Today’s Plan:
- Friday: Work Day in Ross 231 Computer Lab
- A Wicked Brief Introduction to Moral Systems
Friday: Work Day in Ross 231 Computer Lab
We’ll be meeting in the Ross 1240 computer lab on Friday. I go over MLA and APA paper format (hopefully 20 minutes or less) and then give you 30 minutes to work on your papers. A reminder that the papers are due Friday at midnight.
A Wicked Brief Introduction to Moral Systems
Last class I lectured on how I think about ethics, arguing for a sense of ethics:
- Tied to moments in which moral laws come into conflict or when it is unclear which choice is the more moral. Moments of pause or indecision in which the plentitude of possibilities give us pause
- And as attempts to overcome our inability to handle the stranger and the strange.
Today I’ll open over-simplifying those definitions a bit. Let’s call ethics the study of how we make difficult choices. To study ethics is to become more self-reflective and self-aware. As the skit from The Good Life implied, this can lead to a kind of paralysis by analysis (philosophers and theorists often are excellent at discovering and mapping complexity, less great at deciding on one definitive course of action). Rhetoricians (some of us) recognize the need for deep analysis, but often insist on a moment of decision, where analysis has to turn into action. That is a lecture for another course. (In my rhetorical theory class we work with an essay called “The Q Question” by Richard Lanham that urges humanities scholars toward more public, pragmatic projects; see also the work of Bruno Latour, especially Politics of Nature).
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.
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.
Absurd Trolley Problems
Normally we’d spend the rest of class talking about the Duck / Shawn decision in The Walking Dead and thinking about which ethical system underwrites your decision-making. Today I want to try something different instead. I have a handout. I have a website.
Thinking About the Walking Dead
Okay, so we have four different senses of ethics. Chances are all four reverberate through every decision you make. As a phenomenologist, Sicart is interested in what percolated to the surface as you made a decision. This is why rigorous reflection is so important to his method of ethical analysis: what were you thinking about at the time you made a decision? And how did the game designers reward/frustrate/respond to that decision-making? Did they pull a bait and switch (they anticipated I would make X decision, but surprised me). Did decisions become too predictable? To anticipate what I expect to find in the Sicart Summary papers, did they institute a scoring system that told you when they did good, and, if they did, then what notion of ethics are they reinforcing?
There is no right or wrong reflection here. You have space to articulate something smart about a game in light of Sicart’s theories. You might play a game that *doesn’t* involve ethical decision making, but does (you think) engender high ethical impact (my personal favorite for this is The Last of Us).
So, let’s talk about Shawn and Duck.
