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  1. A new solution to the gamer’s dilemma.Rami Ali - 2015 - Ethics and Information Technology 17 (4):267-274.
    Luck (2009) argues that gamers face a dilemma when it comes to performing certain virtual acts. Most gamers regularly commit acts of virtual murder, and take these acts to be morally permissible. They are permissible because unlike real murder, no one is harmed in performing them; their only victims are computer-controlled characters, and such characters are not moral patients. What Luck points out is that this justification equally applies to virtual pedophelia, but gamers intuitively think that such acts are not (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart.Noel Carroll - 1990 - Routledge.
    Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having (...)
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  • Is it wrong to play violent video games?McCormick Matt - 2001 - Ethics and Information Technology 3 (4):277–287.
    Many people have a strong intuition that there is something morally objectionable about playing violent video games, particularly with increases in the number of people who are playing them and the games' alleged contribution to some highly publicized crimes. In this paper,I use the framework of utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethical theories to analyze the possibility that there might be some philosophical foundation for these intuitions. I raise the broader question of whether or not participating in authentic simulations of immoral (...)
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  • Has Bartel resolved the gamer’s dilemma?Morgan Luck & Nathan Ellerby - 2013 - Ethics and Information Technology 15 (3):229-233.
    In this paper we consider whether Christopher Bartel has resolved the gamer’s dilemma. The gamer’s dilemma highlights a discrepancy in our moral judgements about the permissibility of performing certain actions in computer games. Many gamers have the intuition that virtual murder is permissible in computer games, whereas virtual paedophilia is not. Yet finding a relevant moral distinction to ground such intuitions can be difficult. Bartel suggests a relevant moral distinction may turn on the notion that virtual paedophilia harms women in (...)
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  • Enacting taboos as a means to an end; but what end? On the morality of motivations for child murder and paedophilia within gamespace.Garry Young - 2013 - Ethics and Information Technology 15 (1):13-23.
    Video games are currently available which permit the virtual murder of children. No such games are presently available which permit virtual paedophilia. Does this disparity reflect a morally justifiable position? Focusing solely on different player motivations, I contrast two version of a fictitious game—one permitting the virtual murder of children, the other virtual paedophilia—in order to establish whether the selective prohibition of one activity over the other can be morally justified based on player motivation alone. I conclude that it cannot, (...)
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  • Horror Films and the Argument from Reactive Attitudes.Scott Woodcock - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2):309-324.
    Are horror films immoral? Gianluca Di Muzio argues that horror films of a certain kind are immoral because they undermine the reactive attitudes that are responsible for human agents being disposed to respond compassionately to instances of victimization. I begin with this argument as one instance of what I call the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA), and I argue that Di Muzio’s attempt to identify what is morally suspect about horror films must be revised to provide the most persuasive interpretation (...)
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  • The Pleasures of Tragedy.Susan L. Feagin - 1983 - American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1):95 - 104.
    I ARGUE THAT WE RECEIVE PLEASURE FROM TRAGEDIES BECAUSE WE ARE PLEASED TO FIND OURSELVES RESPONDING IN AN UNPLEASANT WAY TO HUMAN SUFFERING AND INJUSTICE. THE PLEASURE IS THUS A METARESPONSE, AND REFLECTS FEELINGS WHICH ARE AT THE BASIS OF MORALITY. THIS HELPS EXPLAIN WHY TRAGEDY IS SUPPOSED TO BE A HIGHER ART FORM THAN COMEDY, AND PROVIDES A NEW WAY OF SEEING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MORALITY OF AN ARTWORK AND ITS VALUE.
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  • The gamer’s dilemma: An analysis of the arguments for the moral distinction between virtual murder and virtual paedophilia.Morgan Luck - 2009 - Ethics and Information Technology 11 (1):31-36.
    Most people agree that murder is wrong. Yet, within computer games virtual murder scarcely raises an eyebrow. In one respect this is hardly surprising, as no one is actually murdered within a computer game. A virtual murder, some might argue, is no more unethical than taking a pawn in a game of chess. However, if no actual children are abused in acts of virtual paedophilia (life-like simulations of the actual practice), does that mean we should disregard these acts with the (...)
