[quote="Dianne":3u9zqv6d]Since this statement is very much a reiteration of your original point of view, I won't belabor the point other than to say that I completely disagree and that I really think you have missed the point of SL in my view.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]
It was not [i:3u9zqv6d]just[/i:3u9zqv6d] a restatement of my original point of view: it contained a great deal more detail and elaboration. But, what exactly do you think that the point of SecondLife is, if it is not a virtualised physical environment for novel forms of social interaction between people, and novel forms of creativity? If you think that the point is different than that, why do you think that there is a single point that I am missing, rather than that SecondLife can be used to achieve many different sorts of objectives, of which yours (whatever it is), and that which I have stated are both examples?
[quote:3u9zqv6d]A lot of SL's avatars (me included) are basically the same person as our RL selves, only with a different form or appearance just as you suggest, but I can say from experience that many are not.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]
I don't think that you understand my point: an avatar cannot be "the same person as our RL selves", since it cannot not a [i:3u9zqv6d]person[/i:3u9zqv6d] at all: it is a computerised [i:3u9zqv6d]representation[/i:3u9zqv6d] of a person. An avatar just does whatever the interaction between the human whose avatar it is and the programming of the SecondLife software tell it to do. It does not have a mind of its own. Having a mind of one's own is an irreducible minimum of personhood. For that reason, an avatar is not in any sense whatsoever a person. Some people might [i:3u9zqv6d]pretend[/i:3u9zqv6d], for fun, that an avatar is a person in its own right, but that does not mean that everyone must take such a pretence and treat it as if it were reality if one is to have anything to do with SecondLife at all. SecondLife is not just about pretence; virtuality is not the same as make-believe.
[quote:3u9zqv6d]There are large numbers of avatars that are "characters," role-players, split personalities etc. and I have had the pleasure of having several SL friends that have multiple avatars, each as different from each other in personality as any two RL human individuals. Some carry on that way for years.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]
None of this detracts from the fundamental point that these avatars are just multiple representations of the same person, virtually embodying different aspects of that single, flesh-and-blood person's personality. The same person may behave in vastly different ways in different situations: an actor when acting, a person when in a meeting compared to when in a party, a spy, a fraudster, a person trying to create a good impression, or a person in a particularly good/bad mood; those differences in behaviour do not mean that multiple people are sharing a single body: it is quite possible for the same person to behave in radically different ways in different circumstances.
[quote="Dianne":3u9zqv6d]No offense but this makes no sense at all. Justice is not some absolute thing that we can hold a statement or event up to and measure it to see if it is "just," in any objective concrete fashion, the whole idea is preposterous. "Justice" is not even describable as a teleological goal or a platonic ideal, it's hardly describable at all. [/quote:3u9zqv6d]
That's not true at all. Justice is very simple to describe. Justice is the principle that nobody shall benefit from her or his own wrong, nor suffer in consequence of another's.
[quote:3u9zqv6d]Justice is indeed subjective and relative both to the situation and the perception of the situation, as I suggested in my initial response. It is a concept necessarily embedded in a particular culture and not always applicable to other cultures. [/quote:3u9zqv6d]
Why do you claim that? What about the concept that nobody shall benefit from her or his own wrong, nor suffer in consequence of another's entails the existence of a culture, and what, precisely, do you think that the relationship between any given culture and that concept is?
In any event, you still cannot get around the point that I made in the first post, which is this: if different people in different cultures all have their own ideas of what justice is, then there must be some sense in which those ideas are ideas [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] the same thing, that is, justice, or else there would be no reason at all to think that the cultures have different ideas [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] justice. If there is a thing called justice about which different people (at least partly based on their culture) have different beliefs, then that entails that there is a thing about which people are having beliefs that is different from the beliefs themselves, or else people would all be deluding themselves when they think that they are having beliefs about a thing called "justice", just as if they were having beliefs about a thing called a "unicorn" (and the beliefs would all be false). A belief [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] X entails a [i:3u9zqv6d]relationship[/i:3u9zqv6d] between (1) the belief; and (2) X. A relationship, in turn, entails two distinct things between which there is a relationship, which therefore entails that, if people are having beliefs about something (rather than believing that they are having beliefs about something, but actually having beliefs about nothing, as in the unicorn example), that the thing about which they are having beliefs is an entity independent of those beliefs themselves.
