Expressive Gaming

Reasonable people have all accepted that video games are a form of art. If someone truly disagrees with the premise that video games have substantial artistic value, then I think it is self-evident to any gamer that the person simply has not experienced games properly.

The act of designing and developing a game is clearly an act of artistic expression. Unlike movies and novels, however, games are interactive. Many games often act more like a dialogue between the designer and the player than a simple transfer of content from designer to player. My question, then, is this: can the process of playing a game be considered an act of artistic expression?

The Moral Crisis of Guantanamo Bay

This post isn't really timely or anything, but it's something that I think we're all wrong to just forget about and let go. The problems of Guantanamo Bay came to my mind the other day, and it seemed as good a reason as any to do a post on it.

The legal system is designed to deal with people who are accused of crimes. It sets guidelines for the sort of behavior that is appropriate. Prosecution of crime is supposed to follow certain rules. Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a swift and fair trial. Swift trials are important. Consider that our main penalty for guilt is time spent in prison. If an innocent person waits a long time for a trial, then they are being punished for a crime they didn't commit. This is highly unjust. Trials need to happen quickly, and they need to be fair.

In times of war, it is impractical to provide every captured enemy with a swift trial. It is also impractical to follow all the rules of evidence, and impractical to follow normal legal rules. Enemy combatants are imprisoned until the war is over. However, this is a tradeoff. When the war is over, prisoners are released. Except for international war criminals, crimes of war are forgiven.

This trade-off is important. Prisoners of war are not criminals. They are people we hold in order to win a war. For normal enemy combatants, we are not trying to enact justice. And we recognize this by releasing them when there is no more immediate threat.

In our justice system, we are doing more than just dealing with an immediate threat. We are using punitive measures to restore justice. This attempt at the restoration of justice requires a much stricter standard of conduct. Accused criminals get speedy trials, are entitled to legal counsel, and cannot have their rights violated without a warrant.

At Guantanamo Bay, we are trying to have both of these models at once. We are holding them out of military expediency, but are unwilling to let them go free as legally guiltless enemy combatants. We are also in the awkward position of holding prisoners in a war that has no clear end condition.

We cannot have people exist in a legal limbo. The situation is a true moral crisis. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial before getting hit with terrible punitive penalties. The people at Guantanamo have rights. Some of them might be innocent, but we cannot know without a fair trial.

If we are at war, it is not against any conventional enemy, and it is not a war that is likely to end cleanly. We cannot simply throw human beings into a prison and hope they die before we have to deal with them.

An Ethical Analysis of Digital Piracy

This is a paper I wrote for a seminar in digital property rights, I've done nothing more than just copy and paste it, so it's rather longer than a typical blog post. I was hoping to make it so the citations jump to the endnotes on a click, but I can't make it work right now. So clicking on the links won't do anything useful unfortunately.

Introduction

Digital piracy is the illegitimate acquisition of digital content. Piracy is therefore illegitimate by definition. For many people, that is enough to rule it morally impermissible. That conclusion, however, misses the point. Law is supposed to follow the conclusions of ethics. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”1 Of course, piracy is not anywhere near as important as civil rights. Nevertheless, the general principle stands: what is morally permissible is not always the same as what is legally legitimate.

The relationship between law and morality is complicated. In principle, everyone can agree that laws should advance moral goals. This does not mean, however, that the law should ban all immoral activities. For instance, cheating on a spouse is almost certainly an immoral act. That doesn't mean, however, that the law should ban cheating. It is also sometimes permissible to legally ban activities that are morally permissible. For instance, there is nothing morally wrong with wanting to take a picnic at a classified air force base. Nevertheless, the government is acting legitimately when it bans that activity. The government has no good way of distinguishing a harmless picnic from the activities of foreign spies. The point is that the ethics of an activity may or may not align with the law, even in a scenario in which the law is written perfectly. Thus, it is important to examine the morality of actions outside of a legal context.

There is a widespread movement to alter the intellectual property laws that control the distribution of copyrighted content online. The Creative Commons license was established to allow creators to willingly designate their work as available for use beyond the constraints of traditional copyright.2 Legal scholars focused on intellectual property issues are advocating various levels of reform to national and international copyright law. The fight to change intellectual property law is important. This paper, however, will focus on a different issue. Given the laws that are currently in place, when, if ever, is it morally permissible to commit digital piracy?

The answer to that question is of critical importance right now. Piracy is currently happening on a massive scale.3 There is widespread disagreement as to what effect piracy is having on the creators and distributors of content, but it is impossible to deny that piracy is happening. Without the law to guide them, millions of individuals are making their own private decisions about what sorts of piracy are acceptable and which are unacceptable. This paper will focus on offering some level of guidance to those who are currently engaged in piracy or are considering piracy. I will begin by looking at some of the issues involved in the ethics of piracy, and I will conclude by offering my own criteria for morally permissible piracy.

An important caveat: I do believe that certain types of piracy are morally permissible. However, piracy is by definition illegal. I am not advocating that you go and break the law. There are consequences to breaking the law that go beyond my consideration. It is up to the reader to decide whether or not the risks of breaking the law are worth it. This paper is focused on whether or not one can be held morally blameworthy for acts of piracy; that is a different question than whether or not one should actually perform acts of piracy.

Some Thoughts on Gender Relations

I've recently found myself in the position of trying to explain to several women why certain men act the way they do, and it's gotten me thinking. The question posed to me was, "why do some men go around hitting on every girl they see? It's just creepy."

The reason some men act like this is because it's a viable strategy to get laid. A lot of women seem doubtful of that. They tell me that for them and many women they know, an overly aggressive strategy is just a turn-off. They don't understand how such a flawed strategy could ever work.

Of course, the aggressive strategy isn't aimed at those women. When a guy uses an aggressive mating strategy in which he propositions many women, he expects to fail most of the time. The key thing is that he invests little time in each individual woman, but approaches many women. When a guy talks to a dozen women in the course of a night, his overall success chance can be reasonable even if his success chance with any particular woman is low. Even if the aggressive strategy is guaranteed to fail with 90% of women, 10% is still plenty to work with.

Why Not Harvest Kidneys to Save Lives?

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw recently wrote an essay titled "Defending the One Percent," in which he defends many conservative economic views. In it, he makes a key moral argument. Essentially, he says that any policy that redistributes goods based on the overall welfare of society is a violation of rights. One of Mankiw's criticisms of a consequentialist approach is that we could probably save many lives by forcing random people to give up one of their kidneys to those who need transplants (since people can live with just one kidney). Nevertheless, we don't do it, and the thought of it seems abhorrent. He moves from that point to the conclusion that making policy from a public welfare perspective is against our moral intuitions, and is not something we should be doing. Mankiw makes other arguments in the paper, and I think he has a lot of it rather wrong. However, I'm going to focus on addressing the kidney argument, since it is similar to many general critiques of utilitarianism.