Good For Good Reasons
Good For Good Reasons
Playing from a Kantian perspective…
So many videogames concern themselves with morality, but how many actually allow for the purest moral compass of them all? Sinan Kubba explores.
WERE HE somehow alive today, I doubt Immanuel Kant would’ve given a jot about No Russian. Despite the controversial Modern Warfare 2 level grabbing all the headlines, the 18th Century philosopher’s concepts of the categorical imperative, morality and duty don’t really accommodate for killing – undercover agent or not. He would have deemed partaking in a brutal terrorist massacre as always morally invalid.
An explanation might be necessary. The categorical imperative was a conceptual universal principle which every person always acted by and was defined by every person’s actions – i.e. every person acted unconditionally by the same moral principles. By Kant’s philosophy, justifying one kill would mean justifying every kill, so he wouldn’t be interested in a morbid game like Modern Warfare 2 in the first place. In fact, he would probably be offended by its titular use of ‘duty’, a word he used to describe the selfless intentions that constitute a truly morally good action.
But if Kant inexplicably gave Modern Warfare 2 a chance, he may have wanted to discuss the moments where you’re explicitly given the choice to kill soldiers or spare them. Occurring during stealth missions, these moments let you choose either to take out a guard unawares and aid your undetected passage through the mission, or to spare him at risk to yourself.
Distilling things to this choice alone, would Kant be forced to accept that sparing this soldier constituted a selfless action, and therefore one of true moral value? Likely, he’d dispute that. Maybe he would highlight the emotions I felt during my playthrough.
I chose to spare each soldier. Was that choice made solely out of duty? No, because in each moment I felt guilt for all the bloodshed I’d already caused up to that point. While my actions were partly – maybe primarily – fuelled by acknowledging that killing these soldiers was unnecessary and therefore evil, they were also unquestionably fuelled by guilt. That disqualifies them from being truly good – by Kant’s standards, anyway.
Let’s put the categorical imperative to one side; taking a world in which everyone acted in a universally, unconditionally morally good way and trying to apply it to videogames would be pointless and dull. After all, it is evil’s presence that places value on being good. Kant himself spoke about the categorical imperative only hypothetically. He never used examples of 
real-life events to back it up, mainly because he believed there wasn’t any proof in human history of an action fuelled solely by duty. This was not because he was a cynic but because, he argued, to know this would be to know the impossible: the true inner workings of another’s mind.
Kant was adamant in only providing hypothetical examples for his philosophy. As such, I think he might have appreciated videogames for their ability to distil reality’s complexity into its core parts. Videogames provide the platform for a simplistic, distilled morality because all of reality’s factors cannot be produced in them, or simply don’t need to be.
Kant was only interested in intentions, not actions, and it’s this that interests me most about his philosophy. It’s also what I think is most interesting to consider when applying his philosophy to videogames: acting out of duty – actions based on solely selfless intentions.
That’s not duty at all
Before applying this concept to videogames, it’s pertinent to clarify how we approach them in terms of morality, and which games we’re talking about. While each game involves roleplay by definition – we can never truly be ourselves – I tend to apply my moral principles to them, as do many players. In short, most of us try to act in our games in a way we believe to be good. That doesn’t apply to all players, as some reinvent principles as part of the roleplay. And of course, to follow duty in games requires choice, and not all games feature choices that allow for it – or even choices at all.
But, thanks primarily to the Western roleplaying game movement, there are many games to which we can apply Kant’s concept of duty. However, for my first example I’m not going to use a Western RPG. Instead, I’m going to go back the level I think Kant wouldn’t have actually been interested in: No Russian.
Great article.
I think The Witcher had some great spots where you were presented with choices where nothing seemed like the right choice, and the consequences would show up much later in the game in unexpected ways. I appreciated that as a contrast to the “You can kill this kitten and gain evil points, which will let you shoot lightning, or you can put the kitten through college and gain healing spells” thing that more traditional design tends to equate to moral choice.
Of course, The Witcher had plenty of clumsy writing too, not to mention a huge amount of misogyny.
I wrote an article about Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory last month for GSW. Its title? “No Morality Meter”. I talk in general, non philosophical terms – it’s more NGJ than your piece.
[http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/04/column_unnatural_selection_on_2.php]
Kant would have been chuffed with me, probably, because after a certain stage I didn’t kill at all. “If the end is to save the world, threaten then knock-out those in your way” seems universalisable, even if some would argue it’s not general enough or a little too utilitarian. Kant would be interested in computers, I think; does an artificial intelligence have any personhood? In other words, would some kind of consequentialist morality make killing in virtual worlds permissible? Or rather, would the existence of a virtual world populated by semi-autonomous but programmed and relatively unintelligent agents open the door for consequentialism to Kant? That said, I’d argue that such rigid deontological ethical thinking is too narrow in the first place.