You write about things being "subjective", but I am afraid that you make the all too common mistake of confusing subjectivity with the sort of infinite regress-generating hyper-relativity of "X is whatever people believe it to be". Subjectivity is merely the concept of the meaning of a statement depending in part on some property of the person making the statement (excluding the attributive function of pronouns). The archetypal example of subjectivity is taste: "fruit cake tastes good" is a subjective statement in that whether it is true or not depends on who is saying it. But notice this: every subjective statement can simply be rephrased to remove the subjectivity: "Mr. Smith likes fruit cake" is equally true or false whoever says it. "Mr. Smith likes fruit cake" cannot simultaneously be true "to" Mr. Smith and false "to" Mr. Jones. The relationship between Mr. Smith's preferences and fruit cake is a fact in the world just as much as that the earth orbits the sun or that the tides are connected to the sun and moon, and any proposition about it is either true or false.
In any event, justice is not like a person's taste in fruitcake: justice is not inherently a property of specific people: its very nature (a concept about what is right to do about certain aspects of relations between people) precludes that as a possibility. It is a property of relationships between people, which property cannot conceivably depend on what people believe it to be.
[quote:3u9zqv6d]By any decent definition that can be quoted (I won't bother to link to any of the online dictionaries, it's trivial to look it up), "justice" is what if [i:3u9zqv6d]fair[/i:3u9zqv6d] and what is [i:3u9zqv6d]moral[/i:3u9zqv6d]. The easiest common definition is that justice is [i:3u9zqv6d]"what is right."[/i:3u9zqv6d] All of these words refer to subjective, personal evaluations that are definitely not concrete, not absolute and undeniably culturally specific.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]
Why do you assume that what is right is (or is even conceptually capable of being) "subjective" (whatever you mean by that, exactly)? What is right is whatever produces most good. What is good is whatever brings the greatest happiness. Happiness, like preference for cake, is a real fact in the world, and, just like the answer "how do I satisfy my preference for cake?", what is right is, in theory at least, as ascertainable as a recipe for fruit cake and a list of places where one can buy the ingredients (although it is often, in practice, extremely difficult to work out what is right because of the inherent mind-boggling complexity of the world and of people).
[quote="Dianne":3u9zqv6d]Again, this is nonsense. I understand your literalist position on this given your RL occupation and life's work (that hopefully is not an insult, I intend merely to describe your "thinking style" as it were), but you seem to believe in a definition of justice not found in any dictionary available to me. You seem to be arguing simply that anything that you don't determine to be just by the rules and procedures that you believe in, is unjust.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]
Well, of course: that is trivially true. To paraphrase, you are stating no more than that I believe everything that I believe is unjust, is unjust. That is a mere truism. To believe anything else would simply be incoherent (self-contradictory). If I believe that X is unjust, I cannot simultaneously hold the belief that X is just.
[quote:3u9zqv6d]You are engaging in exactly the same kind of cultural relativeness that I am trying to describe, yet somehow not seeing it. How is this any different than simply saying "my culture right, your culture wrong."??[/quote:3u9zqv6d]
Because "my culture right, your culture wrong" is firstly too vague to be meaningful, and secondly assumes that a culture (as opposed to a specific decision or set of decisions about how to do things) is the kind of thing that is meaningfully capable of being conceived of as right or wrong.
However, the kind of hyper-relativity of "X is whatever a given culture says it is" leads to the same incoherency (self-contradiction) as does "X is whatever anyone believes that X is": there must be an X, inherently independent of any culture, for different cultures all to be having different attitudes [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] the same thing. This sort of hyper-relativity also breaks down because it cannot be applied to itself: supposing that you hold (as you seem to hold) the belief that "whether something is right or not depends on whether any given culture traditionally holds it to be right". What happens when you subject that claim itself to that test, and find a culture who traditionally reject cultural relativism? You are left with nothing other than an incoherent set of propositions, from which no meaning can be extracted.