Moral levels
An interesting topic that has come up lately is the idea of moral levels. This theory suggests that as we age and different ideas and experiences are exposed to us we develop higher levels of moral reasoning. Moral reasoning can heavily impacts on how we make tough decisions.
To broadly summarise…
Moral level 1. Think about what reasoning would go through an infant’s mind. They don’t care about what anyone else needs (like sleep), their only concern is to get what they want by any means possible.
2. As we get a little bit older we start to make decisions while considering whether we will receive a punishment or reward. We understand that people in authority should be obeyed and weigh up how much trouble we’ll get into by taking a certain action.
3. At this stage we become to understand that others also have needs and wants that can sometimes conflict with our own. Often we start to bargain with others in a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” sort of manner. We still feel it’s alright to “bad” things like cheat or steal as long as you get away with it and no one gets hurt.
4. Here we start to worry about what others think of us and like to be seen as doing the right thing. We start to put ourself in the other person’s shoes when making a tough decision that will impact other people. Usually this is strongly linked to the society the person lives in and what is deemed acceptable.
5. We start to do things in order to maintain order within our society. We desire to do our duty to society, be one with the crowd and to uphold and obey the laws of the community without question.
6. At this stage we start to think about people’s rights and values as being above the law. We see the law as a man made thing that can be challenged and modified if need be. Lawyers and judges spend a lot of time arguing at this level.
7. We start to think about the greater good and consider all facets of the situation before making our decision. We consider the law to be important but understand that sometimes you must break the law to do things for the greater good.
How does this relate to games?
The first thing that sprang into my head when I was discussing this with J was those alignment charts you used to get while playing DnD or oldschool RPGs.
For me I’d consider the entire lawful row to be at moral level 5, perhaps lawful good at 6. True neutral, neutral evil and chaotic neutral float about the level of 2 or 3. Neutral good and chaotic good are probably 7. The only one I don’t know how to place is chaotic evil. The way I see that alignment is that they acknowledge the laws exist but go out of their way to break them, the same with the rights and needs of other people. I suppose chaotic evil is just plain immoral.
Another thing I noticed when thinking about these levels in relation to games is the decisions we make in games tend to be of a lower moral level. Often we do things in games that we would deem wrong in the real world. I think this is largely due to the feeling that it doesn’t impact on real people and it’s not hurting anyone. Perhaps games are an experimenting ground where we can break our morals and laws without consequence.
However, if you think of the game world as it’s own society with it’s own rules and conventions then our actions within games may not be immoral at all. If the laws of the game world say that zombies are bad, they deserve to die, then the player accepts this. Perhaps because players consider games to be a different world separate to our own we can only know what’s right and wrong by what we are told. In a way we’re almost have to rebuild our morals from the ground up as we are introduced to an entirely different world. We need to experiment to understand how our actions influence this world and what outcome they will produce.
Let me know what you think. Have you been in a moraldilemma while playing a game? What decision did you make and why? Do you consider games to have their own laws or are we just free to be immoral while we play? How do you think morals impact on games where a lot of players are involved?
-Laws
