Today’s Plan:
- Morals vs Ethics
- [Absurd] Trolley Problems?
- Wicked Brief Overview of Moral and Ethical Systems
Morals vs Ethics
This will be the shorter version of a longer lecture. The short version is that morals and moral reasoning is a rule-based reasoning. This might be religious, in the form of the ten commandments. This might be secular, in the form of a constitution, a military procedure, or an academic code. If you want to be a good person, follow those rules. When you encounter a real world situation, then consult the rules. The rules here “transcend” every day reality, they come from a higher place or source (whether divine or secular, God or Reason).
Ethics is often seen as how we make decisions when the rules don’t seem to apply, or conflict, or just feel off a bit. A now antique television show was quite good at exploring the space between moral law and ethics–NBC’s Law and Order. That show often tried to show us how the clean, black and white, abstract, transcendent nature of the law often felt off when applied to very messy, grey, imbricated, and material nature of human existence.
I think of ethics a bit differently than that. My understanding of ethics is heavily indebted to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish phenomenological philosopher who spent time in Nazi prison camps and was fortunate enough to survive. 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 what he terms “the other” or “alterity.” We want to design a world with which we are already familiar, a world of “the same.” 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, can bring out the worst in us. To be ethical, for Levinas, is to learn to inhabit this discomfort, disequilibrium and repress the desire to transform something other into something familiar, what he calls “the same.” 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.
So ethics, for Levinas, is learning to recognize and prioritize others, to put their needs ahead of our own. Ethics becomes extra-complicated when we realize that others make different demands on us–and no matter how generous we might want to be, we cannot give everything to everyone (the problem with the mantra “do unto others” is two-fold–first it assumes that the other would want what I would want, second it assumes all others would want the same things). To give to one other often means we have to take away from another other (Levinas, whose philosophy draws heavily on the first Testament and the Talmud, calls this the choice between the other and the neighbor). Thus, in his later career, Levinas pays more attention to the concept of justice. Justice requires I choose between the competing demands of the other and the neighbor–that I chose knowing I must betray one of them. Their is no justice without choice, no choice without imposition. [Levinas’s formula: to make the choice that causes the least amount of violence]. This hurts us twice: first, that we must acclimate ourselves, second that we must have the fortitude and courage to make a decision that will cause unhappiness, pain, or worse. There is no “pure” unfettered, nonviolent option.
More than just an analytical science of how we act, ethics for me marks our ability to handle, to process, the unknown. How do we feel, and respond to our feelings, when we encounter the strange? Do we curl back in repulsion? Express exasperation (*why do they do that? that’s so weird?*). Or do we become self-critical? Do we invite reflection (*why don’t I do that?*). In short, for Levinas ethics is a practice of hospitality. How/do we welcome the stranger? Something different? Further, what happens when we encounter something we cannot control, when we have to make a decision with no clear right answer, when we face something that resists our mastery? Do we have the strength to face and decide?
I believe that the more we recognize and study ethics (as moments of moral indecision), the better we become at carefully choosing how to act when we have no one true, certain, “right” answer to guide our choice. We have to learn to deal with complexity, and the icky feeling that it can produce in us. Video games can help us do that. The point of moral philosophy, of interrogating why we think or feel a particular way, why we make a decision, is to become more familiar with what we value. To reveal consistency, or inconsistency. To invite indecision or the second guess. To, hopefully, learn to live more thoughtfully. We have already talked about video games, procedurality (the power of making us do) and catharsis (the power of making us feel). Now lets cook this all together by adding in some cognitive friction (the power to make us ethically confused) and complicity (the power to make us feel responsible): so that video games train us to handle uncertainty and act ethically in the world by making us do things that feel bad and making us feel very, very responsible. Enter Detroit: Become Human.
Our last project, focused on the work of Miguel Sicart and the game Detroit: Become Human questions whether games, by constructing *sophisticated* ethical problems, can make players more ethical in the sense I have just worked out. The reading you will do for homework will provide us some insight into how Sicart thinks moral problems should (and shouldn’t) be formulated in games to best encourage the kind of critical thinking and questioning I describe in the previous paragraph.
