[Major spoilers for Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite]
In this essay we’re going to take a whirlwind tour through the concepts of moral responsibility and determinism, using Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite as our starting point. Whilst it won’t cover everything, it will hopefully give an overview of what sort of questions come up when we talk about these things, give you some situations pulled from the games to work through, and then show how moral responsibility can exist regardless of whether we are free or not.
One of the recurring themes of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite is whether or not you can be considered morally responsible for your actions. Throughout the original Bioshock you (or, rather, your character Jack) choose to help Atlas with his goal of stopping Ryan. One of the biggest moral choices that is brought up repeatedly is whether to harvest the Little Sisters for Adam, or to spare them.
Of course, the twist that Bioshock is most well known for calls into question whether you are actually able to be held accountable for the majority of your moral choices – you discover that you have been conditioned to blindly act of any instruction that follows the phrase ‘would you kindly.’ As the game reaches its climax, Ryan uses this trigger phrase to force you to kill him.
Now, the question we’re going to focus on for the first half of this is whether or not you/Jack can be held morally responsible for killing Ryan, and to do so we’re going to take a brief tour through some philosophical ideas about moral responsibility.
One of the first explicit constructions of moral responsibility comes from Aristotle. Whilst discussing virtues and vices, he takes a look at how people can be held responsible for having these traits. He concludes that you can only be deemed responsible if you undertook an action (or have a certain disposition) voluntarily. To be considered voluntary, the act must originate with the agent – not with some outside compulsion, and the agent must be fully aware of what they’re doing.
This brings us to the Principle of Alternate Possibilites. Building on Aristotle’s initial phrasing, we may want to say that an agent is morally responsible for an act if and only if they could have done otherwise.
Now, if we return to our Bioshock example, and look at it under these terms, can we say that you/Jack are morally responsible? Could you/Jack have done otherwise? No, because you were compelled by an external trigger to act in the same way. This is similar to how if someone holding a gun to your head forces you to commit a crime or die, you can be judged not to be responsible for your action.
However, Frankfurt1 offers some counterexamples to this. We’ll rephrase one of them in terms of the scene under discussion. When you/Jack are confronting Ryan, you may well have already decided to kill him. The fact you cannot do otherwise is irrelevant – your intended action was his death. Had you leapt on him prior to him uttering the trigger phrase, we would consider you responsible – so why wouldn’t we after you’ve heard it, if your intent was the same?
Frankfurt suggests that, rather than the defining point of moral responsibility being whether you could have done otherwise, it should be whether you could have willed otherwise. You can still have free will whilst tied up, what you lack instead is free action. Therefore, as long as you will something freely, you are morally responsible for the act. This is where it gets a bit tricky, as in order for your will to be free, you have to be capable of willing what you want to will. This is something known as a second-order desire, and it is used to distinguish what we want to call free will from mere animal decision. After all, we don’t want to say that a dog choosing to chase a cat is due to it having free will (well, you might do, but that’s a whole other debate!), but we do want to say that one person murdering another was due to them acting on their free will. So, how can we explain second order desires? A good example of one is that of someone on a diet. Their first order desire – to eat the unhealthy food – may be overruled by their second order desire – them not wanting to want to eat the unhealthy food.
If we consider this version of moral responsibility a bit better, and apply it to Bioshock, we’re left with the following conclusion: that you/Jack are responsible for killing Ryan if you were free to will his death.
Of course, as with most things in philosophy, it’s not that simple! Wolf2 gives us an example of a dictator’s son. This son is raised in a military-based country, in which torture is the norm, and grows up influenced solely by this country. He freely commits terrible acts, as well as wanting to commit those acts – and he may even have grown up wanting to want to commit those acts, in order to be like his father. Can we then consider him morally responsible for these acts?
Many people would say yes, but some would ask whether or not this dictator’s son is free, and whether he does truly have free will. He may appear to have, and he fulfils all of our previous definitions, and yet there’s something that feels wrong about it. His life feels fully determined, and as though he has no freedom in these decisions.
Of course, what’s the difference between the dictator’s son and any other person? A charitable person is charitable because of how they were raised – their traits are as determined by their upbringing as the dictator’s son’s are.
This brings us nicely into the sorts of things Bioshock Infinite loves to play with – the idea of a deterministic universe.
In the very first scene of Bioshock Infinite we become aware of this – the Luteces discuss the possibility of getting you/Booker to row, and Rosalind says ‘No, he doesn’t row’. This seems strange at first, but the further in to the game you go you realise you are not the only Booker she has interacted with – and no Booker has ever helped to row. This seems to imply that your actions – and your will – are fixed, and pre-determined to the point of predictability.
Later, you are asked to toss a coin. It comes up heads – and we are shown that it had come up heads with every other Booker the Luteces have pulled in to Columbia. This suggests a sense of physical determination about the world, nevermind just your actions. To put in simply, it suggests that if we knew everything about the world – right down to the position of every single atom – at a set time (T1), then we could accurately predict the state of the world at another time (T2). Interestingly, this also implies that if we knew everything about the world at T2, we could work backwards and end up with the facts about T1.
