Morality, Games and Papers, Please

[Major spoilers for Papers, Please, Mass Effect 2 and minor spoiler for Infamous]

In my last post I talked about how Bioshock can give us a handle on moral responsibility and free will. In this post I’ll be sticking with the theme of morality, but looking at a different aspect of it – how do we decide what is moral, and how do we act on it? To do this I’ll be looking at Papers, Please (if you’ve not played it, stop reading right now, go and do so and then come back). I’ll start by talking about how Papers, Please is a much better simulator of moral decisions than many games that actively try to be are, before looking at how it also shows that philosophical moral theorising can be incredibly removed from actually attempting to be moral in every day life. To do this, I’ll focus on three key kinds of ethical theory – consequentalism, deontology and virtue based ethics. Finally, we’ll look briefly at whether Papers, Please has worth in studying philosophy.

Many games these days like to add in some kind of moral alignment system – such as Infamous. Infamous is well known for being pretty binary in the choices it presents you, making you decide between, say ‘sharing food with starving people’ or ‘electrocuting people to keep it to yourself’. Now, any reasonable person could easily tell you which of these would be deemed the ‘moral choice’, though they may not choose it in game because being evil gets you force lightening powers. And come on, who doesn’t want force lightening powers?

Obviously, not all games are quite so binary with morality – Mass Effect manages to improve on this somewhat, as its dual system is not called ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but ‘Paragon’ and ‘Renegade’. Now, this remains a binary system, but it’s far more of a hero/anti-hero split than good/evil. After all, even at your worst, Shepherd isn’t wilfully murdering innocent people. And some of the choices in the game get genuinely difficult – such as the decision between reprogramming or destroying the Geth heretics in Mass Effect 2. Neither of these options seem especially ‘good’ or ‘evil’– though it is still clear it’s a moral choice situation, and you have to sit down and make a decision.

But what does all this have to with Papers, Please? Unlike most games, Papers, Please doesn’t present you with what I’m going to call “moral choice moments”. Instead, every single moment of it, every action that you take forces you to make a moral choice. Do you merely refuse the person who lacks their vaccination certificate, or do you detain them? If you detain them, you’ll get extra money and be able afford medicine for your sick child – but who knows what happens to them once they’re detained? Do you let in the wife of a man you’ve just let through, even though she lacks the correct papers? It’ll be your third failing today – and thus, gain you a fine.

Papers, Please makes every decision important, and it does so without drawing attention to the fact choices are being made, without having a meter or scale showing how moral you are. It never questions your decisions – there’s no meta commentary on whether or not you made the right one, just the reactions of the people the decisions affect and your own feelings. Do you feel guilty? Or pleased? That’s the tell, not some bar on the screen that saying you’re good, or that you’re evil.

While discussing this with Lewie Procter, he mentioned an interesting point that sheds a lot of light on this – he describes the main mechanic of Papers, Please as ’empathy’. Making the notion of empathy so core to the game-play forces you to deal with it whether you want to or not – it’s incredibly hard to play the game without thinking about this, as it’s really the only way to decide your own success. Yes, there are fail state conditions, but even then these are somewhat self-determined – do you see your family getting sick as a worse thing than revolutionaries being captured, or the other way around? Most games don’t confront you with empathy quite so forcefully – you can play Dragon Age: Origins just fine without caring a single bit about any of the characters, though of course the experience may be lessened if you do. Within philosophy, Hume believes that reason “is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” If we agree with Hume, pretending we can make these decisions by setting empathy to one side seems flawed – and whilst most games allow us to do just that, Papers, Please does not. Whether Hume is right is a debate we won’t get into here – but it’s something worth keeping in mind as we assess the following theories, all reliant on reasonable decision-making.

But is moral philosophy as guilty of these failings as well? I don’t think it necessarily is – but I do think playing Papers, Please whilst trying to stick to one theory can really highlight the problems of applying these theories in real life. Let’s take a quick walk through the big three.

Firstly, consequentalism. In theory, this is the easiest to apply as its basically about promoting the best consequences. There’s a whole bunch of debate over what these consequences are, so we’ll focus on one particular consequentalist theory for now – but be aware this isn’t the only one. Let’s look at utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism, at least, John Stuart Mill’s version, is about producing the most pleasure/happiness, and the minimal amount of pain. I say ‘pleasure/happiness’ as he doesn’t just mean the things he deems ‘lower’ pleasures (basically, things like sex or having an awesome meal) but also the things he deems ‘higher’ (like learning new things). If we’re following this moral theory as we play Papers, Please, our goal should be to maximise happiness and minimise pain. Sounds easy enough, right? Not so. There’s a ton of things we need to consider.