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  • Papers, Please and the systemic approach to engaging ethical expertise in videogames.Formosa Paul, Ryan Malcolm & Staines Dan - 2016 - Ethics and Information Technology 18 (3):211-225.
    Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope (2013), explores the story of a customs inspector in the fictional political regime of Arstotzka. In this paper we explore the stories, systems and moral themes of Papers, Please in order to illustrate the systemic approach to designing videogames for moral engagement. Next, drawing on the Four Component model of ethical expertise from moral psychology, we contrast this systemic approach with the more common scripted approach. We conclude by demonstrating the different strengths and weaknesses that (...)
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  • What is pornography?Michael C. Rea - 2001 - Noûs 35 (1):118–145.
    This paper aims to provide a "real", as opposed to "merely stipulative", definition of "pornography". The paper first argues that no extant definition of "pornography" comes close to being a real definition, and then goes on to defend a novel definition by showing how it avoids objections that plague its rivals.
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  • Virtual child pornography: The eroticization of inequality.Neil Levy - 2002 - Ethics and Information Technology 4 (4):319-323.
    The United States Supreme Court hasrecently ruled that virtual child pornographyis protected free speech, partly on the groundsthat virtual pornography does not harm actualchildren. I review the evidence for thecontention that virtual pornography might harmchildren, and find that it is, at best,inconclusive. Saying that virtual childpornography does not harm actual children isnot to say that it is completely harmless,however. Child pornography, actual or virtual,necessarily eroticizes inequality; in a sexistsociety it therefore contributes to thesubordination of women.
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  • Erotic art and pornographic pictures.Jerrold Levinson - 2005 - Philosophy and Literature 29 (1):228-240.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erotic Art and Pornographic PicturesJerrold LevinsonOnly in primitive art, with its urgent need to evoke the sources of fertility, are the phallus and the vulva emphasized, as it were innocently. By ancient Greek and Roman times there already existed the special category of the pornographic—graphic art or writing supposed, like a harlot, or porne, to sexually stimulate.1IAS REGARDS PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS of the opposition between the erotic and the pornographic, (...)
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  • What does the gamer do?Rebecca Davnall - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3):225-237.
    The 'Gamer's Dilemma' is the problem of why some actions occurring in video game contexts seem to have similar, albeit attenuated, kinds of moral significance to their real-world equivalents, while others do not. In this paper, I argue that much of the confusion in the literature on this problem is not ethical but metaphysical. The Gamer's Dilemma depends on a particular theory of the virtual, which I call 'inflationary', according to which virtual worlds are a metaphysical novelty generated almost exclusively (...)
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  • Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time.Christopher Bartel - 2020 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But, should players worry about the morality of their virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to perform such acts. While this is an intuitive argument, it does not resolve the (...)
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  • Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography.Carl Öhman - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 22 (2):133-140.
    Recent technological innovation has made video doctoring increasingly accessible. This has given rise to Deepfake Pornography, an emerging phenomenon in which Deep Learning algorithms are used to superimpose a person’s face onto a pornographic video. Although to most people, Deepfake Pornography is intuitively unethical, it seems difficult to justify this intuition without simultaneously condemning other actions that we do not ordinarily find morally objectionable, such as sexual fantasies. In the present article, I refer to this contradiction as the pervert’s dilemma. (...)
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  • An Expressivist Account of the Difference between Poor Taste and Immorality.Garry Young - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (2):465-482.
    This paper considers whether proposition – “x is not immoral but it is in poor taste” – is morally contradictory when considered from the standpoint of constructive ecumenical expressivism. According to CEE, pronouncements about poor taste and immorality have the following in common: they each convey a negative attitude towards x and intimate that x ought not to be done. Given this, P1 is vulnerable to a charge of contradiction, as it intimates that x is both something and not something (...)
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  • Morality Play: A Model for Developing Games of Moral Expertise.Dan Staines, Paul Formosa & Malcolm Ryan - 2019 - Games and Culture 14 (4):410-429.
