THE KEY ETHICAL ISSUES OF METAVERSE AND RELEVANT FATWA LITERATURE

Abstract

After the social media giant Facebook announced on October 28, 2021, that it would rebrand itself as Meta, signalling the company's future direction focusing on Metaverse, the secular world witnessed a surge in interest in this field. Yet almost no literature addresses the ethical issues arising from the Metaverse from the Islamic perspective. I have tried to fill this gap in the literature with my research, which I consider to be exploratory work on the unique and key ethical questions of the Metaverse using the lens of Islamic ethics. The primary focus of my exploratory work has been on the online fatwa literature, which is available in English, considering factors such as availability and ease of accessibility and staying with the online world, which is close to the spirit of the Metaverse. Four key ethical issues related to the Metaverse, including privacy and security issues, risk of addiction and social justice and fairness, have been the focus of my thesis. I have also discussed specific governing issues, including how the acts in the Metaverse world should be perceived, the metaethics of virtual sins and virtual deeds and the cardinal metaethical question of whether the Metaverse is good or bad on the whole. I have examined these issues along with the question of whether it is pertinent to hypothesise on Metaverse while it is still in its conceptual stage, through the Islamic lens. For each of these issues, the relevant sources have been analysed to understand the underlying moral reasoning process, rationale, and wisdom behind the positions adopted in the examined fatwas, which did not necessarily address the specific ethical issues of the Metaverse. For most of these ethical issues, I concluded from the study that compared to the ethical concerns raised in the secular literature, the concerns from the Islamic perspective are far graver. In some instances, such as the permissibility of avatars, the issues have no ethical implications in secular literature but have significant ones from the Islamic perspective.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Islamic Studies