Firstly, we have to balance the happiness of our family against the happiness of strangers – and do we want to allow or avoid a bias there? Well, that depends on if we’re playing this as an agent-neutral consequentalist or not. If we are? Well, then our family’s happiness is as important as the strangers – no more, no less. If not, then we have to prioritise them over others – but to what extent? Is my wife’s happiness worth ten times more than a strangers? A hundred? How do we judge this?

We also have to consider immediate versus long-term consequences. Let’s say we let in a woman lacking a vaccination certificate because her lover asked us to. They’re happy (success!) – but is there a risk of spreading disease (less of a success)? And sure, these are the sort of things that given time, we might be able to sit down and theorise about. But that’s the point of Papers, Please – we don’t have time. You get paid for every person you process, and spending time thinking about the best way to deal with each situation loses you money. And then your family get sick. Trying to work out the best consequences of every action simply isn’t practical.

Some utilitarians have come up with a possible solution to this – rule utilitarianism. Instead of working it out for each individual situation, we follow a set of rules designed to bring the best consequences from what we previously know. So perhaps, these rules could be: ‘help others when they ask unless it risks your family’, or ‘protect those who ask you to even if those you are protecting them from can legally enter the country’. The big criticism of this from within philosophy is that it gets dangerously close to our next theory – deontology, or the theory of doing your duty – but from our perspective, that’s not the biggest flaw. It’s a flaw it shares with deontology though, so we’ll cover that first.

What is deontology? Quite simply, it’s duty-based ethics. This means that you do the right thing because it’s right, and you don’t do the wrong thing because it’s wrong. But how do we know what is right and what’s wrong? This varies from theory to theory, so just like we did with consequentialism, we’ll use one particular deontological theory to highlight our point. This time, we’ll look at Kant. Kant proposes a fairly easy way of telling whether something is morally permissible. An act is morally permissible if it fulfils the following two requirements:

1. If the maxim (rule) you are following could be willed as a universal law.
2. Humanity (whether yourself or another) must be treated as an end, not a means.

So, let’s apply this to our play through of Papers, Please. This is actually a pretty easy theory to apply, as unlike consequentalism we don’t have to try and think of all the possible consequences of an act. However, it’s this simplicity that is its failing as a practical theory.

We’ll look at two particular cases from Papers, Please to see how it works. Firstly, the fact that you’ll get extra money for your family if you detain someone. This is pretty obvious – you’re treating the people as means to get money, so it fails the second requirement. Thus, it’s not morally permissible, and you shouldn’t do it.

Secondly, should you let in someone without the correct vaccination certificate? We need to ask ourselves if we can universalise this. No, because if we made it so that everyone was allowed in without a vaccination certificate, then disease would spread and this is not something you would will.

It’s pretty easy then to work out what is moral and what isn’t whilst playing Papers, Please. Unfortunately, life isn’t as easy as this theory needs it to be. The big problem for both deontology and rule-based utilitarianism is that life doesn’t tend to present you with situations that are solved so easily. Let’s look at another case from the game: a woman comes to your desk. She has no vaccination certificate, and she informs you that if you don’t let her through, she will be killed. What do you do?

There are two conflicting duties or rules here – firstly, ‘don’t allow disease to spread’ and secondly ‘prevent harm coming to innocents’. Both of these pass the test, and both of these seem to be moral rules. But which should you prioritise? In this decision, you must break a rule. There’s no way around it. Does either theory give us a way out? Rule-utilitarianism does – you can go back to the initial premise of maximising happiness/minimising pain, but this also brings back the original criticism and pulls the usefulness of rule-utilitarianism into question. Kant’s deontology, however, doesn’t seem to. In principle, there are proposed solutions to this – such as proposing a hierarchy of duties, but it seems as though following Kant is real life would have you pretty stumped.

There’s another big flaw in deontology too – and that is that it allows seemingly tragic consequences for the sake of doing your duty. An extreme, non-game example is that if told to torture one innocent in order to save a thousand lives, Kantian deontology would demand that you not do so, and allow the thousand to die. Is this something we truly see as moral? And is it something we could live out in a game such as Papers, Please, without feeling horrific guilt?

We come now, then, to the third of our three theories – Virtue Ethics. Originally Platonic/Aristotelian in origin, Virtue Ethics underwent a revival in the fifties thanks to Anscombe. We’re going to look mostly at the classical Greek version of this, rather than any later developments.

