I'm not sure the moral question is so separate from the legal/political one. Warning signs always start flashing for me when people start wielding questionable thought experiments. In particular, the way you've set up the experiment is such that we have to assume there is no negative consequence of lying beyond the possible elimination of the games industry, which skews one's own moral compass in such situations, especially if you're a consequentialist.darthzew said:
As a fan of the categorical imperative it's difficult for me to divorce this particular problem from the simple question of whether you would sacrifice anything else that other people enjoy for an unlimited payoff. Would you sacrifice movies? Books? Chocolate? Soccer? Churches? It seems like you would need to have pretty good reasons to think that the things that you would sacrifice were importantly different from the things that you wouldn't. Because if your reasoning was "I like this but not that", then this strikes me as ethically irresponsible.
Maybe "many people like this while few people like that" is one possible option, but is mob rule the way to go? "This has Educational value" gives the air of totalitarianism, and "This is commercially successful" is complete free market capitalism. In any case, those answers tell you a lot about the person's political stance, and one's opinion with regards to the kind of state mechanisms you have and the openness to disrupting the integrity of an industry of development are not obviously divorced.
