Suggested Topics for Talking Ethics events

We meet for Talking Ethics for about two hours in-world, thrice a week, to explore various ethical issues and dilemmas.

If you have any ideas for themes, topics or dilemmas for these in-world meetings, please post them here or feel free to IM me in-world, if you'd rather talk with me privately about them.

Sel
(:

Ok, here they are, in no particular order:
Truth and Honesty in RL and SL
Business, Capitalism, Money and L$
Identity, Privacy and Disclosure
Personal Morals and Religious Principles
Games and Roleplaying

Also, a comment: I hesitate to say this, as it would probably require that we go to TWO sessions per topic in order to get a consensus, but it seems to me that often it would be useful to have agreed upon definitions of some terms that will come up in that day's discussion. I've noticed that sometimes two individuals will be disagreeing and it gradually becomes obvious that they are actually talking about two different interpretations of terms or ideas. For instance, we seem to have a number of difffering definitions of the words "ethics" and "morality".

To me, an agreement on what it is we mean when we use words would make for a tighter discussion.

Looking forward to the next group,
anya daligdig

Anya - I like all of your topic ideas, and would like to add to the stack some ideas based on a discussion I had with Seleras today:

Expectations, Assumptions and Prejudices in SL
Ethics-driven TOS

The first topic, especially, could help to narrow the scope of some discussions where a lot of time is spent addressing a few key concepts, i.e. whether it is relevant to place ethical responsibility on everyone's shoulders to meet your expectations of what sort of world SL is or will be, or even who you are behind your avatar. I have pretty strong opinions about the idea that, although it makes me uncomfortable to interact in some ways with avatars who are not what I expect, some responsibility falls on my shoulders to find like minded people / avatars in SL. In some situations, I may not care who I am interacting with, and in others I definitely do.

Ethics-driven TOS is a bit simpler I think. There is a lot of confusing discussion in ethics talk about whether or not X or Y is legal under the TOS. While it's important that we all respect and live by the guidelines, especially because our accounts may be yanked if we don't, it's also important that the TOS is driven by ethics and the needs of the community. This is an issue faced by all flavor of online services and the special lines which must be drawn for SL are, well, not as complicated as they are often perceived.

I'd love to take the compliment, Justin, but those topics were my additional choices from Selara's poll which you can find in another thread. The poll set up only allowed us one choice, ,so Selaras suggested we report other topics from the poll in an post here.

I like your topics.....hope they can get added.

anya

That wasn't clear.. oops. I'll have to vote in the poll meself.