SL/Virtual Reality Morality/Ethics... any group working on these?

Statists and control freaks come in all flavors, not just the religious.

QFT

Oh come on, you aren't even trying... you should have said: "OH MY GOD(S?)!!!"

Meetspace ethics, religion just don't have much overlap with SL. Where they don't fit, they either cling to them or ignore them.

Live and let live. What works for me ethics and morals wize won't work for you. Why do you want to "organize" SL. In order to classify, rules must be made, inclusion creates exclusion...To allow something means you have to disallow something else.


As wide a group of people with diverse backgrounds and customs, coupled with an environment (the internet) that leads most to believe there are no consequenses to any behavior, you'd get laughed off your podium if you tried to make "The Almighty Global Moral and Ethical guidelines".


There is no way to get a list of "accepted ethics and morals" that would be acceptable to all people. In Second Life, we can be whoever we chose, however we choose. Why do you want to make SL mundane and ordinary with rules and regulations of ethics and morality. Most of all, I want to say, and I'm not being rude here, but what say do you have? Or anyone else for that matter, in how I run my Second life?

There are enough rules in place as it is. You may not like how or who I choose to be, but I expect you to return the freedom and courtesy to me that I extend to you in letting you be who and how you are.

Sorry, Long post, and probably winding and missing the point, but this post has bugged me since the first time I read it...and it was hard to make a response without drawing all sorts of analogies.

Lets just say that a lot of hurt and injury have been imposed by people who were just "enforcing" their beliefs of what was moral and ethical and they whole-heartedly believed they were "doing the right thing for the good of society".

There's a lot of talk about this, but little action

Avatar Rights are embedded in the Caledon covenant. They have been adopted by other groups since.

With regard to Hobbes, Locke and social contracts long term, this may interest you... (yeah, I wrote it a short while ago).

http://slrecord.typepad.com/the_second_life_record/2007/12/the-matter-form.html

When I look at the post I see "I'm interested in any present work going on regarding defining specific sets of Moralities/Ethics for SL and/or Virtual Realities" and "Can anyone help me with source material or working groups?"

It's a request for information about existing material on virtual world ethics. Like when you ask a reference librarian for information. You aren't asking them to engage in a debate about the subject you asked about, just to help find a book.

Its nobody's business who has their business up in my business.

thank you.

Grins... that's about right.

Hi Pat,

You might be interested in the work of Johnny Soraker and Edward Spence at the University of Twente (http://www.utwente.nl/ceptes/research_staff/Soraker/ and http://www.utwente.nl/ceptes/research_staff/spence/). Both are PhD research fellows in the Department of Philosophy working on a VICI project on the Cultural Quality of New Media.

Spence is an Australian (a senior lecturer in moral philosophy and a senior research fellow in Canberra, among other things) whose current area of research for the project is The Cultural Quality of Digital Information. He is co-author of a book titled 'Media, Markets and Morals' to be published later this year.

Soraker is a Norwegian whose research focuses on whether virtual realities can influence our conception of reality and the ethical question of whether virtual realities can change our sense of duty and/or our moral sentiments.

He has an interesting abstract in progress subtitled 'Some Reflections on Virtual Reality in Light of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism'. Check his blog for more information, as well as his reflections on Second Life, where he spends a considerable amount of time by all accounts.

I think you may be making a context error here. SL is principally a role-play space. this akes it inherentl;y hard to pin down social structures, because you can't readily tell whether people are doing a 1:1 map between them and their in-world presence (by which i mean: every view and action they take is relateable to their rela-life situation) or they are playing a role.

A lot of roles here are about exploring morality from a hands-on perspective - so it's not enough to observe that there is a crack-den RP group with crack addicts, ho's, cops, pimps, and clappy-hand rehabilitators: you have to discount the surface morals in order tro understand the nature of that exploration.

So I suspect what you really want is a forum for discussion.

Hi Pat,

I'd like to point out a couple of issues I have with the context you describe for your search.

Firstly, while I applaud your approach to the meaning of words, in that they should mean whatever you say they mean . I believe you are incorrect in the way you describe morals and ethics as almost interchangeable words for the same thing.

They are two discrete and separate concepts, although it may be said that in most cases ethics flow from morals.

Also, unfortunately, while an individual has a perfect freedom to choose a moral framework which may influence the ethics he/she adopts within society, once chosen they are indeed prescriptive and do control/influence behaviour within that framework.

Finally I would say that any meaningful investigation or research on morals and ethics within a virtual environment would require more information regarding the subjects than we have in an anonymous environment like SL. We may act as anthropologists and describe/research "behaviour", but we are not in a position within SL to ascribe morals to the subjects or their behaviour.

As an example, much as we can analyse and research the behaviour of an ant hill, we are not in a position to ascribe any moral or ethical motivations to behaviour. The reason is we know nothing about the internal context in which each ant acts.

My view would therefore be that in order to make the most of any time you invest in this area, you may need to clarify the terms and scope of your research.

Good point, if you're doing a research survey. But in this case, we do have a window into the internal context: our selves. C.S. Lewis once pointed this out in a beautiful quotation, which I can't lay my hands on at the moment.

I don't think that observation of the masses is the way to establish a moral code or a workable set of ethics, anyway. It's more a case of one on one.

