Today’s Plan:
- Reminder: Paper Due Friday
- Introduction to Ethics
First a Quick Choose Your Own Adventure Game
I’ve got a quick survey for you to complete.
Introduction to Ethics
Today I want to give some sense of what constitutes ethics. I’ll start by attempting to differentiate ethics from morals. First I will give one “classic” way of thinking what differentiates the terms and then I will try and complicate that.
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. In simplest terms, both the study of ethics and morals deal with right and wrong. Generally, morality is thought to deal with personal convictions developed via abstract or religious/spiritual principles. Morals can be stated as laws: “thou shalt not kill.” Ethics are thought to be rules derived from “external” agencies–our secular social/institutional contracts. Ethics are far more fuzzy and ambiguous, and often arise as questions that problematize morals. “Thou shalt kill if a solider in war.” And something can be ethical, but not moral and vice versa. Murder, then, is almost always immoral and usually unethical (except, for say, the soldier example, which we wouldn’t call “murder”). However, adultery is often immoral, but it isn’t necessarily unethical (while it is against our understanding of right/wrong, it isn’t something socially deemed illegal–even legally it is grounds for divorce but not prison).
As I said, these are some generic, standard distinctions between morals and ethics. The distinction often hinges on whether a law or rule has a transcendent or material basis–that is, was this law delivered to us from on high (whether a religious height such as God or a secular height such as Reason–does the principle extend from something trans-human)? Such things are morals. Ethics, again, come from empirical study of human practices. I should say that I find this distinction between morality and ethics a bit too simplistic and ultimately unhelpful (and so does Bruno Latour–I’ve written about this and him here).
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. I don’t care if the rules come from state agencies or spiritual institutions. Again, morality is how we develop and internalize the rules: thou shalt not kill. A moral. I am not particularly concerned where the rule comes from or who enforces it. I see morality as the study of the rules we internalize, and how those rules govern our behavior, how those rules influence the way we come to see ourselves and the way we formulate/articulate our desires.
Ethics, for me, signals how we employ, actualize, our moral values in lived experience. It is how/whether we (choose to) act. What do we do when our rules seem to fail us? When our rules come into conflict? When it is unclear how our generic rules apply to a messy, complicated, specific situation? Ethics attends to those moments when we make a decision that we think feels right even though the rules might tell us it is probably wrong (I think you can probably see how Papers, Please is an ethical game in the sense I am describing–a game in which what is “right” isn’t clear, a game that makes us decide through a haze of uncertainty). If morality is our sense of what should be, ethics is the study of how we actually act. Ethics operates in relation to morality, often in its shadow, in the places where morals break down. I think the study of ethics is the most interesting when we encounter a situation in which or moral convictions come into conflict. Again, if we believe that “thou shalt not kill,” then how do we also celebrate the soldier? How do we operate in the face of competing morals, competing “goods,” competing obligations?
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. Such possession is akin to mastery–to rule the world without question. 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 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. [First principle is ethics not ontology–before we know what is, we are aware of the presence of an-other that calls us into being etc etc].
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. To give to one other often means we have to take away from an other. 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].
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?
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 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.
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.
Trolley Problems
Let’s talk about the Trolley Problem, created by Foot and complicated by Thompson. Very simply: the trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment created in the 1970’s by philosopher Philippa Foot.
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. Foot’s trolley problem is meant to explore the moral consistency, or lack thereof, people use to make life or death decisions. Video games can proceduralize this thought experiment, to make it more visceral or “real.” We feel the decision–this kind of feeling is called “affective” or pathetic (deriving from the Greek term for emotion, pathos).
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. The werewolves were created by dark elven magic? And then, like Frankenstein’s monster, abandoned by their creators. At some point a wolf had killed an elf. Maybe it was self-defense? 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 (well there is, but you are probably only going to have that option if you have made a series of other decisions, and only about 1 in every 10 player unlocks that “perfect” ending). The game forced me to be responsible. I must pull the lever and determine who gets hit by the train.
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 Vanguard” or “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 Raccoon 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–“they look like monsters to you?”).
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 required experience: Walking Dead episode 1).
As should become clear through the next project, I feel that games can spur ethical reflection. However, as Miguel Sicart notes, there are things that both programmers and players must do for games to best realize this potential. We will explore these things in class. For now, I would suggest that reflection is a key component of ethical thinking and growth. It isn’t enough to simply “do,” we must ask why we do. It isn’t enough to simply “feel,” we must ask why we feel. Both the procedural paper and the tragedy paper have begun this kind of work.
TedX talk on the trolley problem (interesting discussion of neuroscience and the trolley problem).
