No morality is an absolute thing. On this very basic principle of morality there can only be one correct position. :-)

IRT LambdMOO..as Pavel Curtis tells it the wizards got fed up and siezed power in a coup d'etat. But I'm not talking about player-governance at all; democracy just replaces one tyrant with a hundred tyrants. I'm talking about self-governance. What is self-governance in virtual world terms? Well it's simply giving the the means to enforce a simple right to the owner of that right. You cannot do this succesfully in the real world, I contend you can however do it in the virtual world because of it's very limited nature.

Just a for example... in the virtual world you can silence me with a press of a button. In the real world you have to use a gun. You can do it just for yourself in the virtual world, in the real world you make that decision for everyone. In the first case you are able to execute self-governence, in the latter it's what...anarchy...vigilanteism.

By "enable them [players] to enforce their own rights", I mean giving them the power to control their level of interaction or non-interaction with other players. The player who insists they have rights beyond their own virtual space will soon find themselves by intention or exclusion playing a single-user game. And that is where consensus lives. People left to their own devices will naturally come to consensus with a wide range of other people. Not on all issues, but on those they consider important when playing the game or their version of the game.

There are several rights you might extend to a player, the most basic right you could grant them is control over their communications. It's trivial to do, yet most muds suck at it. There are many other rights you might grant players, but if they don't have the means to enforce it, then it's a poor design decision, socially IMO.