    According to cognitive psychologists, moral decision-making is a dual-process phenomenon involving two types of cognitive processes: explicit reasoning and implicit intuition. Moral development involves training and integrating both types of cognitive processes through a mix of instruction, practice, and reflection. Serious games are an ideal platform for this kind of moral training, as they provide safe spaces for exploring difficult moral problems and practicing the skills necessary to resolve them. In this article, we present Morality Play, a model for the (...)
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  • Is it distinctively wrong to simulate doing wrong?John Tillson - 2018 - Ethics and Information Technology 20 (3):205-217.
    This paper is concerned with whether there is a moral difference between simulating wrongdoing and consuming non-simulatory representations of wrongdoing. I argue that simulating wrongdoing is (as such) a pro tanto wrong whose wrongness does not tarnish other cases of consuming representations of wrongdoing. While simulating wrongdoing (as such) constitutes a disrespectful act, consuming representations of wrongdoing (as such) does not. I aim to motivate this view in part by bringing a number of intuitive moral judgements into reflective equilibrium, and (...)
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  • Resolving the gamer’s dilemma.Christopher Bartel - 2012 - Ethics and Information Technology 14 (1):11-16.
    Morgan Luck raises a potentially troubling problem for gamers who enjoy video games that allow the player to commit acts of virtual murder. The problem simply is that the arguments typically advanced to defend virtual murder in video games would appear to also support video games that allowed gamers to commit acts of virtual paedophilia. Luck’s arguments are persuasive, however, there is one line of argument that he does not consider, which may provide the relevant distinction: as virtual paedophilia involves (...)
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  • Virtual competitions and the gamer’s dilemma.Karim Nader - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 22 (3):239-245.
    This paper expands Rami Ali’s dissolution of the gamer’s dilemma (Ethics Inf Technol 17:267-274, 2015). Morgan Luck’s gamer’s dilemma (Ethics Inf Technol 11(1):31-36, 2009) rests on our having diverging intuition when considering virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. Virtual murder is seemingly permissible, when virtual child molestation is not and there is no obvious morally relevant difference between the two. Ali argues that virtual murder and virtual child molestation are equally permissible/impermissible when considered under different modes of (...)
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  • Splintering the gamer’s dilemma: moral intuitions, motivational assumptions, and action prototypes.Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 22 (1):93-102.
    The gamer’s dilemma :31–36, 2009) asks whether any ethical features distinguish virtual pedophilia, which is generally considered impermissible, from virtual murder, which is generally considered permissible. If not, this equivalence seems to force one of two conclusions: either both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are permissible, or both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are impermissible. In this article, I attempt, first, to explain the psychological basis of the dilemma. I argue that the two different action types picked out by “virtual (...)
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  • ‘It’s Just a Story’: Pornography, Desire, and the Ethics of Fictive Imagining.Christopher Bartel & Anna Cremaldi - 2018 - British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (1):37-50.
    Is it ever morally wrong for a consumer to imagine something immoral in a work of fiction, or for an author to prompt such imagining? Brandon Cooke has recently argued that it cannot be. On Cooke’s account, fictive imagining is immune to moral criticism because such cases of imagining do not amount to the endorsement of the immoral content, nor do they imply that the authors of such fictions necessarily endorse their contents. We argue against Cooke that in fact fictively (...)
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  • The incorrigible social meaning of video game imagery.Stephanie Patridge - 2010 - Ethics and Information Technology 13 (4):303-312.
    In this paper, I consider a particular amoralist challenge against those who would morally criticize our single-player video play, viz., “come on, it’s only a game!” The amoralist challenge with which I engage gains strength from two facts: the activities to which the amoralist lays claim are only those that do not involve interactions with other rational or sentient creatures, and the amoralist concedes that there may be extrinsic, consequentialist considerations that support legitimate moral criticisms. I argue that the amoralist (...)
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  • Fictional Immorality and Immoral Fiction.Garry Young - 2021 - Lexington Books.
    This book examines what, if anything, makes a depiction of fictional immorality—such as the murder, torture, or sexual assault of a fictional character—an example of immoral fiction, and therefore something that should be morally criticized and possibly prohibited.