Trolley Problems and Absurd Trolley Problems
Do a thing!
A Wicked Brief Introduction to Moral Systems
Given the complexity of human decision making, there’s a lot of different theories and approaches to ethics. Let me lay out 4 of them:
- Deontology or Moral Law
- Teleology or Consequentialism
- Virtue Ethics
- Hospitality Ethics
Deontological ethics are based on identifying moral laws and obligations. To know if we are making the right decision, we ask ourselves what the rules are. For instance, if you didn’t lie to Herschel because lying is wrong, then you were invoking a deontological frame. You made a deontological decision. You worked back from the specific concrete moment to a (prior) conviction (philosophical knowledge that precedes any human experience, stuff we might “innately” know, is termed “a priori”–some empirical philosophers, like John Locke, argue that nothing is a priori, everything is learned). Deontological ethics get critiqued because sometimes moral laws come into conflict and because it requires absolute adherence to the law without thought of context. At core: God, Reason, Science, common sense dictate right from wrong. Hey, look, Kant.
Consequential ethics look ahead, from the action and decision, to its consequences. You use prior knowledge to make hypotheses about what will happen. Your focus here isn’t on what other people or institutions would declare right or wrong, but on producing “the greater good.” This is often called utilitarianism, which strives to imagine what will make the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Another form of consequentialism is hedonism, which strives to make the most (personal) pleasure and minimize (personal) pain. If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you thought lying might lead him to question you further or kick you out of the farm, then you probably made a hedonistic decision. If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you thought lying might lead him to question you and kick you and Clementine out of the farm, then you made a consequential decision. Consequential ethics get critiqued because they can lead us into hurting minority populations. One could argue, for instance, that slavery contributed to the “greater good”–that enslaving 3 people makes life wonderful for 7. I’d say they are wrong–but one can rationalize pain in relation to happiness, which can lead us down dark paths, trying to calculate levels of pain, which is precisely why Kant thought of consequentialist ethics as “wishy washy” and wanted to develop something more universal. At core: act in service to the greater good.
Virtue ethics are a bit different–though, like consequential ethics they rely on our imagination. Virtue ethics asks us to imagine, in that situation how a good person would act. This, in a sense, mixes deontology (who is the good here? what rules do they follow? what institutions would they represent?) with the situational flexibility of consequentialism. If deontology operates around rules that govern behavior, virtue ethics begins by establishing the characteristics common to good people (bravery, compassion, justice, etc). Often we tie virtue ethics to a particular person–for instance, we might cite Martin Luther King’s dedication to non-violence, self-sacrifice, and self-discipline (but, like, if you try to tell me that MLK was “cooperative” or “less radical” then you are simply telling me you haven’t read MLK. MLK’s domestication is a topic for another day). At core: imagine what a great person would do in this situation.
If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you believe a good person should tell the truth and be brave, and trust others (etc.), then you are exercising virtue ethics. Note: this is different than deontology, because here you don’t *have* to follow the rules, and there might be times that lying (say, to protect someone from Nazi pursuit), is justified.
Ethics of hospitality also involve an effort of imagination; this time it is our task to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and imagine a decision from their perspective. Is this a decision we would want someone to make if they were in our position? We can think of this as a more radical version of the Christian ethic of the Golden Rule (from Lev. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), except here we are self-skeptical enough to realize that the other might not want the same things as us. So rather than assume the other is just like us, we train ourselves to recognize and honor their difference, their alterity. Hence hospitality, since we train ourselves to welcome the strange, the unfamiliar. Ethics, here, trains people to negotiate the unknown and the contingent. Ethics as the impossibility of ever walking in another’s shoes, but trying like hell all the same. At core: ethics as making “space” for other people.
Homework
There is no class on Wednesday or Thursday as I will be away at an academic conference. In lieu of class, do two things:
- Read Sicart’s “Moral Dilemmas” essay in the Files section of Canvas and respond to the questions in the Canvas 11.M assignment
- Download the PollEverywhere App for a cell phone, tablet, or create an account on a laptop. We will start using this in next Monday’s class to collaboratively play Detroit: Become Human
