The ethics of personalised digital duplicates: a minimally viable permissibility principle

Abstract With recent technological advances, it is possible to create personalised digital duplicates. These are partial, at least semi-autonomous, recreations of real people in digital form. Should such duplicates be created? When can they be used? This article develops a general framework for thinking about the ethics of digital duplicates. It starts by clarifying the object of inquiry– digital duplicates themselves– defining them, giving examples, and justifying the focus on them rather than other kinds of artificial being. It then identifies a set of generic harms and benefits associated with digital duplicates and uses this as the basis for formulating a minimally viable permissible principle (MVPP) that stipulates widely agreeable conditions that should be met in order for the creation and use of digital duplicates to be ethically permissible. It concludes by assessing whether it is possible for those conditions to be met in practice, and whether it is possible for the use of digital duplicates to be more or less permissible.