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Is the immorality of being a meth or crack dealer not easy for you to recognize? If not, there's no point in continuing to debate.

If it is AND if you actually played a game like FarmVille and got addicted despite being very intelligent, despite being aware of how inane the "game" is and how it cynically taps into some primitive part of your brain, you'd realize that your examples are to FarmVille what selling donuts are to dealing crack/meth/heroin.

An extremely important distinction that @saraid216 and perhaps you may have failed to make: The claim is not that X itself is immoral or using/playing X is immoral, but that the intentions and methods of the dealers/creators of X are.



Scads have been written on the problems around morality so it is certainly not an over and done with "couldn't be more obvious" issue. The problem is we deem it one of these issues with no further debate - it's a nearly universal modern prejudice to which most of us are blind. There is tons of literature dealing with questions like: Have there been different moralities throughout history? (Hint: There have. In reading Aristotle we see that lying was considering virtuous and pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind.) Is thinking for humans really otherwise than an instinctual act? If not then what does that say for personal responsibility? Is there perhaps something valuable to sustaining life in lying, selfishness, self-deception, etc? Of course you probably deem all of these easily answerable questions, but I assure you a little digging below the surface and they are remarkably difficult and fascinating questions most of which still do not have answers.




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