Governing the virtual world: Why ethics must keep up with immersive technologies
Virtual reality is moving rapidly from entertainment into our everyday lives. From employee training and education to healthcare and customer service, immersive platforms now let people interact with lifelike digital agents that look, speak, and behave like real humans. These experiences are powerful, but they also raise new ethical questions. When people know their actions in virtual environments have no visible consequences, how does that affect their behavior? And who decides what is acceptable when those same platforms collect intimate data such as facial expressions, gaze, and emotional reactions?
This research set out to address these questions by exploring how immersive platforms can be governed responsibly. The authors developed a governance framework that combines two long-standing ethical perspectives: consequentialism, which focuses on the outcomes of actions, and deontology, which focuses on intentions. Together, these perspectives help us understand not only what happens in virtual environments but also why it happens, and how organizations can respond to both the good and the bad.
The framework identifies four possible states of user behavior, ranging from good intentions that lead to harm to bad intentions that accidentally produce positive results. Each state calls for a different kind of governance response – sometimes guiding users through education, sometimes applying protective measures, and other times encouraging positive behaviors that foster fairness and inclusion. The central idea is that governance in immersive technologies should not just prevent harm; it should actively promote ethical and inclusive experiences.
This matters for society because immersive platforms are already shaping the future of work and social life. In corporate training, for example, virtual agents might help employees practice leadership or conflict resolution, but they can also unintentionally reinforce biases if the systems learn from skewed datasets. The proposed framework shows how organizations can recognize and prevent such risks, turning ethical oversight into a form of strategic advantage. A platform that protects users’ privacy, ensures transparency, and supports equitable treatment is not only more ethical, it is also more trusted and more sustainable.
As our physical and digital worlds continue to merge, the choices we make about how to govern immersive technologies will influence how we think, learn, and relate to others. Our study calls on designers, managers, and policymakers to treat ethical governance as both a moral and strategic priority. Doing so can help ensure that the virtual worlds reflect the best of human intentions, not just the most powerful technologies.
Saghafi, A., & Angelopoulos, S. (2025). Virtual virtues: a governance framework of moral consequentialism and deontological ethics for immersive virtual reality platforms (external link, opens in new window) . The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 34(4), 101936.