Today’s Plan:
- Office Hours
- Introduction to Ethics / Project One
- Setting Up a Google Doc
- Homework
Introduction to Ethics
Today I want to give some sense of what constitutes ethics. I’ll start by attempting to differentiate ethics from morals. Both ethics and morals are a part of what we call practical philosophy–rather than dealing with “what is,” practical philosophy deals with how we should act, what should be. In simplest terms, then, both the study of ethics and philosophy deal with right and wrong. Generally, morality is thought to deal with personal convictions developed via abstract or religious/spiritual principles. Ethics are thought to be rules derived from “external” agencies–our secular social/institutional contracts. Murder, then, is both immoral and unethical. However, adultery is often immoral, but it isn’t necessarily unethical. By this distinction between morals and ethics, you can often determine the latter by asking “can I go to jail for this?”
I should say that I find this distinction between morality and ethics simplistic. I think of ethics otherwise.
For me, morality is the study of the rules that govern our behavior, our internalization of the rules, what we value and believe. The spiritual-internal vs. secular-external distinction isn’t particularly productive for me. Again, morality is how we develop and internalize the rules: thou shalt not kill. A moral.
Ethics, for me, signals how we employ, actualize, our moral values in lived experience. It is how we act. If morality is our sense of what should be, ethics is our study of how we actually act. Ethics operates in relation to morality, always in its shadow. I think the study of ethics is the most interesting when we encounter a situation in which or moral convictions come into conflict. If we believe that “thou shalt not kill,” then how do we also celebrate the soldier?
My understanding of ethics is heavily indebted to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s work encourages us to recognize our aversion to difference, and the lengths humans will go to eliminate alterity (that which is strange, different, unknown or unknowable to them). He jests that we have an allergy to the strange and different, to the other. We seek to joyously possess the world as a certain knowledge. To eliminate questions that make us uncomfortable. Rather than deal with the other, we desire the same–we desire to know, label, categorize, understand something. Facing something we do not know, or cannot know, brings out the worst in us. To be ethical, for Levinas, is to learn to inhabit this discomfort, disequilibrium. To welcome the other as an other, to let them be different, rather than to convert them into the “same” thing that I already know.
What does this have to do with the distinction between morality and ethics? I believe that the more we recognize and study ethics (as moments of moral indecision), the more we learn to choose when no one true, certain, “right” answer is evident, available, or even possible, the more ethical–the better people–we will become.
Ok, enough blather. Let’s talk about the Trolley Problem, created by Foot and complicated by Thompson.
Let’s play 4 quick choose your own adventure games.
So, if you haven’t guessed by now, here is my theory for what video games have learned is their unique province: they can leverage the emotional unrest, affectation, difficulty, disequilibrium of Trolley Problems. In a book or a film, we are left to watch the trolley driver pull the switch or not. The author decides. The author justifies. Perhaps she does so to secretly stir our outrage, to get us to deconstruct her flawed reasoning. She can spur reflection, contemplation, resistance. But we are always a bystander to the action, distanced from the choice. We are witness.
But not so in a game. I remember my first play through of Dragon Age: Origins. The details are a bit foggy–I remember encountering some elves and some werewolves. Maybe the werewolves were created by dark elven magic? And then, like Frankenstein’s monster, abandoned by their creators. Or maybe a wolf had killed and assaulted an elf? I honestly don’t remember. But I remember, unexpectedly, having to decide which species to exterminate. Only one can survive. Neither is innocent. And there is no heroic path to saving them both. I am responsible. I must pull the lever.
I’ve played games since roughly 1984 on my Atari 2600. I’ve murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions of aliens and demons and terrorists and zombies and horde (“For the Alliance!”). I’ve killed all these things from a moral position that authorizes their death. I’ve never been troubled by all this killing. Those aliens threaten our light. Those demons threaten Tristram. Those terrorists threaten democracy. Those zombies would eat me and the few others remaining in Racoon City. I killed them all without friction. (Save for Silent Hill 3, one of the greatest mindfuck games of all-time unfortunately lost to history).
But Dragon Age interrupted my joyous possession of the world, my righteous action, my moral foundation. It stung me. This was something different.
I introduce the Trolley Problem, the lever, the notions of disequilibrium, ethics, and agency as a way of thinking about games. I imagine many of you are already thinking of games that leverage this dynamic. Soon we will work together to generate lists of games–AAA, mobile, indie–that we can play and explore as a class (in addition to my two required experiences: A Wolf Among Us and A Study in Steampunk.
Homework
For Friday’s class, I’d like you to read Sicart’s Introduction and chapter “Defining Ethical Gameplay.” Pay attention to how Sicart defines ethics and morality–how does his definitions compare to the ones I offer above? What does Sicart offer as guides for good ethical games/gameplay? What does Sicart identify as key terms, or dimensions, of ethical game play?
Spend 20 minutes writing about Sicart in your Google Doc. Generally, I would like you to try and generate two “questions” we could ask about games relevant to ethical gaming. Attempt to explicate 2 important quote from the text as the basis for your questions–put them in context (transition into them, etc). Essentially, I am measuring how well y’all know how to work with source material, explicate direct quotations, and site sources. Use APA format for in-text citations.
