Punk, Puccini and the Karate Kid: A Reply to Mooradian

Abstract My reply to Mooradian’s (2026) commentary on my co-authored paper (Young & Whitty, 2026) – about the potential for a life in virtual reality (VR) to be just as meaningful as a life outside of it – focuses on the potential difference he correctly identifies between the objective value of some virtual activities and their corresponding physical activity (e.g., various forms of art and specifically karate). As a consequence of this potential difference, Mooradian is concerned with whether there will be “enough virtual worthwhile activities to support living much of our lives in VR environments”. In my response, I argue that, in my original co-authored paper, I do not require equivalence in meaningfulness to be centred on equivalent objective values (between virtual and physical activities), but instead on the potential of each activity to satisfy the conditioned for meaningfulness, in much the same way as I do not require two physical activities (e.g., composing punk music or a classical opera) to be of equivalent objective value to satisfy these conditions.