Moral in videogames

[Delsana]

It's an escape, is probably the best way to say it.

 

[Shymer]

Why do you kill in videogames if you know thou shall not kill? Is there no such thing as moral behaviour while acting in a virtual world? Please submit your explainations, justifications and reasons. Thanks in advance.

My simple understanding is that I am not killing anything when I am playing a game. I am motivated to master a challenge of dexterity (hand-eye coordination) or intellect (tactical/strategic planning). This is not about morality - it is about a feeling of achievement (winning and being right, being recognised for my skills and having control).

There is moral behaviour 'in a virtual world' because it should inform how we treat other players in a multi-player environment. Morality also comes into play when it comes to the developers choice to portray certain acts in certain ways.

Christian teachings about sins of thought are complicated, but in essence it seems to boil down to the fact that morality is about what's in the heart, not in outward behaviour. Playing games is a behaviour that does not, by and large, lead to evil behaviour. Evil in your heart will more readily lead to evil behaviour.

So playing apparently violent computer games does not make me less moral. However if I harbour evil thoughts in my heart, I may well seek satisfaction in violent computer games.

In summary - you cannot tell, by the games someone plays, whether they are moral. By extension, you cannot control someone's moral decisions by controlling what games they play.

 

[Not-here-anymore]

And thus morality is not objective. If different people within the same society can hold conflicting viewpoints as to what is and isn't moral... well, that's the definition of subjectivity

Is it the barrier of language? Objectivity is if anyone can acknowledge it. Subjectivity is if it is only entiteled to an individual. That is epistemology or ontology on when we can say something is objective or subjective and how we know it. That is if only yourself can identify somehting it is subjective. Like your pure thoughts. No one but you may tell what you are thinking. But then there is neurobiology that challenges this sentiment. If you and anyone can identify something it is objective. Like a table in a room.

Objective items are fact, subjective items are opinion. By arguing an objective morality, to me, you are suggesting that everyone's moral code is identical; that what is and isn't good is a universal constant, and not the opinion of the person carrying out the action. So perhaps it is a question of language/semantics.

I think what I have problems with is your idea of consensus. From your previous posts, it seems that because everyone has agreed on something they will keep on agreeing with it; it becomes inalienable fact, and those introduced to the consensus will agree with it because it is.

They will keep on agreeing with it as long as they believe it is right.

They will keep on agreeing as long as they believe it isn't too wrong. People are easily capable of committing acts they consider wrong, or evil, as long as someone else has told them to do so. This, perhaps, is a problem of agency in real life - people are as easily controllable as game characters, under certain circumstances.

If you believe because it is good it should be the law we have another conlusion.

Quite the opposite - I believe that because it is the law it should be good. I don't mean effective, I mean it should be bound to be always on the positive side of ethics. However, I fear I lack the knowledge on the subject to make arguing further on that line profitable or entertaining for either of us.

"Because it is descreptive it is normative" is the sentiment that somehting is and should be.
"Because it is normative it should be descriptive" is the sentiment that something should be but is not.
"Because it is descreptive it should be noramtive" is the sentiment that something is and should be but is not.
Kind of contradicting. Have I done somehting wrong? I am fairly sure you cannot interchange noramtive and desciptive arguments around in a sentence containing "because" which is why I have not included that combination in my argument.

If I understand what you're saying correctly...
I don't mean to say that the law (normative?) isn't good (descriptive?), merely that it should strive to be so. I appreciate the implication in my last post may have been that it doesn't fulfil that role; perhaps I phrased it badly. What I meant was that the law shouldn't enforce an entire positive set of morals - not every act of good should become legally mandatory, else good becomes meaningless. However, assuming the necessity of a legal system, the laws that are in place should constantly evolve towards an ethical optimum.

Interestingly real life rewards work the same. If you want to know more watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel_video_title

The time scale is the issue. 10 minutes of game - reward! 10 minutes of life - still working towards it...

The problem of agency was also my initial problem to adress. From there it just piles on. Because I have the responsibility of the actions how do I avoid it being moraly wrong by killing in a videogame? Am I killing in a videogame? How can I say I am not killing in a videogame? Are characters living beings? Are they even real? And so on...

For my own curiosity - do you play games which involve violence towards virtual characters? Are you OK with your actions in these worlds?

The issue seems to be as much to do with what constitutes life as what constitutes death.

