edy420 » September 17th, 2017, 12:57 pm wrote:Serpent,
Some relationships are ok with pornography and even flirting.
But IMO the point where it gets physical is when it becomes cheating, even if some couples are ok with it.
VR experience is just another version of TV.
It's just more in your face.
So then I think it fair to say "morally", couples who aren't ok with pornography, won't be ok with VR and vice versa.
But neither are cheating.
No act that falls within the confines of a contract can be cheating. To cheat means to break a rule that was known and agreed-to; it is the practice of deception to gain an illegitimate advantage of some kind.
But that's not what your last question was about.
It was about making a virtual copy of a real person and abusing it. I believe the phrase was "sex slave".
If that does "no harm" in your idea of a marriage bond, or in your idea of society, then so much harm has already been done that society that it's no longer viable anyway - in which case you would, of course, be correct.
The two mainstays of a social contract (as distinct from a business or legal one) is mutual trust and respect. The forms, distribution and expressions of those social glues may vary greatly: I can only respond in light of the mores with which I am familiar. In any social contract I know, if you debased your neighbour's wife - even if only in effigy, that couple would no longer be prepared to risk their own safety to rescue you from a flooded house, or share their bread with you in dire need.
To me, that seems like a lot more "harm done" than some trivial infidelity; hence the moral rejection.
(My personal repugnance is to the whole scenario: the desire for abusive sex; taking pleasure in the the humiliation of another person; the fantasy of doing this to a person of one's acquaintance; the surreptitious acquisition of that person's image and its objectification. I can't remotely imagine ever again being intimate - or in the same room with - someone who had done those things.)
As to what Dawkins thinks our "natural being" is, I couldn't comment. Seems to me civilization itself is so far from natural that whatever natural is, it doesn't affect civilized moralities very much.