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  • How to (dis)solve the Gamer’s Dilemma.Erick Jose Ramirez - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (1):1-21.
    The Gamer's Dilemma challenges us to find a distinction between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia. Without such a distinction, we are forced to conclude that either both are morally acceptable or that both should be morally illicit. This paper argues that the best way to solve the dilemma is, in one sense, to dissolve it. The Gamer's Dilemma rests on a misunderstanding in the sense that it does not distinguish between the form of a simulation and its surface content. A (...)
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  • Has Ali dissolved the gamer’s dilemma?Morgan Luck - 2018 - Ethics and Information Technology 20 (3):157-162.
    In this paper I will evaluate Ali’s dissolution of the gamer’s dilemma. To this end the dilemma will be summarized and Ali’s dissolution formulated. I conclude that Ali has not dissolved the dilemma (at least not fully).
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  • Objections to Ostritsch’s argument in “The amoralist challenge to gaming and the gamer’s moral obligation”.Garry Young - 2017 - Ethics and Information Technology 19 (3):209-219.
    This paper raises three objections to the argument presented by Ostritsch in The amoralist challenge to gaming and the gamer’s moral obligation, in which the amoralist’s mantra “it’s just a game” is viewed as an illegitimate rebuttal of all moral objections to video games. The first objection focuses on Ostritsch’s ‘strong sense’ of player enjoyment, which I argue is too crude, given the moral work it is meant to be doing. Next, I question the legitimacy of Ostritsch’s claim that certain (...)
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  • Pornography, ethics, and video games.Stephanie Patridge - 2013 - Ethics and Information Technology 15 (1):25-34.
    In a recent and provocative essay, Christopher Bartel attempts to resolve the gamer’s dilemma. The dilemma, formulated by Morgan Luck, goes as follows: there is no principled distinction between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia. So, we’ll have to give up either our intuition that virtual murder is morally permissible—seemingly leaving us over-moralizing our gameplay—or our intuition that acts of virtual pedophilia are morally troubling—seemingly leaving us under-moralizing our game play. Bartel’s attempted resolution relies on establishing the following three theses: (1) (...)
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  • The Grave Resolution to the Gamer’s Dilemma: an Argument for a Moral Distinction Between Virtual Murder and Virtual Child Molestation.Morgan Luck - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (3):1287-1308.
    In this paper a new resolution to the gamer’s dilemma is presented. The first part of the paper is devoted to strictly formulating the dilemma, and the second to establishing its resolution. The proposed resolution, the grave resolution, aims to resolve not only the gamer’s dilemma, but also a wider set of analogous paradoxes – which together make up the paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly.
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  • Players, Characters, and the Gamer's Dilemma.Craig Bourne & Emily Caddick Bourne - 2019 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (2):133-143.
    Is there any difference between playing video games in which the player’s character commits murder and video games in which the player’s character commits pedophilic acts? Morgan Luck’s “Gamer’s Dilemma” has established this question as a puzzle concerning notions of permissibility and harm. We propose that a fruitful alternative way to approach the question is through an account of aesthetic engagement. We develop an alternative to the dominant account of the relationship between players and the actions of their characters, and (...)
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  • Homo ludens: proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur.Johan Huizinga - 2019 - H. D. Tjeenk Willink.
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  • Correction to: The Grave Resolution to the Gamer’s Dilemma: an Argument for a Moral Distinction Between Virtual Murder and Virtual Child Molestation.Morgan Luck - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (3):1309-1309.
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  • The amoralist challenge to gaming and the gamer’s moral obligation.Sebastian Ostritsch - 2017 - Ethics and Information Technology 19 (2):117-128.
    According to the amoralist, computer games cannot be subject to moral evaluation because morality applies to reality only, and games are not real but “just games”. This challenges our everyday moralist intuition that some games are to be met with moral criticism. I discuss and reject the two most common answers to the amoralist challenge and argue that the amoralist is right in claiming that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in simply playing a game. I go on to argue for (...)
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