The player’s actions may be fictional, but their attitudes are non-fictional. Many gamers have posted videos of themselves beating the suffragette unconscious, giving their videos titles like “Beating up annoying feminist”. In one small town in the game, the player can interact with a suffragette who is campaigning for women’s right to vote. Consider a recent controversy over Red Dead Redemption 2. It is their attitudes toward the image’s subject that matters morally. But it is not the player’s actions toward those images that are morally interesting. When we interact with a video game, we are merely interacting with images. It is morally wrong to hold malicious attitudes toward other people even when we don’t act on those attitudes and the malicious things we do to photographs (or symbols more generally) reveal something about our attitudes toward those real-world subjects. Rather, it is the individual’s attitude toward the person who’s in the photograph that is morally questionable. The important thing to notice here is that the object of moral condemnation in these cases is not the individual’s actions toward a glossy piece of paper. And we can morally criticize people for their attitudes and values just as much as we can criticize someone for their actions.
My actions indicate something about my attitudes, values, and respect (or lack of respect) for the subject of the symbolic image. In these instances, the objects take on some symbolic meaning and my actions become symbolic too. If my reasons for burning these inanimate objects are directed toward the people depicted in them, then my reasons and my behaviors toward these objects are open to moral scrutiny. Think of my earlier examples-burning a photograph of Dr. But, why do I want to burn his photograph? What are my reasons for defacing his image? Is my animosity toward my grandfather justified? Was he worthy of such animosity? Or am I being unreasonably malicious? I am not just burning any old photograph, rather it is him that I am fictionally burning. In this case, my burning of his photograph is potent with meaning. Suppose that I harbor some malicious and vindictive animosity toward my grandfather. However, if my reasons for burning the photograph are directed instead toward the subject of the photograph, then something more is going on. This seems fine because I am merely thinking of the photograph as an image-just another photo tucked away in a box.
It is a purely pragmatic decision to declutter my life. So, after binge-watching hours of Marie Kondo, I decide it’s time to get rid of my boxes of old photographs by burning them. Suppose I decide to simplify my life, to get rid of all the stuff cluttering my house packed away in boxes that I never open. And I might have some understandable and morally innocent reason to burn the photograph. There is nothing morally wrong with burning glossy pieces of paper. Does my burning the photograph mean anything? In one sense, you might think not. It is merely a glossy piece of paper that visually resembles my grandfather. We have our reasons and our reasons can be morally problematic.Ī photograph of my grandfather is not my grandfather. How we behave toward inanimate objects is not accidental. Are these actions really morally neutral? I don’t think they are (which I’ve argued for here and here). Or imagine someone burning a photo of the Pope, or of the Queen of England. Imagine that a white supremacist burns a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. Like video games, photographs are just images.īut it can be morally wrong to harm a photograph. Let me ask you a different question: is it ever morally wrong to harm a photograph? Photographs are just glossy pieces of paper that share a visual resemblance to people, places, and things. Here’s why.įorget about video games for a moment. This is a perfectly reasonable (and common) line of thought. So, all of my actions in games must be morally neutral. Is it ever morally wrong to commit violent or immoral acts in a video game? Video games are just images, right? No matter what I do in a video game, I am just interacting with images, and harming an image doesn’t cause any real-world harm. What follows is a guest post by Christopher Bartel, Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University
0 kommentar(er)
