Are digital subjects in virtual reality morally equivalent to human subjects? We divide this problem into two questions bearing, respectively, on cognitive and emotional equivalence. Typically, cognitive equivalence does not hold due to the lack of substantialist indistinguishability, but emotional equivalence applies: digital subjects endowed with face or language elicit emotional responses on a par with real-world pleasure, desire, horror, or fear. This is sufficient for projecting moral traits on avatars in the metaverse or on dialog systems based on large language models. Our main case study is a chatbot trained on the chat history between a Canadian man and his deceased fiancée. To demonstrate emotional equivalence and the mechanism of moral transfer, we compare digital devices with the functioning of oracles in a story by Plutarch and in a narrative that draws on the book of Genesis. Finally, we note that, along with the projections of ethical issues, humans also tend to bring real-world solutions of moral conundrums into extended reality. We argue that the lack of cognitive equivalence makes such projections problematic as they lead to overpolicing and a sanitized metaverse.

虚拟现实中的数字主体在道德上等同于人类主体吗？我们将这个问题分为两个问题，分别涉及认知和情感等价性。通常，由于缺乏实体主义的不可区分性，认知等价性不成立，但情感等价性适用：赋予面部或语言的数字主体引发与现实世界的快乐、欲望、恐怖或恐惧同等的情感反应。这足以将道德特征投射到元宇宙中的化身或基于大型语言模型的对话系统上。我们的主要案例研究是一个聊天机器人，它根据一名加拿大男子和他已故未婚妻之间的聊天记录进行训练。为了证明情感等价和道德转移的机制，我们将数字设备与普鲁塔克 (Plutarch) 的故事和借鉴创世记的叙述中的神谕功能进行了比较。最后，我们注意到，随着道德问题的预测，人类也倾向于将现实世界中道德难题的解决方案带入扩展现实。我们认为，缺乏认知等价性会使此类预测存在问题，因为它们会导致过度监管和净化后的元宇宙。