Well it depends on what you mean by cheating. Cheating tends to be a concept where more than one player is agreeing to a single ruleset and when one of those players breaks that ruleset, that’s the cheating.
You cannot compete in a system if you don’t both work in the same system. How do you know who’s won in a game of chess for example if the other player is playing as if all of their pawns are queens, and you are not? From their perspective they won, but from yours, they didn’t play the same game you’re playing.
So it changes when you play a game by yourself. In my view, the ruleset was created by the developers. Now clearly you could say that maybe the devs wanted additional rulesets and didn’t have the time, money, or inclination to make them, and you could also say that some devs are actively accepting of alterations to their game, but you have to ask yourself then what the rulesets of that game really are.
For me, and this is just for me, even when the devs themselves make sweeping changes to a game I can lose interest - especially when those changes “dumb down” the content and make it more accessible/simpler. Take mmo’s for example: If for 2 years the game required other players and a lot of time investment and then suddenly the devs make a huge patch where you can now solo everything and achieve the same past accomplishments in a quarter of the time, I feel like that’s “cheating”. Generally I just quit when that happens.
Obviously this isn’t an objective thing here, it’s just my personal opinion. I think generally the original vision of the game is the “intended” vision, so altering it in certain ways just seems like it’s going against the spirit of the game itself.







Absolutely.
So you have objective and subjective morality. Morality simply meaning actions we should or should not take. If something is immoral, it is an action we should not take. What actions should we not take is predicated on logic.
The fundamental premise here is simple: You cannot desire the violation of your own will.
This is actually impossible. Let’s say for instance that you don’t want to be punched in the face, but then you want me to punch you in the face. You are not desiring the violation of your own will here, your will has simply changed to desiring that I strike you. Even if you changed your mind again, you are still not desiring the violating of your own will.
And since it is not possible to quantify value in an objective way, you also cannot create an objective hierarchy of value for will. Your will and mine are equal, for all intents and purposes. Any and all ideas we might have that seem to contradict that claim are merely our personal opinions.
So what this fundamentally means is that since you would never want me to initiate any actions of which violated your will - AND you cannot quantify an objective hierarchy of value for human will - then it leads that you as well should not initiate any actions of which violate my will.
Imagine the golden rule but edited in just the slightest. It’s not do unto others as you would want done to you but do unto others as they would want done to them.
In fact, majoritively this is how all human societies already engineer themselves - they just take a great many smaller caveats away from this in their own quest for greed and power.
Take murder, rape, assault, theft, or fraud for instance. ALL of those things are only made manifest when at least one party initiates an act against another in which the second party did not consent. If you hand me $20 and your will is aligned to do so (a gift, say), that does not manifest the idea of theft. But if I take that $20 from you without your permission, I have violated your will within a logical order of operations across time.
In short, we both held the same will as it pertained to that $20 - exclusive authority over it.
The reason why you are the owner of that $20 is because you fulfilled two primary fundamental criteria: 1. You desired exclusive authority over it. And 2. You did not violate the will of another as it pertains to that $20 in order to obtain exclsuive authority over it.
In other words, you wanted it and you didn’t steal it.
And these things predated my will to also hold exclusive authority over it. We have a conflict here though - a conflict of wills - where both of us desire an outcome that we both cannot have. There is only one $20 bill and both of us want exclusive authority over it, but only one of us can.
So morally, we back you, because logically neither of us can desire the violation of our own wills and also because your will predated mine. In short, in order for you to continue to hold exclusive authority over that $20, you need do nothing, whereas for me to hold exclusive authority over it, I must violate the second rule of ownership - I must violate your will in order to have it. I have to rob you.
This is why societies punish murderers, rapists, robbers, and fraudsters. They don’t punish all of them because of power and corruption, but as a whole, all societies always have done this, or desired to do this, given their resources and power.
Rape as another example does not manifest unless there’s at least one non-consenting party. Same thing for murder. If both of us went into an MMA match together for example and we both fully understand the risks therein - including but not limited to possible death - then so long as we both followed the rules then if one of us died in the ring, we didn’t commit murder. Would it be a tragedy? Well, sure, but it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be called murder.
Now if I laced my gloves with lead which wasn’t in the rules and you didn’t consent to that? Then I murdered you. Even if my intent wasn’t to kill you, that is still breaking your consent which lead to a highly negative outcome for you. In many societies across the world as well we wouldn’t even classify such an act as first degree murder, and the penalty wouldn’t be as severe, though it would still be severe.
Or if someone tries to enter my home to harm me and my family and I put them down - that too isn’t murder, even though the assailant didn’t want to die, the logic there is that my will predated theirs - I did not want someone to attack me and my family, or even enter my home without my consent - so the moment they did my act of violence was a reaction to their initiated act of which violated my will. It’d be akin to taking my $20 back if you stole it from me. I should be allowed to at that point even if you don’t want me to because it’s my $20.
In fact you already agree to this because you have no choice because of the two cardinal premises here. You would never want me for example to violate your will, so even if you were to tell me you would be OK if I took $20 from you that’s missing the point - that just means your will was aligned to give me $20. I again, never robbed you. You never ACTUALLY want to be robbed, you might just agree if someone takes something from you that you subjectively agree with their justification for doing so and thus, change your will so that you would be OK with them having what they took.
Your will was never violated then.