In one vision of ethics--universalizing ethics--we are the same person everywhere and at all times, with the same moral code in all of our interactions with other people. In another vision--harmonizing ethics--who we are, and our moral code, change, depending on the person we are with, and our respective situations.
An example from the online Scrabble-knockoff Words with Friends (WWF), in which I've opted for harmonizing over universalizing: I'm playing now with two especially interesting anonymous opponents, along with some more generic, ordinarily pleasant ones, as well as a few people I know personally. Of the two interesting anonymous opponents, Player 1 I strongly suspect of occasionally using cheats (very readily available!--see, e.g., scrabblecheat.com) to boost his/her/zir performance.* Player 2, on the other hand, strikes me not only as honest, like the overwhelming majority of WWF players I've played (there have only been two other opponents out of the hundreds I've dealt with that I had the same sense of being cheated by that I have with player 1),** but as an unusually excellent partner/foe. Player 2 and I reinforce a wide-open style of play in each other that I very much enjoy--I'd much rather lose a 440 to 430 game than win a 330 to 250 game--and he/she/zi strikes me as a fine person, not that I know anything about zir beyond zir's occasionally changing profile picture and gracious comments.
First, the Player 1 story: When I decided zi was dealing some of the time--not often--from the bottom of the deck, my first reaction was to simply decline any further invitations to play. But after doing that once, with a social excuse about having to work, I accepted zir next invitation. Zi was/is in fact a good player and worthy foeperson--and how bad was it really for zir to resort to cheats now and then to make up my slight points per word edge over zir? Zi was probably a perfectly okay person, like all the subjects in Duke marketing professor Dan Ariely's experiments who cheated a bit, but only a bit.*** And how bad would it be for me to maintain my underlying edge over zir with my own occasional cheat?
So, dear reader, I recently became a cheat. Instead of feeling huffy about losing to plays like WAMEFOU and ARETHUSA that felt computer-aided, I decided to join zir--to harmonize with my own occasional cheating, matching my sense of what zi had been doing. So far, it's worked out fine--zi complimented my first computer-aided play of a funky long word, something zi'd never done before with my honest plays. As for the future, we shall see--but for the moment, I'm enjoying harmonizing with Player 1. Will I change my mind and decide that my morally relaxed harmonizing--if it be that, because of course I do not know that zi is cheating--needs to stop? Will I then stop, but perhaps start cheating again with zir or another player? I'm open to ideas, criticism, and persuasion!--maybe harmonizing with people like the notional readers of this blog, or the very real ethics students I will meet for the first time on Thursday, will help in one way or another, whether it leads me more toward harmony, more toward universality, or in yet another direction.
Now, more briefly, my Player 2 story: It's the endgame, with no tiles left, and I can get rid of all my tiles but the Q for a nice 36 points, with the drawback of leaving me no place to play the Q, with an eventual big point swing for Player 2. Or I can make a weaker 18 point play that sets up QI for me next turn if zi doesn't take the spot to play ZIT for 22. But zi can play ZIG on a double word score elsewhere for 28. And zi and I are all about offense not defense, right?...so zi won't take my space, will zi?! So I play the 18 point play--and zi does block me by playing ZIT instead of ZIG. I'm miffed at zi for a moment--and then I'm happy. Chivalrous we may both be--but we both want to win, too. With my underlying four points per word edge, I win the big majority of our games, so it's entirely understandable that zi wants to play some D to maximize zir chance to beat me. Good luck to zir!
*To be Nate Silverish about it--see his excellent book The Signal and the Noise, as well as his blog, 538.com--I'd guess there's a .7 chance that Player 1 has used Scrabblecheat or a like source. WWF is a form game, in which players with a higher points per word average beat players with lower averages a predictable percentage of the time, and, as I checked when we started to play, I have a 2 points per word edge over P1. My losing a majority of our game could of course be chance, though...what tilts me toward P1 being a cheater are some joker long word plays zi's made, such as the ones mentioned above in the post, that strike me as very unlikely unless you were a better player than P1 or you're spending a whole lot of time doing semi-legitimate "fishing" to see if a play works--but P1 moves fast by WWF standards. In other words--I do.not know beyond a reasonable doubt that P1 is a cheater. What I have is a probabilistic suspicion that seems to me rationally based, but could be mistaken.
**If cheating is defined more broadly to include fishing--let's see if GOONIES is a word--then my sense is that a considerable majority--.8?--of WWF players cheat, most certainly including myself. Within that majority of fishers, I believe a few of us are energetic, semi-cheating fishers who try anything (and in doing so shade into cheaters who use programs), more of us are lazy, or conscientious, semi-honest cheaters, if cheaters we be, who limit our attempts to what we think might be words we've heard of, and yet more us are mostly lazy/conscientious but occasionally energetic fishers.
***The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially Ourselves (2012).