LAUSR

Ramirez et al. (2021) have recently claimed that using Virtual Reality (VR) as an educational nudge to promote empathy is unethical. These authors argue that the influence exerted on the participant through virtual simulation is based on the deception of making them believe that they are someone else when this is impossible (p. 4–7). This makes the use of VR for empathy enhancement a manipulative strategy in itself. Following Goldie (2011, but see also Goldie, 1999, 2000), Ramirez et al. argue that adopting the other’s perspective is very difficult or even impossible. In most cases, in order to adopt the other’s perspective, one must govern his or her imaginative process with a “characterisation” of the other, based on past experiences and (sometimes unconscious) aspects of his or her character or emotions, to which the observer does not have access. They reinforce this argument with some insights from semantic variance and intersectional approaches to personal identity. In a nutshell, they claim that the promise of being “someone else” in VR is doomed to fail. Consequently, empathy-enhancing simulations are deceptive in nature and, therefore, they constitute an ethically undesirable educational tool. Alternatively, the authors suggest that it would be more justified to use VR to enhance sympathy—understanding “sympathy” as the “process of feeling for another” which leads to expressing an “attitude of care or of concern with respect to their target” (p. 13, italics in the original source). In this article, we show that Ramirez et al.’s ethical rejection of empathy enhancement through VR is based on confusion. First, we show that this misunderstanding stems from the conception of empathy-enhancing simulations solely as failed attempts at “being someone else,” along with ignoring the crucial difference between the psychological perspective-taking processes of imagineother and imagine-self. Then, having overcome that misconception, we argue that the ethical misgivings about the use of VR to promote empathy should disappear and that these projects have greater potential for behavioural change than purely sympathy-focused interventions.