Abstract
The gamer’s dilemma (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11(1):31–36, 2009) asks whether any ethical features distinguish virtual pedophilia, which is generally considered impermissible, from virtual murder, which is generally considered permissible. If not, this equivalence seems to force one of two conclusions: either both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are permissible, or both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are impermissible. In this article, I attempt, first, to explain the psychological basis of the dilemma. I argue that the two different action types picked out by “virtual pedophilia” and “virtual murder” set very different expectations for their token instantiations that systematically bias judgments of permissibility. In particular, the proscription of virtual pedophilia rests on intuitions about immoral desire, sexual violations, and a schematization of a powerful adult offending against an innocent child. I go on to argue that these differences between virtual pedophilia and virtual murder may be ethically relevant. Precisely because virtual pedophilia is normally aversive in a way that virtual murder is not, we plausibly expect virtual pedophilia to invite abnormal and immorally desirous forms of engagement.
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Notes
Ali (2015) brackets one possible solution to the dilemma: Bartel’s (2012) suggestion that virtual pedophilia may be impermissible because it constitutes a form of child pornography. Protagonists of the debate agree that this may explain why virtual pedophilia depicted on-screen seems impermissible in some cases, but they note that virtual pedophilia typically seems wrong even if it is not shown graphically (Ali 2015, p. 268; Luck and Ellerby 2013; Young 2013, p. 15). However, see Young (2016, pp. 61–72) for an argument that virtual pedophilia does not constitute a form of child pornography.
Luck (2009, p. 34) and Young (2016, pp. 50, 51) present a counterargument to this position: even if we have intuitions that virtual pedophilia may attract immoral forms of engagement, and even if we have compelling a priori reasons for supposing these intuitions to be right, as I hope to have provided, even so, the connection is contingent. It just would be the case that some players of Luck’s (2018) molestation mode, if it were commercially available, would be motivated to play the mode solely based on its competitive affordances, or perhaps to experience the thrill of breaking a taboo (Young, 2016, pp. 46, 47). Such divergent cases will not, on this view, be impermissible, and it seems that we would need them to be impermissible in order for the generalizing argument to succeed.
This objection misses the point. The point is that there are systematic differences between the kinds of action conceptually and notionally picked out by “virtual pedophilia” and “virtual murder,” and that these differences are likely to invite different sorts of engagement. If this is so, then one is justified in asking whether this generalization is morally meaningful, as I have done. The fact that the generalizing argument—and as already noted, the gamer’s dilemma deals in generalizations—admits of exceptions no more undermines the argument than the fact that people can tell and laugh at racist jokes for non-racist reasons undermines a moral claim that telling racist jokes is wrong. One might argue that action tokens should not in this way inherit the consensed wrongness of their types (see, e.g., Dancy 2004; Dworkin 1995 for discussion), but that is a much broader argument than the one I am making here.
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Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. Splintering the gamer’s dilemma: moral intuitions, motivational assumptions, and action prototypes. Ethics Inf Technol 22, 93–102 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09518-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09518-x