 

[Jachwe]

Objective items are fact, subjective items are opinion. By arguing an objective morality, to me, you are suggesting that everyone's moral code is identical; that what is and isn't good is a universal constant, and not the opinion of the person carrying out the action. So perhaps it is a question of language/semantics.

Morality is a fact of social conscisnous thus it is objective. It is not exclusivly the fact of an individual´s conscisnous which would be subjective because morality is brought into existece by consensual believe of good. The social conscisnous is brought into existence once people build society and conceptualize themselves being part of it. If you do not want to be part of society you do not have to have a morality because there is no need for it.
There is not one moral code because morality is a process. You might believe that authorian ethics such as practiced in christianity is monumental and unchanging because there is one book and it has not changed for 2000 years. The truth is there were burnings of people deemed evil. Nowadays the church does not approve of such practices anymore. Thus the act of burning evil people now has become obscene. Morality is evolving and developing according to consensus. Its development and branching is dictated by the consensus.
The reason why there is not one moral code is simple. For there to be only one moral code it is necessary that there is only one universal consensus. We can imagine such a universal consensus but as I stated earlier consensus implies disagreement and thus if unity is archived it would eventualy branch out again. That is the reason why there is not only one moral code and the reason why there will never be a definite universal moral code.

They will keep on agreeing as long as they believe it isn't too wrong. People are easily capable of committing acts they consider wrong, or evil, as long as someone else has told them to do so. This, perhaps, is a problem of agency in real life - people are as easily controllable as game characters, under certain circumstances.

You will not do something you deem wrong without justification. Otherwise your action would make no sense. I am talking about sense in a deep way which affects your very self. If your actions which are an expression of your-self do not make sense your-self does not make sense because your-self is the source of your actions. If your-self does not make sense it is the same as not having morality which means going back to the state of nature where there is no such thing as morality and thus no need for an actions to make sense.
That is your actions are to be moraly evaluated. The source of your actions is your-self. If an action is performed by your-self and the action makes no sense you do not act according to social nature. That is of course your actions express a disjunction between you and society because you are not par tof society but in the state of nature.

If I understand what you're saying correctly...
I don't mean to say that the law (normative?) isn't good (descriptive?), merely that it should strive to be so. I appreciate the implication in my last post may have been that it doesn't fulfil that role; perhaps I phrased it badly. What I meant was that the law shouldn't enforce an entire positive set of morals - not every act of good should become legally mandatory, else good becomes meaningless. However, assuming the necessity of a legal system, the laws that are in place should constantly evolve towards an ethical optimum.

Morality is normative because it says how things should be. Laws are descriptive because you can point at them.

For my own curiosity - do you play games which involve violence towards virtual characters? Are you OK with your actions in these worlds?

The issue seems to be as much to do with what constitutes life as what constitutes death.

Yes I do play violent videogames. I am also ok with my actioncs within those games otherwise I could not play them. I will post the rest on the issue later. For now I have to go.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Why do you kill in videogames if you know thou shall not kill? Is there no such thing as moral behaviour while acting in a virtual world? Please submit your explainations, justifications and reasons. Thanks in advance.

Because, under the right circumstances, thou shalt indeed kill. For example, if you had to kill someone in order to prevent a bomb going off in mid-London, would you According to the 10 Commandments, you should not, because it would involve killing. But I would without hesitation.
If you want to compare video games to real life, please do. I kill in Crysis 2 because practically everyone I look at tries to shoot me. I kill in Mass Effect to save the galaxy.

Of course morality is different in a game. Why do you kill and eat plants? They are closer to us than computer code is. Justify the slaughter of countless plants! Game code has no feelings, no intelligence, no emotion. It's a series of 1s and 0s. 010110101010111100100011. Should that sentence have rights? Why not, it's computer code.

 

[Jedamethis]

Because they don't die. They'd have to be alive to die. They don't eat, they don't sleep, they don't think. They're not alive.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Why do you kill in videogames if you know thou shall not kill? Is there no such thing as moral behaviour while acting in a virtual world? Please submit your explainations, justifications and reasons. Thanks in advance.

Cause I've got a lot of anger and violence repressed from day to day frustrations and I figure it's much more legal to take it out on fictional beings that the ones I could actually get in trouble for offing. Oh and besides, I only kill people that piss me of in games.

 

[Togs]

Wow another escapist troll, a rare but often hilarious thing.