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Charles Wankel and Shaun Malleck, Emerging Ethical Issues of Life in Virtual Worlds (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2010).

Virtual Worlds are increasingly used in business and education.  With each day more people are venturing into computer-generated online persistent worlds such as Second Life for increasingly diverse reasons such as commerce, education, research, and entertainment.  This book explores the emerging ethical issues associated with these novel environments for human interaction and cutting-edge approaches to the attendant new ethical problems.  This volume puts forth a wide range of virtual world ethical issues on which research is only commencing.  Topics include real-world ethical and legal issues of doings in virtual worlds, norms of research ethics in virtual worlds, ethical implications of employing virtual worlds as tools for medical education and experimenting with healthcare services, the ethics of the collective action of virtual world communities, consideration of the virtue and potential of cosmopolitanism in virtual worlds, Deleuzian ethical approaches to the experience of the disabled in virtual worlds, the ethics of virtual world design, and the ethical implications of the "illusion of reality" presented by virtual worlds.

http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Research-Management-Education-Development/dp/1607523779/

Collegially,

Charles Wankel

St. John's University, New York

http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~wankelc
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