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Gary Young, Resolving the gamer’s dilemma: examining the moral and psychological differences between virtual murder and virtual paedophilia

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missed the point of the dilemma; she instead argued that virtual paedophilia was (morally) bad because it necessarily reflected our shared moral reality whereas virtual murder did not. In 2015,… Click to show full abstract

missed the point of the dilemma; she instead argued that virtual paedophilia was (morally) bad because it necessarily reflected our shared moral reality whereas virtual murder did not. In 2015, the most recent attempt at providing a solution to the dilemma came from Rami Ali (Ali 2015), who (unlike Bartel and Patridge) did not seek to resolve the dilemma so much as to dissolve it. Ali argued for the dissolution of the dilemma because he believed that Luck’s original premise was flawed: gamers did not believe that all instances of virtual murder were permissible and that all instances of virtual paedophilia were to be prohibited. Young’s book is divided into six chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the dilemma. The first chapter introduces the dilemma and provides the reader with some background information. Chapters 2 and 3 analyse the five original arguments that are rejected by Luck as possible justifications for a relevant distinction between virtual murder and virtual paedophilia. Although Young disagrees with Luck in some regards as to the scope of some of the arguments, or as to how they specifically fail, his analyses ultimately reach the same conclusion. Chapters 4 and 5 are used to analyse the three proposed solutions to the dilemma. Young claims that Bartel’s ‘eroticization of inequality’ ‘fails to convince because it misses the point’ (p. 81): its focus on the indirect harm to women is not why gamers believe that virtual paedophilia is so morally reprehensible. He thinks that Patridge, and her approach of claiming that virtual paedophilia necessarily reflects our shared moral reality, is able to provide a useful descriptive ‘sketch’ of why there is such division between gamers’ attitudes towards virtual murder and virtual paedophilia but that such an account is unable to form the basis of a normative position (p. 92). While Young acknowledges that Ali’s attempted dissolution of the dilemma is novel and ‘has promise’ (p. 102), he believes that Ali is unable to ascertain the gamer’s specific motivation for In 2009, in what was one of the first papers published on the topic of the philosophy of video games, Morgan Luck created the ‘Gamer’s Dilemma’. His starting premise was that gamers permitted all acts of murder within video games whilst simultaneously prohibiting all acts of virtual paedophilia. However when Luck examined the proposed justifications that supported the starting premise he found that none of the five arguments he analyzed could maintain such a moral distinction between the two types of virtual acts. Luck therefore concluded that unless such a justification could be found, one that made all acts of virtual murder permissible whilst simultaneously prohibiting all acts of virtual paedophilia, gamers would either have to accept that virtual paedophilia is as permissible as virtual murder or prohibit the latter to keep the former from being made readily accessible. In Resolving the Gamer’s Dilemma: Examining the Moral and Psychological Differences between Virtual Murder and Virtual Paedophilia, Gary Young brings together the dilemma and the three best known responses to it and analyzes them all, to provide the reader with a new perspective on this issue as well as contributing his own novel attempt at resolving the dilemma. As briefly mentioned above, there have been three major responses to Luck’s challenge to provide a justifiable reason for believing his original premise. The first was from Richard Bartel (Bartel 2012) who argued that virtual paedophilia was distinct from virtual murder insofar as the former caused an indirect harm to women that the latter did not. Next came Stephanie Patridge (Patridge 2013), who disagreed with Bartel’s conclusion and argued that an ‘indirect harm argument’

Keywords: dilemma; virtual paedophilia; murder virtual; paedophilia; virtual murder

Journal Title: Ethics and Information Technology
Year Published: 2017

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