Many students have difficulty grasping philosophical concepts, and the more abstract the idea, the more difficult it is for students to wrap their head around. Students also have difficulty connecting with topics about which they have strong pre-conceptions, or are overly familiar. This (obviously) leaves instructors struggling to figure out how to convey these ideas to students. 

Virtual reality technology affords instructors unique pedagogical opportunities in both technology courses and non-technology courses. As of now, our single best use for virtual reality in non-technology courses is through using virtual reality to place students into deeply immersive experiences that confront them with ethical situations. 

This technique is somewhat reminiscent of service-learning approaches in education. In service-learning students are put into volunteering situations, where they learn through immersion. They take the concepts they have learned in class and apply them in real-world situations. Virtual reality, though, allows us to do something that service-learning does not. It allows students to walk a mile in the shoes of someone else. 

Inhabiting another perspective cultivates empathy and changes behavior. This has been shown many times, across a suite of different topics. 

Using VR’s ability to cultivate empathy (empathy pumps) is immensely useful in helping students connect with a topic with which they may have a wall of preconceptions built. For instance, let’s imagine that students are learning about the philosophy and ethics of homelessness: 

This is exactly what I had students do in my Fall 2022 Social and Political Philosophy course. I built the course around 4 social and political philosophy modules, with one of them being homelessness. I anticipated that homelessness would be an especially difficult topic for students to connect to, and so decided to use virtual reality experiences to place them in proximity to the lives of a person experiencing homelessness. First, by putting them into the shoes of someone that was in the process of becoming homeless (Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience) and then through an exploration of the lives, and personal history of someone who is homeless (We Live Here). 

Before this I had a class discussion with the students about homelessness, what they knew, and how they felt about it. I found that many students described the topic in terms that indicated that homelessness not a philosophical problem for society, but rather a moral failing on behalf of the homeless individual. This viewpoint would have made philosophical inquiry into the topic very difficult. 

The student spent roughly 40 minutes total in these virtual reality experiences, but after the virtual reality experiences of homelessness though I found that students were interested, actively inquiring into aspects of the experience that were directly linked to class lecture topics and in some cases felt a strong sense of connection to “Rocky” the homeless woman in the experience. Many of the subsequent assignments students submitted mentioned “Rocky” and their time spent with her and used her as an example to discuss other issues of homelessness such as citizenship, rights, disenfranchisement, and identity, etc. 

The immersive capabilities of virtual reality can positively contribute to philosophy courses across the board. But, these are not the limits of virtual reality's potential for teaching philosophy. With better technology will come the ability to create immersive experiences that confront students with even more complex moral situations, and better conceptual modeling. The possibilities of using virtual reality for teaching ethics are limited only by our ability to create new applications to address philosophical issues.