Why do we so often care about the outcomes of games when nothing is at stake? There is a paradox here, much like the paradox of fiction, which concerns why we care about the fates and threats of merely fictional beings. I argue that the paradox threatens to overturn a great deal of what philosophers have thought about caring, severing its connection to value and undermining its moral weight. I defend a solution to the paradox that draws on Kendall Walton's (...) solution to the paradox of fiction, developing his idea that it be extended to games. The solution takes games to involve make‐believe: in particular, players and spectators make‐believe that the outcome of the game matters. I also explore how the phenomenon extends beyond games. And I explore some moral implications: in particular, my view preserves the idea that we have reason not to impede others in their pursuit of what they care about. (shrink)

The late Vivienne Westwood sketched a role for fashion that elevates it from the prosaic to the status of art, as something important, life-enhancing, and worthy of pursuit. Here, a philosophical treatment of Westwood’s vision of fashion that does justice to the artistic and life-enhancing value that fashion can realise is offered, using an emergent theory in contemporary analytic aesthetics. The virtue theory of art delineates the intrinsic worth of art in terms of the opportunities it provides for us to (...) exercise and cultivate virtues such as courage, self-expression, imagination, wit, or authenticity. Our engagement with art can subsequently be genuinely life-enhancing in lieu of the constitutive role the virtues play in living well. The present study takes Westwood’s claims as a jumping-off point, considering how they speak not just to her own designs but to our relationship with our clothes more broadly. Fashion is defended as a practice that performs this function in analogous ways to other genres of art and thus has clear artistic value as well as enables us to live well. Given this potential, just as Westwood claimed, there are reasons to perform the practice well because it has importance for the ways in which it can realise artistic value and aid us in living well. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...) volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

C. Thi Nguyen – the author whose new book, Games: Agency as Art, is the main provocation for co-editor John Russell and I putting together this special issue of the Journal of the Philosophy of Spo...

C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art delivers on three ambitious aims: It offers a novel take on human cognition—it claims that we are able to ‘layer’ our agency during gameplay,It contributes to t...

It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...) everyone is rational, no one will cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems. (shrink)

This paper argues that striving is a cardinal virtue in sport and life. It is an overlooked virtue that is an important component of human happiness and a source of a sense of dignity. The human ps...

ABSTRACT This paper argues that striving is a cardinal virtue in sport and life. It is an overlooked virtue that is an important component of human happiness and a source of a sense of dignity. The human psychological capacity for striving emerged as a trait for addressing the entropic features of our existence, but it can be engaged and used for other purposes. Sport is one such example. Sport appears exceptional in being designed specifically to test and display our capacities (...) to strive. Although striving is connected to pursuit of excellence in sport, it supports a more democratic conception of the value of sport than achievement-oriented perfectionist accounts. (shrink)

Accounts of aesthetic valuing emphasize two constraints on the formation of aesthetic belief. We must form our own aesthetic beliefs by engaging with aesthetic value first-hand (the acquaintance principle) and by using our own capacities (the autonomy principle). But why? C. Thi Nguyen’s proposal is that aesthetic valuing has an inverted structure. We often care about inquiry and engagement for the sake of having true beliefs, but in aesthetic engagement this is flipped: we care about arriving at good aesthetic beliefs (...) for the sake of the values that arise in the process of doing so. The engagement is the point, so we must use our own capacities in first-hand encounters. Here I challenge Nguyen’s account. I argue that it misconstrues the value of aesthetic belief; it conflicts with restrictions on aesthetic testimony; and it has trouble harnessing engagement-value for a theory of aesthetic value. A better approach emphasizes the social character of aesthetic valuing. On this view, aesthetic valuing is a social practice structured around the collaborative exercise and improvement of certain special capacities. The autonomy and acquaintance principles tell us to engage these capacities in forming our aesthetic beliefs. Understood aright, and contrary to consensus, these rules are identical. (shrink)

What we might usefully call “playing full-stop” and playing games plausibly figure in a well-lived life. Yet there are reasons to worry that the two not only do not naturally go hand in hand, but are in fact deeply opposed. In this essay I investigate the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. I argue that the nature of this tension is easily exaggerated. While there is a psychological tension between simultaneously engaging in earnest competitive game play and (...) playing fullstop, there is no logical contradiction between the two. Somewhat surprisingly, seeing how this tension is best understood teaches us something about the nature of willing an end and the “guise of the good.” With a resolution of the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games, I turn to the practical worry that playing competitive games is destructive precisely for the very reasons it is opposed to playing full-stop. Here I develop a positive proposal to mitigate the tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. This proposal draws on the idea of “striving play” as recently developed by Thi Nguyen and some ideas from classical Stoicism. (shrink)

I propose an account of aesthetic value, where aesthetic value lies in the process of aesthetic engagement: in our activity of perceiving, guiding our attention, interpreting, and otherwise wrestling with aesthetic objects. It also includes our social activities of engagement: arguing with each other, writing criticism, making top-ten lists. (This is a short summary of a view developed in greater detail elsewhere.).