For those who say "RL and SL should use the same morals and ethics"...I'm not so sure. Yes, the basic premises are the same...The Golden Rule, etc. But the devil is, as always, in the details. I think the endless discussions we get here, for instance, about whether or not SL sex constitutes cheating on your spouse shows that lots of other people are interested in the details, too.

So, go to it, philosophers!

Hi Lindal

I'm not sure that SL really does give us a window into anyone else's internal context, except maybe our own.

Well not unless everyone's "internal context" is actually 20 years younger, 10 times more successful, 5 times as attractive, and twice as well endowed as their RL physical manifestations

Oh, if you ever find the C.S. Lewis quote, I'd be very grateful if you'd pass it on. What can I say, I like that sort of thing

Hello Pat, whilst others have largely expressed what I might have said here, had it not been for Suezanne's re-railing I think your 'lumping' of SL with other Virtual Worlds might be an over generalisation.

SecondLife whilst marketed to us as 'Be what you want to be' it is ultimately what Linden want it to be. Similarly with WoW or any other virtual world. Any virtual world is the property of it's owner, quite differently to the Real World. Whilst WoW has it's own set of rules and instructions with the 'goal' of winning, SecondLife by it's isolation to the physical constraints First Life place upon us is equally isolated. My laws stop at my property border at which point, my neighbours laws take over. For any 'one set' of laws/ethics/morals to exist, Linden must want it to. I strongly believe that if they were to take any steps further than the current TOS and CS cover, they would risk losing customers. SL at present supports an enormous diversity of morals and ethics. For many of us, this is one the biggest attractions. It's not so much a place in which we live, as a place in which we play. As a business, Linden would be wisest to keep SL as diverse as possible and not restrict. There is little incentive for Linden to restrict.

Just my 5 cents as an armchair philosopher

The Ethics group meets weekly to Discuss issues of SL Morals and Ethics. It's a discussion group, and a great place to Hone ones Debate skills, and explore ones own ethical Outlook. The one thing the group does NOT do is attempt to Select the "One and Only Right, Moral and Ethical Path" they believe everyone should Follow.

If you want to Discuss,, Please look them up.

Like Charity, Morals and Ethics Begin in the Home. One should make sure ones own Moral Foundation is solid before Judging others. "Let he who is without Sin cast the first stone." Good advice, No matter what ones background is.

Angel.

Ahh.. but what if my personal moral framework is flimsy and shallow and selfish and tells me it's still perfectly ethical for me to judge you?

Oh and that Morals and Ethics actually begin in the workplace?

Sorry, I'm being a bit facetious, but it always amuses me when people on the one hand stand up and say "we believe everyone's chosen path is correct for them", "we shouldn't judge"; and then go on to be prescriptive about how and what and when is right..

You are right. We are all judges, voluntarily or naturally. It's human nature. I think any species who can set fire to a church populated by their females and young is beyond ethics. They too probably thought their chosen path was correct for them. I think they should be hunted down and destroyed .... and I try not to be judgemental. Ethics start in the head I think.

What concerns me most, is the religous 'layering' over ethics. Historically a very large proportion of wars have been fought for religous reasons/beliefs. Political reasoning is no better.

If you are reaching out in a business sense, try the VWBB.

Religious morals are never really about inspiring moral behavior when you get down to it. All religious moral codes tend to take pre-existing moral and ethical truisms (for which they then claim authorship) such as "thou shalt not kill" and mix them with rules and laws that equate morality with tribal fealty, such as "thou shall have no other gods before me". Under any such system those that are loyal to the tribe are considered moral, and those that are not (no matter how ethical they actually are) can be labeled immoral. It's crass, utterly obvious, and (unfortunately), extremely effective. It's not limited to religion either. Nationalism works on similar principles, with similar mechanisms.

I think the question as to whether SL or other virtual worlds have their own emergent ethical/moral systems hinges on the degree to which people treat them like new and potentially better worlds, or bring their tribal, racial, ethnic, or national affiliations with them from the outside world. I think it was somewhat true early on, but as SL becomes more mainstream, and as profit has replaced world building as the goal for a large percentage of the population, any emergent ethical system has been largely drowned out under the weight of individual self-interest. It's also complicated by people's differing motivations for being here. Some might want to be better people than they are in the real world while others might want to escape from the social, ethical, and legal restrictions of their real world communities.

Sorry I don't have any suggestions for the OP, but it's an interesting topic.

I never was an advocate for legislating morality, in first life.

So I definitely wouldn't support it in Second Life.

The original question was whether people might be interested in discussing how Ethics and Morality might be defined in SL.

Most of the replies (not all) basically said "no", and then went on at length to discuss, in detail, ethics and morals in SL.

Therefore, the answer is "Yes".

LOL good point I hadn't even noticed that.

Actually, the original question was a request for information on any source material or working groups regarding the subject. Most responses supplied their own opinion on the matter - which, I suppose, is providing some "source material".

I get concerned when I read about real morals/ethics in a virtual world. Let's just behave decently but try to avoid too many of the problems associated with codes of honour. Let's all just mind our own business here and avoid turning our "Brave New World" into a "Handmaid's Tale" - or even worse, a "1984".

I was envisioning it more like Animal Farm, myself...