The Moral Roots Behind Our Positions on Copybots and Other Essential VW Questions

It's easy to demonize those who disagree with us or to perceive them as immoral. Researchers have found that the differences between conservative and liberal positions on issues actually stem from a different balance of moral priorities:

• Harm/care
• Fairness/reciprocity
• Ingroup/loyalty
• Authority/respect
• Purity/sanctity

This lecture by researcher Jonathan Haidt is a good introduction to the finding of research in this area and is great food for thought.

You can test your own priorities at the research site and then think about how they relate to the question of copybots and virtual property. Here are my results:

Are Multiple Identities Contrary to a Life of Integrity

Yesterday I wrote on the new Transworlder's Community site:

I'm ready to be done with peering through the duality of SL vs. RL and the psychological, social and technical barriers that keep them apart. We live ONE LIFE through multiple identities, upon multiple worlds.

After sleeping on it, I realized that the post left the door open to a number of implications I did not intend to communicate. So I'm offering a couple additional points as clarification:

1. Public pseudonymity IS compatible with the quest to live with integrity. There are many good reasons one might choose to use one or more publicly anonynous or pseudonymous identities, including their value as safe vehicles for online exploration.  That said, I do believe that witholding information is very different than providing false information. And that hiding important aspects of ourselves from our closest friends and significant others is detrimental to both our relationships and our self-acceptance.
   
2. Integrity does not require one to look or act the same in every environment. No one would expect you to dress for work in the same clothes you use for camping, or chit chat with your your neighbor at their kitchen table with the same level of intimacy you share with your lover in bed (or on your kitchen table). The same concept holds true for virtual environments and relationships.  Integrity comes from acting from a unified set of ethical principals, not in having an avatar that looks and acts (god forbid) just like your human counterpart.
   

We are so much more than the sum of our parts, but we must integrate our diverse dimensions to synthesize our full potential.

"The artwork is, to be sure, a thing that is made, but it says something other than what the mere thing itself is, allo agoreuei. The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory. In the work of art something other is brought together with the thing that is made. To brint together is, in Greek, symballein. The work is a symbol."  Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art

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Exploring the (un)reality of virtual life: Part 1

SL is an empathy box. It sorts those who can treat others as real, as feeling beings, as autonomous people, from those who can only treat others as tools...[Second Life] does separate the few who stay from the many who don't. And one boundary between them, I believe, is empathy - is the ability to see this place and these people as real, at least as real as the physical world. From "The Empathy Box" by Sophrosyne Stenvaag

Despite my great fondness and respect for Sophrosyne, I found her recent "Empathy Box" post subtly disquieting. "What's up with that," I wondered for the better part of last week. Try as I might, I couldn't pin down what bothered me. By the weekend, I finally realized that I hadn't been reacting to any specific ideas she proposed, but rather to my own lack of understanding of what words like "reality" and "empathy" mean when they're used in reference to virtual life.

You'd have thought I'd learned my lesson about announcing a series of posts with no idea where they'll end up, but that's what I've decided to do again. Instead of taking a week in the privacy of my own server to journey through dead-ends, wrong turns and unexpected detours, I'm offering you the dubious honor and uncertain pleasure of traveling along with me as I attempt to gain some clarity on the (un)reality of virtual life.

For now, I'll leave us with an initial axiom to consider:

An avatar's personhood exists solely in the underlying sentient being.

By "personhood," I mean

A socially constructed moral category that denotes the inclusion criteria and salient characteristics that distinguish human beings from other forms of life and thus specify the individuals to which we owe particular moral obligations, i.e., those obligations we have to others due to their status as persons. (from Healthcare Ethics)

Let's see where this takes us.

Your cheating alt: Botgirl's Guide to Living With Lies

A discussion popped up on Twitter last week about the deceptive use of alts in the soap opera known as Second Life. Many readers here have heard (or experienced) horrific stories of betrayal, lust, revenge and greed. I must admit that a few have sent shivers up even my pixelated spine. I'll spare you the gory details now (sorry) and share a bit of Botgirl's Guide to Living with Lies.

Botgirl's Guide to Living With Lies

Humans lie. Online humans in anonymous settings lie even more, especially those who spend a lot of time here. Nevertheless, I think the fear of duplicity is a much more pervasive source of harm than any actual screwing-over taking place. The specter of deception hangs over virtual interactions and relationships like a hungry ghost. Okay, I hear you, my imaginary human friend:

"Don't be naive Botgirl. My boyfriend cheated behind my back using four alts of two genders and three species."

I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of devious, duplicitous, manipulative, calculated lying-through-the-virtual-teeth goings on in Second Life. I'm just suggesting that while some of us are harmed by malicious deception, all of us are negatively impacted by the way the fear of deception plays out in our interactions and relationships.

There has been a lot of good thinking related to the ethics and management of disclosure in anonymous environments, including an insightful post by Dusan Writer, an academic paper by Hyung-Yi Lu and a great body of work by Nick Yee. So instead of trying to add my two cents to the why and how, I'm going to throw out a few little ideas about how humans in avatar form might open their hearts without exposing their jugulars:

• Enjoy the present without expectations. This one is hard, but well-worth the effort. As I've written previously, there is no telling who is directing the avatar in front (or on top) of you. And you know what? If you are enjoying the company it doesn't have to matter. A lot of the hurt I've heard expressed related to relationships in Second Life seems to be more from shattered expectations (believing one's own lies) than overt deception by someone else. Which leads me to...
  

• Assume nothing and ask questions. If you DO care about something beyond what someone discloses, then ask and do not move forward in the relationship until you're satisfied with the answer. Now they are not obliged to tell you. And they can lie. But at least if you are wounded, it won't be self-inflicted. That's some consolation, right?
  

• Know what you don't know. Personal interactions in virtual worlds can certainly be authentic when avatars don't know each others' human identities. But our conceptions of even our closest loved ones are mostly fabrications of our own thoughts. As Bryon Katie said, "In the history of the world no two people have ever met." I think that goes double or triple for those we "meet" in the virtual world. Of course, there is a connection between your perception of someone and the qualities they possess. The mistake is to reify them into some solid entity with stable and knowable characteristics.

• Focus more on what you have to give, than on what you want to get. I'm not talking co-dependency here, but genuine no-strings-attached loving kindness; what Buddhists call metta. W.C. Fields said "You can't cheat an honest man" because there's usually an element of greed involved in a swindle. I think it's just as fair to say that you can't betray someone who is genuinely in relationship from a metta point of view.
  

My final suggestion dear humans is to lighten the hell up! Out of the seven or so billion people on Earth, you are among the luckiest. If you're reading this, you probably have the resources to spend dozens of hours a week in a virtual world where you can do pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want. You're not worrying where your next meal is coming from or how to keep your child from dying of malnutrition. So if your new online loves stabs you in the back, try to keep things in perspective.

With tough love,

Botgirl