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they’re unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. (...) We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. (shrink)

One of the many brilliant insights of C. Thi Nguyen’s brilliant book, Games: Agency as Art, is the connection he draws between the distinctive agency of game play and one important feature of a lif...

The practical phenomenon of moral diversity is a central feature of many contemporary societies and poses a distinct problem to moral theory building. Because of its goal to settle the moral question fully and exclusively and/or to provide better understanding of moral disagreement, traditional first-order moral theory often does not provide sufficient guidance to address this phenomenon and moral agency in deeply morally diverse societies. In this article, I move beyond traditional first-order moral theorizing and, based on multilevel social contract (...) theory (Moehler 2018, 2020a), develop a practically sound notion of moral agency for morally diverse societies. The interrelational and dynamic notion of integrated moral agency developed in this article demands that agents actively exercise their rational and affective capacities, are receptive to the capacities of others, and are aware of the type of moral interaction in which they engage with others. The notion of integrated moral agency helps agents to reconcile conflicting first-order moral directives and to maximally protect agents’ autonomy in morally diverse societies. (shrink)

Many influential philosophers have claimed that truth is valuable, indeed so valuable as to be the ultimate standard of correctness for intellectual activity. Yet most philosophers also think that truth is only instrumentally valuable. These commitments make for a strange pair. One would have thought that an ultimate standard would enjoy more than just instrumental value. This paper develops a new argument for the non-instrumental value of truth: (1) inquiry is non-instrumentally valuable; and (2) truth inherits some of its value (...) from the value of inquiry. This makes truth finally but extrinsically valuable, a thesis that to my knowledge has not been directly defended in the literature. I support (1) by appeal to the notion of epistemic injustice, and (2) through the surprising claim that some goals get their value from the pursuit that aims at them. (shrink)

Ethics is a skill set. But what skill set is it? An answer to this question would help make progress for both theory and moral agency. I argue that moral performance may best be understood on the model of athletic performance; both moral and athletic performance are rule-structured unions of efficiency and inefficiency, enabling us to engage in the wholehearted and autonomous pursuit of goals subject to constraints. By understanding how athletics demands embodied performance, we better understand moral demand and (...) wrongdoing: less moral psychology, more moral kinesiology. (shrink)

In domains as disparate as playing Go and predicting the structure of proteins, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have begun to perform at levels beyond which any humans can achieve. Does this fact represent something lamentable? Does superhuman AI performance somehow undermine the value of human achievements in these areas? Go grandmaster Lee Sedol suggested as much when he announced his retirement from professional Go, blaming the advances of Go-playing programs like AlphaGo for sapping his will to play the game at (...) a high level. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of Sedol’s lament. I consider a number of ways that the existence of superhuman-performing AI technologies could undermine the value of human achievements. I argue there is very little in the nature of the technology itself that warrants such despair. (Compare: does the existence of a fighter jet undermine the value of being the fastest human sprinter?) But I also argue there are several more localized domains where these technologies threaten to displace human beings from being able to achieve valuable things at all. This is a particular worry for those in unequal societies, I argue, given the difficulty of many achievements and the corresponding amount of resources needed to achieve great things. (shrink)

In the debate about actions in virtual environments two interdependent types of question have been pondered: What is a person doing who acts in a virtual environment? Second, can virtual actions be evaluated morally? These questions have been discussed using examples from morally dubious computer games, which seem to revel in atrocities. The examples were introduced using the terminology of “virtual murder” “virtual rape” and “virtual pedophilia”. The terminological choice had a lasting impact on the debate, on the way action (...) types are assigned and on how moral evaluation is supposed to be conducted. However, this terminology and its theoretical consequences, while sometimes resulting in correct results, lead to absurd results when applied across the board. It will be suggested that these absurd consequences can be avoided by a different answer to the question what people in virtual worlds are doing. Alleged virtual actions are first and foremost the creation and modification of data-structures and the resulting output in computer hardware. Such modifications of data structure and imagery can be performed with different intentions, purposes and styles, which will influence the type and moral evaluation of a user’s actions. This reinterpretation allows for a more complex analysis of the moral reasons for praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of actions in virtual environments. This analysis takes not just harm and effects on character into account but the peculiar ways in which speech acts can be morally wrong: e.g. agitatory, deceptive, bullshitting. (shrink)

Spontaneous freedom, the freedom of unplanned and unscripted activity enjoyed by “free spirits,” is central to everyday talk about “freedom.” Yet the freedom of spontaneity is absent from contemporary moral philosophers’ theories of freedom. This article begins to remedy the philosophical neglect of spontaneous freedom. I offer an account of the nature of spontaneous freedom and make a case for its value. I go on to show how an understanding of spontaneous freedom clarifies the free will debate by helping to (...) make sense of the libertarian claim that compatibilist varieties of freedom do not allow for genuine novelty and creativity. (shrink)

In this article, I consider Alkis Kontos’ and Allan Bäck’s critiques to Suits that his theory of games and good living lack ontological grounds or rests on the wrong foundations. Taking these criti...

Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last few decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars and Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece and Naruto), and TV series (e.g., Star Trek and Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (...) (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to non-existent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and nonhuman animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental esthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can, therefore, explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations. (shrink)

In this paper, I revisit the question of how and in what sense can individuals comprising a group be held responsible for morally reprehensible behaviour by that group. The question is tackled by posing a counterfactual: what would happen if selfish individuals became moral creatures? A game called the Samaritan’s Curse is developed, which sheds light on the dilemma of group moral responsibility, and raises new questions concerning ‘conferred morality’ and self-fulfilling morals, and also forces us to question some implicit (...) assumptions of game-theory. (shrink)

Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the (...) concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are. (shrink)

The gamer’s dilemma offers three plausible but jointly inconsistent premises: (1) Virtual murder in video games is morally permissible. (2) Virtual paedophelia in video games is not morally permissible. (3) There is no morally relevant difference between virtual murder and virtual paedophelia in video games. In this paper I argue that the gamer’s dilemma can be understood as one of three distinct dilemmas, depending on how we understand two key ideas in Morgan Luck’s (2009) original formulation. The two ideas are (...) those of (1) occurring in a video game and (2) being a virtual instance of murder or paedophelia. Depending on the weight placed on the gaming context, the dilemma is either about in-game acts or virtual acts. And depending on the type of virtual acts we have in mind, the dilemma is either about virtual representations or virtual partial reproductions of murder and paedophelia. This gives us three dilemmas worth resolving: a gaming dilemma, a representation dilemma, and a simulation dilemma. I argue that these dilemmas are about different issues, apply to different cases, and are susceptible to different solutions. I also consider how different participants in the debate have interpreted the dilemma in one or more of these three ways. (shrink)

I make a proposal about what wondering is and how it differs from other mental phenomena like curiosity. I argue that, though it's tempting to analyze wondering as a desire to know the answer to the question one wonders about, that would be wrong, since wondering is an activity rather than a state, i.e., something we do. I also argue that wondering about a question needn't even essentially involve a desire to know the answer to that question, even as a (...) necessary part of what rationalizes the wondering. Instead, on my account, to wonder about a question is to consider various possible answers as possible answers, guided by mechanisms whose function is to make the subject epistemically better off with respect to those answers, and which considering ceases at least when a person is consciously certain of the answer to their question. This allows wondering to not be objectionably metacognitive, and allows us to make sense of cases in which the motivating desire isn't to know an answer but just to wonder itself. (shrink)

Introduction Conceptual Distinctions: Work, Labor, Employment, Leisure The Value of Work and the ‘Anti-Work’ Critique Work, Meaning, and Dignity Work and Distributive Justice Work and Contributive Justice Work and Productive Justice Work and its Future BIBLIOGRAPHY .

Most people are in agreement that guilty pleasures exist, and that we feel them at some point in our life. In my masters thesis I am going to try and answer why guilty pleasure exists and if it should exist. I am going to do this by exploring three different types of situations where our aesthetic tastes may not align with what we think is correct to like. I will call these situations the self theory, the social theory and the (...) moral theory. I will discuss each one in turn and suggest reasons for and against them, ultimately concluding that the moral theory is the only theory that gives good reasons to think that guilty pleasure is justified. (shrink)

In this paper, we report on an experiment with The Walking Dead (TWD), which is a narrative-driven adventure game where players have to survive in a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies. We used OpenFace software to extract action unit (AU) intensities of facial expressions characteristic of decision-making processes and then we implemented a simple convolution neural network (CNN) to see which AUs are predictive of decision-making. Our results provide evidence that the pre-decision variations in action units 17 (chin raiser), 23 (...) (lip tightener), and 25 (parting of lips) are predictive of decision-making processes. Furthermore, when combined, their predictive power increased up to 0.81 accuracy on the test set; we offer speculations about why it is that these particular three AUs were found to be connected to decision-making. Our results also suggest that machine learning methods in combination with video games may be used to accurately and automatically identify complex decision-making processes using AU intensity alone. Finally, our study offers a new method to test specific hypotheses about the relationships between higher-order cognitive processes and behavior, which relies on both narrative video games and easily accessible software, like OpenFace. (shrink)