In this the concept of eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing, is key. Eudaimonia is the end-goal, if you will, of human existence. It’s a fulfilment of yourself, a happiness and being a good and valuable person. Part of achieving eudaimonia is cultivating virtues. What are virtues, you may ask? They’re traits or dispositions – not just a tendency towards certain acts, or an agreement that doing a certain thing is moral, but something deeper than that. They’re a core part of a person.

This makes telling whether other people are moral somewhat complicated. With utilitarianism, if a person acts in such a way that they maximise happiness, we call it a moral act. Virtue ethics doesn’t allow for this. If a person acts honestly, there is no guarantee they have the virtue of honesty – for instance, if someone acts honestly because they’ll be punished for lying, they don’t have the virtue. To have the virtue, they must be honest for honesty’s sake.

Another important part of this theory is the notion of phronesis, or moral/practical wisdom. This is knowing how to be virtuous, and being able to think rationally about what is and isn’t moral. It’s the difference between a child imitating morality and an adult understanding it.

So, a little bit more complicated to explain than our previous two – hence it’s revival. Rather than relying on arbitrary calculations, or a set of rules, the emphasis is on being a moral person, and not just doing acts that are deemed moral. Unfortunately, this advantage is also its downfall. Playing through Papers, Please as a virtue ethicist is a real challenge – you’re constantly having to decide whether honesty or bravery is more valuable to you, whether it’s more important to be generous or loyal. You’re left having to use your practical wisdom with little to no guidelines, and in the end, all you have to rely on is a vague sense of ‘be virtuous’. This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad theory, but it does make it highly impractical! If you really want to see how difficult it is – think about whether or not a virtue ethicist would use the full-body scanner, given both its invasiveness and its effectiveness.

As you can see, Papers, Please, shows us how these ethical theories – simple on paper – become hard to consistently apply. This certainly doesn’t invalidate them, as it’s possible for something to be accurate but difficult to apply, but it is food for thought when discussing how to be moral. If a theory (regardless of accuracy) is difficult to understand and apply, how is it of worth to those following it? Should academics be attempting to make these theories more understandable and more applicable, or is this not the point of moral philosophy?

A final point (sparked by Procter’s aforementioned point of empathy as mechanic) is that Papers, Please can act as a better ethical exploratory tool than many thought experiments in some regard. One major issue with ethical thought experiments is the lack of connection to the situation – in the famed Trolley Problem*, why do we care what happens? What motivates us? How can we relate to the situation? Empathy is a very important aspect of ethical decisions – whether you agree it should be or not. Deontologists may find empathy to be a worthless thing, and require only rationality, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It’s something that plays a vital part in our decision making (hence why it can be used so well in a game such as this) and to act as though we can ignore it is to limit how we deal with morality.

Of course, thought experiments have values the game does not – like scientific experiments, they are carefully crafted to focus on just one variable at a time, allowing us to really focus in on certain ethical intuitions. Still, games like Papers, Please open up new options on how we teach ethical theories, and ways we can relate to their impact in real life. It’s for this reason then, that I would consider Papers, Please both a fantastic example of what games reliant on moral choice can be, as well as a potentially useful philosophical tool.

*The Trolley Problem is as follows:
“There is a runaway trolley heading down the tracks toward five people who are tied up and unable to move. You are some distance away, next to a lever that can switch the tracks the trolley is on. On the other track is one person. Is it better to do nothing, or pull the lever?”

 

Further Reading:

Stanford Encylopedia Entries: Consequentalism, Deontological Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy
BBC Ethics Guide

Utilitarianism:
J. S. Mill, ‘Utilitarianism’
Bentham, J. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Singer, P. `Is act-utilitarianism self-defeating?’, Philosophical Review (1972), vol 81, 94-104
P. Railton, `Alienation, consequentialism and the demands of morality’. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1984, vol. 13

Kant:
Kant, ‘Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals’ – I recommend the modernised version found here.
O’Neill, O. ‘Kantian Ethics’ in ed. Singer, P. A Companion to Ethics
Hill, T. ‘Kantian Normative Ethics’ in ed. Copp, D., Handbook of Ethical Theory

Virtue Ethics:
Aristotle, ‘The Nicomachean Ethics’
Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’
Foot, P. ‘Virtues and Vices’ in her Virtues and Vices
Hurka, T. ‘Against Virtue Ethics’, Ch. 8 of his Virtue, Vice, and Value

Reason and Passion:
Hume Treatise on Human Nature
Mackie, J. Hume’s Moral Theory
Korsgaard, C. ‘Scepticism about Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy 1986