The Department of Anthropological Sciences presents the Senior Research Symposium
Exploring the self and encountering the Other: Morality and Virtual Reality
Speakers: Dr Jean Buttigieg & Prof. Paul Clough (University of Malta)
Friday, 6 May 2016, 17:30hrs
Library, Valletta Campus
Second Life is a virtual world created by Linden Lab in 2003 and is defined as “an immersive, user-created online world”. As a virtual world, it is ideal for thinking about the self and encountering the other in a postmodern context.
Dr Jean Buttigieg will be talking about the in-world morality of frequent residents of Second Life and show how morality in Second Life is not that different from morality in the real life.
Prof. Paul Clough will begin by outlining 2 trends in the new sub-discipline, the Anthropology of Morality – the trend from James Laidlaw’s influential 2002 article, which sees ethics as the cultivation of the Self; and its contrary, a trend which sees morality as rooted objectively in the way we treat the Other. He will use these trends to comment on morality in Second Life.
