[qsort]

No offense but this is only a slightly refurbished version the "videogames make us murderers" type of argument. Those are extraordinary claims, and as such require extraordinary proof, when in fact no correlation (let alone causation) exists.

It's like claiming "it's unwise to brush aside any argument that reading HN makes your skin turn green", it's entirely baseless; I don't understand why the burden of proof should rest on me.

There's an argument that some themes might be less palatable to some people, but that effectively comes down to personal preferences. For example, I personally hold the view that lotteries and similar games are unethical, but is it really fair of me to cast those who play such games as "objectively immoral"?

[claudiawerner]

>It's like claiming "it's unwise to brush aside any argument that reading HN makes your skin turn green", it's entirely baseless; I don't understand why the burden of proof should rest on me.

I agree, which is why I have provided several resources to engage with the philosophical (and by following references, psychological and sociological) literature on the topic of the intersection between violent video games, morality, and (more dubiously and controversially) real world behavior here[0]. The arguments go for and against, but no author to my knowledge has argued that video games and their players do not at least qualify for moral consideration. Furthermore, these arguments are sometimes agnostic regarding major meta-ethical positions. Is this the kind of base for the argument you're looking for?

>For example, I personally hold the view that lotteries and similar games are unethical, but is it really fair of me to cast those who play such games as "objectively immoral"?

There's some concept shuffling here which does not accurately get to the heart of morality and moral resposibility. The word 'morality' is generally used in a normative sense (consider war, vegetarianism, killing, advertising, the environment, etc. as topics we frequently speak of in the normative sense), but your usage of the concept in describing lotteries as unethical targets the descriptive sense - a code accepted by an individual or a community[1].

The normative sense, which I believe the article and GP targets, concerns a code that would be accepted and followed by all rational people given access to moral facts (and processes of deliberation). Those facts may be deducible a priori (but need not be). This is the same sense in which someone might say "you should not do X".

Moral judgements may also imply moral responsibility - not only should you "not do X" as a rational person, but you are in some way responsible if you do do X. Moral responsibility pertaining to both meanings of morality is widely (but not unanimously) accepted by philosophers.

Building on moral responsibility, we finally reach moral blameworthiness, which allows us to "cast those who play games" one way or the other, or reserve judgement.

There are quate a few steps between [deducing that some video games, and indeed playing them, is morally significant] to [casting someone as 'objectively immoral']. Ask, however, that if there is an argument showing that torture is wrong, would we be justified in labelling a torturer with full mental and rational capacity and access to moral facts to be "objectively immoral"? If so, why wouldn't we be able to say the same if the papers I have cited make convincing arguments about video games and players of video games?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187823

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

[qsort]

> but no author to my knowledge has argued that video games and their players do not at least qualify for moral consideration

This is a weird phrasing, to be honest: if an author decides to write on a topic, by definition they believe the topic is worthy of consideration. By the same logic, by how niche this topic is, even by moral philosophy standards, we could deduce that most authors do not believe it is worthy of consideration?

Honestly AFAIK, the position that actions happening in a fictional scenario have no moral weight is the default and widely accepted one, with hardly any credible objections.

I couldn't read the papers you linked because they are paywalled. I'd be interested in hearing a dissenting opinion if you could outline one.

> but your usage of the concept in describing lotteries as unethical targets the descriptive sense - a code accepted by an individual or a community (...)

This is a distinction without a difference. Morality in the sense that "all rational people should accept it" is basically an empty set, AFAIK most of the philosophical arguments are "moral implications", i.e. if you accept X, then you should also accept Y; but it's dubious it's possible to make any moral judgement in the sense you require.

The root cause of my opposition to lotteries, etc. is the moral belief that it's unjust to reward or punish people on the basis of events or characteristics they have no way to control. This is a moral intuition, there is no way I can rationally convince you in a non-circular way that you should absolutely accept this fact. If you don't, the discussion is kind of over.

To make a different example, why do you oppose slavery? (I'm going to assume that you do) The most likely answer is a variation on "all humans have a natural right to self-determination", but why is that? Again, it's a moral intuition without any absolute justification.

> If so, why wouldn't we be able to say the same if the papers I have cited make convincing arguments about video games and players of video games?

Because I'm not convinced they do.

