The new opportunities for digital interaction open through this rapid growth of the metaverse put forth significant ethical challenges. The paper will discuss some of these issues concerning privacy, accessibility, identity, and user safety in virtual environments. Much technological promise is held out, but the real-world constraints required to achieve such an ethical goal are bounded by the limits of re-source and technical feasibility. Looking at the available metaverse systems in current use, such as Horizon Worlds, Second Life, or Fortnite, we outline areas critical to ethical design application and offer a phasic way of filling the present gaps in technology. We present an incremental-approach framework that accounts for pragmatic difficulties in deployment by developers. Implications of the analysis guide principled development of the metaverse, from both short and long term.