Research Material

The Swedish version of the magazine Metro has an artice about a woman who hacked a man’s account in the net based role play Maple Story and deleted his virtual life. The background is that they were married, virtually, and that the man recently divorced the woman. The news article’s account of the event is that the woman has committed murder based on a “crime passionnel”. This “virtual murder” could give up to 5 years imprisonment – as the headline suggests.

Both ‘murder’ and ‘married’ are used as metaphors. Even if they were married only in the game, and not legally, it’s not so far fetched to imagine a future with real virtual marriages. In fact, even without research, I’m pretty sure there are cases already and they will most certainly increase. This is kind of strange for me personally, but looking outside my own door, it doesn’t strike me as impossible or even particularly odd.

But virtual murder…? Can the act of erasing a virtual person ever be compared to the act of murder (erasing a human person of flesh and blood)? It might be fun to draw the parallel, but is the metaphor ‘virtual murder’ grounded in some insight into the future, as ‘virtual marriage’ might be? Is it possible that virtual embodiment ever can be compared to physical, biological embodiment in terms of ethics and law?

I don’t think there is any question about whether a separate person might be inclined to value her or his virtual embodiment as more valuable than the physical/biological, disregarding the obvious fact that the latter is a prerequisite for the former. But can this view ever cross the personal realm and become an interpersonal viewpoint?

It might. When, and if, our virtual relations become more and stronger than our physical/biological relations, the soul-body binary might be succeeded by a virtual-body binary where the virtual part actually gets precedence over the body part (just as the soul, or mind, has precedence over the body today). Law systems have of course always relayed on the viewable, bodily part of a human being. That’s why horrible crimes as rape or bullying does not get the penalty they deserve in most law systems.

Perhaps it boils down to the question about “what is life?” or the even more difficult question “what does it mean to live?”.