Now, in our world we don’t know whether determinism is true or false – there is information that points both ways. For instance, studies seem to suggest that the brain knows decisions we will make before our conscious mind does. Then again, evidence at the microlevel seems to suggest we may have true randomness in the universe, though we don’t know enough about quantum mechanics yet to be able to be more specific. Bioshock Infinite, however, is a world clearly set up to be a deterministic universe (and not, I should add, due to the fact it’s a game – more on this later), and allows us to engage with the concept and what it means for our views on moral responsibility within its framework.
Importantly, Bioshock Infinite spans a multiverse, so we need to talk about how it’s not just one Booker, but many, that we’re faced with. Simply, the Booker we play as is the Booker that succeeds (an interesting idea on this is that when you die and respawn, you are playing out the life of another Booker til his death, then your respawn is another Booker who did not die at that point).
We see that every Booker that reaches the river is determined to take one of two paths – he will either fall into ruin and sell his daughter, or become Comstock. This is not to say that Booker is pre-determined to take either of these routes – there may be hundreds upon thousands of universes in which Booker never reaches the river for various reasons, and these do not therefore end up necessarily in either of these two routes. But, should he end up at the river, then his future is pre-determined. We can assume that the two different decisions are due to slightly different world-states at this time.
What does this mean for moral responsibility then? Well, if Comstock’s actions are deserved from the very moment Booker steps into the river and agrees to baptism, is he responsible? As previously discussed, we seem to want to be able to have one of the following conditions met:
a) Freedom of action
b) Freedom of will
But Booker/Comstock seemingly has neither. He is not free to act as his actions are predetermined, just how Jack’s were determined explicitly by the trigger phrase. He also doesn’t seem free to will what he wants, as at the river point, his will is determined for the rest of his life.
This is where it gets tricky. There are some philosophers who would argue that this is as much freedom of will as it’s possible to have – the decisions are still based upon his own self, even if they are pre-determined. What matters is that they come from his ‘true, deep self’, not so much that we couldn’t predict them. Looking back to our example of the dictator’s son, this would allow us to view him as morally responsible (though we may also hold his father equally responsible) and so it also allows us to say Booker/Comstock is morally responsible for his acts – or at least, he is as morally responsible as anyone can be. It does seem to be his true self – looking at the evidence we find elsewhere in the game, Comstock does seem to be a logical place for Booker to have ended up (whereas, if Comstock was vastly different to pre-river Booker, we may assume something had put him out of touch with his ‘true, deep self’).
Some may go one step further with this – whether we have free will or not is not relevant, we just need to work with what we’ve got. If the whole universe is deterministic, we still need a justice system, and so we should be holding people as morally responsible for their own acts (unless they were coerced, as Jack was) in order to have a functional society. Otherwise, people like Comstock/Booker would go unchecked, and this hardly seems an ideal state of affairs.
Now, you may note I have barely mentioned Elizabeth yet, and that is because Elizabeth (and to an extent, the Luteces) appears to not be subject to the universe’s deterministic nature. There is a theory known as Laplace’s Demon, which states if a sufficiently intelligent demon knew everything about the universe at T1, it could predict T2. We may well want to suggest that Elizabeth is, or has elements of, Laplace’s demon – though she doesn’t seem to explicitly have this knowledge, perhaps it is subconcious. Given her role as outside of any one universe, perhaps she is free to play with the state of the universe and change the outcomes. This doesn’t make the actually universe any less deterministic – it just adds her as an element of what makes it so. This concept is one that could take up a whole post on it’s own, so I will leave it here as an aside.
Before I wrap up, let’s take a brief look at something I mentioned previously – the fact that Bioshock is a game, and therefore inherently deterministic. The game itself being limited by predetermined paths does not mean that it has to explicitly be a game that uses the philosophical ideas of a deterministic universe. It may well be choosing to use these ideas to ‘cover’ the fact it’s limited, but that doesn’t mean these ideas are not expressed in a way that allows us to engage with them. Games such as these become useful tools – forcing the player to look at the idea that if Booker reaches the river, he will always do one of two things can open discussion into the topic generally.
Hopefully, this essay has highlighted some of the ways we look at moral responsibility in general, and given you some example cases to think about. We may be left with questions regarding our own universe and whether it is deterministic or not, but it allows us to think about how our opinions may change if we did discover it was. It seems the ideal conclusion is to recognise that moral responsibility is necessary for a functional society – and so, as long as we take into account active coercion (or things that put you out of touch with yourself), we can say people are morally responsible without a requirement of freedom of will, at least in terms of justice and punishment. Returning to Bioshock one last time, we may well conclude that Jack is not morally responsible for some of his actions (though it’s debatable how many) but that Booker/Comstock certainly is.
Further Reading:
Stanford Encyclopedia Entries: Moral Responsibility, Free Will, Causal Determinism
1Frankfurt, H. ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ repr. in ed. Watson, G
2Wolf, S. ‘Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility’ in ed. Watson, G.
