vi princess. Even the princess recognizes this "extension" relationship, as evidenced by her care for his damaged human body.
What if, by contrast, the Na'vi and their world was portrayed in the movie as digital, a variant of Second Life? Would it be as obvious that Sully himself was adopted by the Na'vi people, etc? Not to me, anyway. It seems like involvement in the digital world, separate and unique to ours, brings about a deep confusion about the moral status of its creatures.
In sum, Cameron's film does not bring up the same confused intuitions on our moral status that Second Life does, but that isn't to say that there aren't other intriguing ethical questions to be drawn from the film.
