The Gaming Den

In 1985, noted philosopher Michael Ruse wrote an article entitled "Is Rape Wrong on Andromeda?" In the article, he postulated that if intelligent alien species existed on other planets in the universe, they might have different notions of morality than our own. Taking his cue from the growing field of what is now known as evolutionary psychology, Ruse argued that much of what we consider moral is shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and natural selection. Indeed, many biologists today believe that a variety of beliefs and behaviors like justice, fairness, mutual cooperation, reciprocal altruism, proportionality, inclusive fitness, kin favoritism and even the instinct to protect children all evolved from basic biological behaviors that made those who followed such principles more likely to survive and pass those values on to their offspring.

So, it stands to reason that extraterrestrial morality would be shaped by a set of different environmental pressures, and that an alien's resulting moral code may be quite different than ours as a result. In a society where simple biology dictated that females only came in heat one day a year and were responsible for all of the child rearing, the males may have no choice but to engage it what we would consider rape simply to ensure the survival of their species. As their species became sentient, a whole complex system of morality may arise to justify such behavior in a way that most of us cannot fully fathom. This is not to say that such behavior is either right or wrong in an objective moral sense (assuming you even accept that such a thing exists), but simply that it is, for lack of a better word, appropriate behavior in that particular context.

How does this relate to games? To put it simply, the environments we experience inside games are other worlds, and many of the avatars we play in them are essentially alien creatures who may seem human from time to time but are not entirely so. Their actions may not always map one-to-one with our sense of reality, and something that is not acceptable in our world may be entirely appropriate within theirs. Of course, by this I do not mean to justify or endorse in any way the harassment or "griefing" by one player of another in a multiplayer game; those are actions with real-life intent, directed at another real-life person, with real-life consequences. But within the context of the reality of the game itself, it may be entirely acceptable for a warrior to attack a seemingly unsuspecting centaur or for a hoodlum to shoot a hooker.

Don Strudel wrote:As we all know, in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Garou eat human flesh, routinely engage in the violent murder of human beings, and have sex with both humans and wolves that spread diseases between them.

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and provide a justification for all of this: Garou are immoral. They do not follow black and white human morals, but their own blue and orange morals that do not agree with human morals. Hence, whatever actions they do that we disagree with (cannibalism, murder, cross-species sex) are perfectly permissible amongst their alien mindset.

Prak_Anima wrote: There's also the fact that I still hold the dogrape is a special case. Wolves in WtA are portrayed as immensely more capable of communication and informed consent than real wolves. Possibly because a garou actually can sidle up to one, say "yo, bitch, down to fuck?" and get an intelligible, to them, answer.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote: There's also the fact that I still hold the dogrape is a special case. Wolves in WtA are portrayed as immensely more capable of communication and informed consent than real wolves. Possibly because a garou actually can sidle up to one, say "yo, bitch, down to fuck?" and get an intelligible, to them, answer.

Dude, you can do that to a nine year old too. Doesn't make it even a little bit OK.

-Username17

1. That the ever-dominant and only inherent impulse in all living beings, including man, is the will to remain alive — the will, that is, to attain power over those forces which make life difficult or impossible.

2. That all schemes of morality are nothing more than efforts to put into permanent codes the expedients found useful by some given race in the course of its successful endeavors to remain alive.

3. That, despite the universal tendency to give these codes authority by crediting them to some god, they are essentially man-made and mutable, and so change, or should change, as the conditions of human existence in the world are modified.

4. That the human race should endeavor to make its mastery over its environment more and more certain, and that it is its destiny, therefore, to widen more and more the gap which now separates it from the lower races of animals.

5. That any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of mankind toward greater and greater efficiency.

6. That all gods and religions, because they have for their main object the protection of moral codes against change, are inimitable to the life and well-being of healthy and efficient men.

7. That all the ideas which grow out of such gods and religions — such, for example, as the Christian ideas of humility, of self-sacrifice and of brotherhood — are enemies of life, too.

8. That human beings of the ruling, efficient class should reject all gods and religions, and with them the morality at the bottom of them and the ideas which grow out of them, and restore to its ancient kingship that primal instinct which enables every efficient individual to differentiate between the things which are beneficial to him and the things which are harmful.

FrankTrollman wrote:Heh. He really is going on fine until he decides that because morality is man made to help us survive, that we should reject it. It really doesn't follow at all. Having shown that morality works, Nietzsche really would have needed to demonstrate that his immoral superman system also worked, or worked better.

As is: This sentence no verb.

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Something symbolic.

• Die
  or
• Be about people coming up with shitty philosophical defenses of rape while other people either shoot them down or vomit into their own mouths.

Don Strudel wrote: whatever actions they do that we disagree with (cannibalism, murder, cross-species sex) are perfectly permissible amongst their alien mindset. [...]

This article sums up the concept of alien morality:

"...Taking his cue from the growing field of what is now known as evolutionary psychology, Ruse argued that much of what we consider moral is shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and natural selection."

Suppose we ask an orthodox Hindu: why does he suppose that one should not eat meat? One kind of answer is: this belief was instilled in him by his family at an early age, and has been sustained by a variety of social and personal pressures. But it does not give a REASON for the belief, in the sense of 'reason' in which logic is concerned with reasons. Explanations of this kind belong to psychology or sociology. They are quite foreign to logic.

Suppose we answer the question in a different way, saying: the Hindu believes that killing, and everything which requires killing, is wrong; and that eating meat requires killing. This answer MAY explain the origin of the belief. But it also does, or purports to do, something else: it JUSTIFIES the belief.