This is really good! Bioshock and Infinite are my two favourite games in existence, and on a very short list of favourite creative things overall.
“To put in simply, it suggests that if we knew everything about the world – right down to the position of every single atom – at a set time (T1), then we could accurately predict the state of the world at another time (T2). Interestingly, this also implies that if we knew everything about the world at T2, we could work backwards and end up with the facts about T1.”
I wrote something some years back about free will and video games that I unfortunately lost in some laptop meltdown or other, but I find this a particularly fruitful area of discussion and am very happy to find you talking about it. Consider David Cage’s games, and particularly his insistence that people play through these games once and keep that experience as their story. As long as the illusion of free will, whether within a game which as you say we *know* is a pre-determined experience, or in life. I am unsure if the thought suggested above and by many philosophers can possibly make sense to human beings or other life forms living within the system.
It may be correct to say that an individual’s reality is ultimately determined by causes and effects way, way outside of their influence and it may be that their desires and loves were not of their making. From basic things like the need to eat, reproduce and so on, to more idiosyncratic stuff like being obsessed with pickled things and John Waters movie how can they be said to be ours if something that happened several thousand years ago determined that we would do these things? Sam Harris has written a lot in the last few years about free will and one of his favourite analogies is comparing a human being within a determinist existence as being a puppet on strings, claiming that soft-determinists claim that a puppet has free will if they love their strings. I would say that a puppet is not by definition a puppet without those strings, and a human being as we understand it cannot be a human being without the strings of a determinist universe.
As you say this is an area that Bioshock 1 and Infinite examine in an interesting way and I would throw in how they relate to Noir as a genre, which has a long history of fated — or seemingly fated — tragedy. (D.O.A. is a wonderful example of this!) Booker DeWitt in particular emphasises the Noir element, making the player complicit as an unreliable narrator of events, and the moral lens through which their actions are seen. Infinite has a good measure of Jim Thompson about its attitude to violence, to the con-man and self-deluding degenerate. Booker is a product of his environment in a similar way to the dictator example you use. He grew up in a time when the society around him viewed things in a certain way as it related to race and as a result he suffered at the hands of that aggressive racism. It was this desire to belong and to avoid being that outsider that he became a person capable of such atrocities as occurred at Wounded Knee.
Unlike The Killer Inside Me or After Dark, My Sweet, as a result of Elizabeth and the world in which Infinite exists, Booker De Witt is able to step outside of any particular decisions and take account of himself as a person across all possibilities. Outside of all of the variables he remains a flawed, emotionally fractious and dangerous human being. This is most of all what makes him a tragic character. Unlike the puppet who is happy with their strings, the illusion that he could have done otherwise or that all he was the victim of bad luck is stripped from him and he is forced to accept who and what he is: an inherently bad person. As with a bunch of great Noir stories, in accepting that the thing is rigged and was rigged before he ever got there, DeWitt is freed.
The people who play through games boasting branching choices who are frustrated at the limitations of choice in games are largely missing the point. In particular the way in which they wish to see these choices realized. This is particularly true of games with a moral component like The Walking Dead. Some were angry (Small Spoilers) that taking the food or not taking the food from the car resulted in no great differences in the storyline. This makes an error in viewing moral choices and severely limits the narrative and creative potential of exploring morality in video games. It takes any number of issues and questions and uses them in a way that dresses up a choose your own adventure story (nothing wrong with those).
When one is presented with a real life moral choice, on a small or large scale, how often is the effect able to be traced right back to the cause? If one chooses to give money to a homeless person or to choose whether to steal someone’s wallet, it is fairly usual that one NEVER becomes aware of how the lives of the people involved are altered. These situations still possess an inherent moral question to the individual, regardless of whether six months down the road the homeless person shows up and gives you a free box of cake or you get arrested and go to prison forever or extra carrying capacity. The player and the character in the food situation in The Walking Dead is changed depending on the choice regardless of what both the character and player become aware of at a later date as a plot point. It is childish to use a complicated moral quandary as a way to disguise a reward/punishment system to the player. It is equally childish to use it as a way to unlock more missions or content.
Likewise I would say that the fact that both Bioshock 1 and Infinite are effectively on the rails, is irrelevant to the different moral questions that can arise for the player, both through being made complicit in great crimes and being given as Daniel Dennett would say a little “wiggle room” with the few decisions that the games throw up. The experience of the player can be as individual and provocative, and in my opinion frequently far more so, when the guiding hand of the artist/director/creator is emphasising the illusion and disguising the strings, rather than testing it with branching choice trees.
The differences between the appearance of free will and the actual reality of free will — if such a thing is desirable or if it can even be comprehended — is difficult to consider. I can read ahead and get the results of a recorded football match or the ending of a great movie and my enjoyment will decrease. The stakes suddenly don’t seem real in The Sting or The Exorcist if I know how things will end. If I don’t and it surprises me, it is as good as new, even though it was determined a long time ago.