The Resident Evil 4 example was a good one, but it amused me because Kant was famously indifferent to animals; to him they didn’t qualify as persons and therefore didn’t matter much.
Providing binary choices in games can be effective sometimes, but these scenarios are often substitutes for proper decision-making (I’m a determinist, but talk in these terms because it’s pertinent to do so). To be fair, though, most games are simply “murder funnels”, and there’s no space to act or think in moral terms unless you simply fire up the game and never move forward. In the case of both explicit and implicit morality, problems certainly come into play in terms of “reward”, but in Splinter Cell I felt motivated to act because I did, and it often made the game far more difficult. Whether this was in service of my own ego or guilt is another matter, but we can assume, I think, that I was motivated more by selfish means than duty. The context matters, however. In Modern Warfare 2 I had no qualms about killing all of the enemies because that’s what I was conditioned to do. It’s much more of a murder funnel than something non-linear like Chaos Theory, and because the enemies lacked any superficial attributes of personhood I was able to kill them easily and arguably indulged in the killing.
Great article, there’s certainly a lot to mull over. One of the biggest roadblocks to real ethical decision-making in games is players themselves. They want to kill guys because it’s fun, but will only act morally if motivated by aforementioned arbitrary rewards. Even diegetic, explicit “rewards” are often meaningless – new clothes or weapons etc. – but players respond to these as well as absolutely meaningless Gamerscore or art unlocks. Most don’t view the experience in itself as the reward, which is sad.
Also, play Far Cry 2!
One important distinction that I believe isn’t highlighted enough in these discussions is the difference between game morality as a role-playing tool and game morality as a challenge for the player. I tend to role-play may way through RPGs (funny, that) and it’s rare that I have to pause and chew over a weighty moral decision; any given Fallout 3 character I play is either that kind of person who is happy to destroy a whole town for money or they’re not. My decision is a way of expressing the personality of my character. Even for players who aren’t as interested in getting inside their character’s heads, the situation is so extreme and the results so clear that it’s not hard to choose which way to turn.
More interesting to discuss, I feel, are situations where the player has a genuine quandary on their hands. Maybe it isn’t obvious what the right choice is, maybe the consequences aren’t clear or the decision is between the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils. It’s all to easy to go into a game with clear intentions of being good or evil and it’s very rare that those ideas are challenged.
*Spoiler warning for those who haven’t played the Pitt DLC for Fallout 3 and intend to.*
The best example I’ve seen of this in a long time, possibly ever, was in the Pitt DLC for Fallout 3. Most of the choices in FO3 are pretty clear cut, but the one you’re presented with at the end of the Pitt made my brain hurt. You’re recruited to infiltrate the slave community of the Pitt, with the intention of bringing down the warlord who is running the show. You discover that he may have the cure for the particular form of mutation that affects all who are born there or stay too long. You work your way up, eventually winning a gladiatorial contest that earns you your freedom and an audience with the warlord
The first indication of things not being quite as they seem is when you speak to one of the raiders that guard the place on your way up to see the boss. He tells you that the workers have it easy; they have food, water, clothing, shelter and, short of the occasional industrial accident, safety. The raiders, on the other hand, are the ones who have to go out into the wasteland and find the food, water and other resources that everyone needs, risking their lives fighting the mutated denizens of the waste in the process.
With everything you’ve experienced in your travels around the Capitol Wasteland, you have to admit that he has a point.
On confronting the guy behind all this, you realise that there is more to the situation than meets the eye. He’s ex-Brotherhood of Steel and choose to stay behind after the Brotherhood abandoned the area after stripping it of any valuable tech. He deeply regrets the current situation, but he sees it as necessary to maintaining order and stability while the cure, which is being developed by his wife, is completed. He’s happy for you to look for yourself so, naturally, you do so. Then the real sucker punch hits you:
The source of the cure is his own baby daughter.
Her mother tells you how she was born completely free of mutation and that they’re close to a breakthrough that could help everyone in the area. She’s clearly a highly ethical woman, she’s sure progress could have been much quicker, but she’s not going to risk harming her baby. You’re pretty certain that the rebels would have no such qualms.
That’s the choice you’re presented with. You can free the slaves of the Pitt, but it means snatching a baby from two loving parents who have dedicated their whole lives to the stability and reconstruction of the area. In a game that has “slavery=bad” as one of its most common recurring themes, it’s a real bast of a decision that you have to make. I had to make that decision for the first time about two weeks ago and I’m still not sure I made the right one.