Plato vs Aristotle (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)
Does virtual reality open a new sphere of ethics - virtual morality?
Earlier in this course we looked at how the U.S. military is partnering with video game manufacturers both to create more robust training simulations for its troops and to promote its "brand," particularly with young people for recruitment purposes. At the time, I left aside the debate over whether playing violent video games makes people more violent in real life. This is a perennial debate, which in its essence goes back to the very origins of Western philosophy, and the difference between Plato's and Aristotle's views on art.
Plato, as you will recall (winky-wink), considered the arts "immoral" because
- They distract from "man's" striving for higher things
- They seduce people into sensual pleasure and various kinds of immorality and make those things look normal and attractive, and
- They are lies about reality.
Aristotle, on the other hand, proposed the concept of catharsis: the arts deal with emotions and passions, and these are genuine and important aspects of human existence. When one experiences a strong emotion through art, one is able to be "purged" of that emotion. The arts can thus provide a kind of "safety-valve," as people often suggest. If you go to a sad chick-flick and cry your eyes out, you will feel better - you have purged yourself of maudlin emotions that were already in you. People supposedly partly enjoy horror movies because they are thereby purged of their fears through experiencing and releasing the fear emotion. Similarly, if you go to an action flick and watch the hero blow people away, you will purge yourself of your violent negative inner emotions. These are modern variations on Aristotle's view of Greek tragedies as cathartic.
This argument has been extended by the defenders of video games and pornography, the claim being that acting violent in video games or feeling sexual (and usually debasing and objectifying women) while watching pornography will act as a catharsis for the player, purging him of his powerful drives, emotions and desires which might otherwise get expressed in the real world.
I say "his" intentionally, because the arguments - from Plato and Aristotle to the present - tend to focus on the (straight) male subject, who is imagined as having a bundle of explosive emotions roiling around inside him: lust, brutality, anger and aggression, among others.
Those with a more Platonic attitude continue to argue that violent video games teach their players that violence is a good thing and a preferred solution to problems and give them an unrealistic image of what violence is actually like, and that watching pornography trains men to treat women as objects and expect them to wear high heels during intercourse, apart from many other things that wouldn't be on most real women's wish lists in sex (more on this in a couple of weeks).
Whether you tend to a more Aristotelian or Platonic view on these matters will probably have an effect on your response to the questions we're looking at this week, but it is not the only question. Rather than trying to decide whether video games are "good for us" or "bad for us," from a psychological perspective, Stacey Goguen (2008) suggests that the virtual space of video games opens up an ethical dimension that has never existed before in the world, at least not quite in this form. You could read her article now for a clearer understanding of what the question is for Goguen. Or just click next and rely on me for your knowledge of what she says. Your call.