[claudiawerner]

>if an author decides to write on a topic, by definition they believe the topic is worthy of consideration.

This was not my point; rather, it would be possible for a philosopher to argue that they are not worthy of moral consideration, or not worthy in some way (but are worthy in others) - "worthy of moral consideration" refers to the object having moral properties, or that an activity is morally relevant. It does not mean that the topic isn't worth arguing about. For instance, some moral philosophers have argued that animals are not worthy of moral consideration.

>is the default and widely accepted one, with hardly any credible objections.

I don't think so. Consequentialist accounts of the morality of violent video games and even other media more generally cite arguments such as increasing aggression or anti-social behaviour. I'm not convinced the data is correct, but I think that among the general populace, some topics and actions are mff-limits morally blameworthy, such as engaging in a simulation in which it is your choice to molest children.

>This is a distinction without a difference.

It very much does make a difference, at the very least in the way we talk about morality. "It's against my ethical code" is not the reason you'd hear when you ask why someone disapproves of torture. "It's immoral" is what you'd hear, and it means something much stronger, something we act on in the world to the extent of restricting others, and the reason we have the state, courts, justice, the non-aggression principle, socialism, libertarianism, capitalism, and any other ideology or justice.

>Morality in the sense that "all rational people should accept it" is basically an empty set

The fact that no metaethical theory makes the case for you sufficiently does not mean that none of them do, and the same "choose your axioms" argument could me made just as well against, say, mathematics, identifying colours, epistemic standards, or logic itself. The only token that allows you to throw out the grounding of morality allows you to throw out anything else too. That's not to say moral facts necessarily exist, but many people take them to insofar as they provide for (almost) uncontroversial moral facts involving, say, slavery or torture.

There are very good arguments against morality in general, but "you can't prove any particular code of ethics is the right one a priori" is not one of them - the sophist's hammer is too blunt to be useful to me, you, or anyone else.

>This is a moral intuition, there is no way I can rationally convince you in a non-circular way that you should absolutely accept this fact. If you don't, the discussion is kind of over.

There is, assuming that we share systems with roughly the same results, just as you can convince me that A == A assuming we share similar logical systems, or that the earth is round assuming we seare similar epistemologies. They don't even have to be the same in order to rationally convince someone of internal consistency, which is what matters here.

>Again, it's a moral intuition without any absolute justification.

We could continue reducing the question down to a single basic statement of any ethical theory. That's not a problem, because although we may say on forums that morality is relative or descriptive/non-normative, we act as though it is objective and absolute, and we frequently ground our rational actions in that belief.

I'm sorry to say I don't think I'll do a good enough job of explaining or relaying the arguments against the immorality of video games more succintly than they have been made already, but here are PDF links to a good non-paywalled paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18384555564403984...

The papers citing this one also do a good job of arguing that some video games can be immoral to play, but none are as high-level and cover as many ethical bases as this one. It's worth noting that even this author cannot say that video games are unworthy of moral consideration. "It's just a game" is by no means his approach here.

Edit: here is one such paper I cited in my other comment that argues the immorglity of certain multiplayer video games from a Kantian perspective: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-019-09498-y

[qsort]

> This was not my point

Fair enough, I misunderstood.

> increasing aggression or anti-social behaviour. > I'm not convinced the data is correct.

I'm not convinced the data is correct either. What are we talking about, then? It's a baseless claim, as empirical data shows.

> the reason we have the state, courts, justice...

The reason we have those things is that we have to coexist with other people. There is no necessary relation between state and ethics, nor there should be. Politics on a large scale is the result of interest groups with differing moral codes/interests/priorities pushing in various directions.

> There are very good arguments against morality in general...

I'm not trying to argue morality does or doesn't exist, it's not a question I find personally interesting, I was just claiming the request for morality to be universally grounded is unreasonable, we seem to agree there. I don't really have an objection to what you're saying.

Mathematics is very different because it's a formal language. One could view all mathematics as purely string manipulation. There's no requirement to agree on anything, not even the meaning of the symbols, except for a set of primitive concepts and a set of axioms. In a formal language you have proper definitions and checkable (even machine-checkable) proofs, a privilege that natural language doesn't enjoy.

> but here are PDF links

Much appreciated, I'll take a look.