Morality of mind control…

[Reynard]

The definition given was "imposing your will".

Trickery is just a mundane version of mind control.

Context matters.

 

[Deset Gled]

Context matters.

?

Communication does to. If you could provide said context it might be more productive.

FWIW, I would say my example was less "trickery" and more "gaslighting using magic tools". I have no idea if this makes a difference to your context or not.

 

[TiQuinn]

This reminds me of the True Lies quote:

Helen: "Have you ever killed anyone?"
Harry: "Yeah, but they were all bad."

I think that's about as deep as the morality of my games tend to go.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Depends on which violation you think is worse. At a guess quite a few people would rather die than have their mind invaded and taken over.

Is that the test for evil-ness? If people prefer A over B, B is more evil?

I don't think so.

 

[tetrasodium]

I feel that way because certain word choices indicate to me whether this is a person I really want to have a discussion with. Framing someone's opinion as "corrupting" tells me this might not be a very useful conversation.

No need to get personal but you still aren't really making a case. Focusing the question through a lens like Star wars corrupts the discussion by forcing moral absolutism onto the framing. You yourself seem to have recent posts agreeing or admitting that the question needs to be answered in the relative context of any given scenario, pairing that with outrage over Star wars being a terribly corrupting lense of moral absolutism is odd.



If you think the question is one that must be answered in terms of moral absolutism then be clear and say so rather than taking issue with the idea that forcing something with contextual relative morality into moral absolutism corrupts a nuanced discussion with the chains of absolute morality. Dithering like this hedging for both moral absolutism and relative morality presents an incoherent position because the two are antithetical to each other

 

[jian]

Context matters.

Yes. Mind control isn’t being persuasive or charismatic, or even psychological abuse, fraud, or gaslighting - we know how all of those things work in real life. It’s an out of context problem for us so we have to try and imagine it. The teleporting gold situation isn’t mind control, it’s just fraud and trickery, and we know how that works.

 

[Deset Gled]

Yes. Mind control isn’t being persuasive or charismatic, or even psychological abuse, fraud, or gaslighting - we know how all of those things work in real life.

This is where I completely and totally disagree. Mind control is a very real thing. And if we're going to try and talk about real world morals, we have to use the real world versions of mind control as relative comparisons. It's the only way to give real context to the discussion. Anything else is just writing fantasy - both fantasy mind control and fantasy morals.

The only alternative, IMNSHO, is to admit that we're only considering in world morality. In which case we should be talking about what Wee Jas and Yoda tell us about mind control instead of discussing medicine.

 

[jian]

This is where I completely and totally disagree. Mind control is a very real thing. And if we're going to try and talk about real world morals, we have to use the real world versions of mind control as relative comparisons. It's the only way to give real context to the discussion. Anything else is just writing fantasy - both fantasy mind control and fantasy morals.

The only alternative, IMNSHO, is to admit that we're only considering in world morality. In which case we should be talking about what Wee Jas and Yoda tell us about mind control instead of discussing medicine.

So, just to be clear, are you including mundane charisma, fraud, and psychological abuse in your definition of mind control? That’s fine but I don’t think that’s what we’ve mostly been talking about. If nothing else, we mostly have well settled cultural and legal definitions of whether those things are right or wrong (OK, wrong, and wrong, generally).

 

[tetrasodium]

This is where I completely and totally disagree. Mind control is a very real thing. And if we're going to try and talk about real world morals, we have to use the real world versions of mind control as relative comparisons. It's the only way to give real context to the discussion. Anything else is just writing fantasy - both fantasy mind control and fantasy morals.

The only alternative, IMNSHO, is to admit that we're only considering in world morality. In which case we should be talking about what Wee Jas and Yoda tell us about mind control instead of discussing medicine.

Don't we use terms like marketing propaganda and cult indoctrination for that though? Can you give some specifics if you are talking about something very different from those examples?

 

[Reynard]

This is where I completely and totally disagree. Mind control is a very real thing. And if we're going to try and talk about real world morals, we have to use the real world versions of mind control as relative comparisons. It's the only way to give real context to the discussion. Anything else is just writing fantasy - both fantasy mind control and fantasy morals.

The only alternative, IMNSHO, is to admit that we're only considering in world morality. In which case we should be talking about what Wee Jas and Yoda tell us about mind control instead of discussing medicine.

It seems strange to come in to a discussion and attempt to make an end run around the point by shifting the goal posts.

You decided to latch on to a specific word -- supernatural -- to then attempt to argue that deceit is mind control. That's both nonsensical, and besides the point.