christianphilosopher

Patton,

Three points. First, my aim was not merely judgment but persuasion. If we as members of a society can't have a normal conversation about morality and try to persuade the other party of our views without one of the parties crying, "You can't judge me!" then there is absolutely no point in even having a conversation about ethics. Taking attempts at ethical persuasion merely as instances of moral judgment is a sure conversation stopper. And conversation is what we need more of.

Second point. That being said, however, I do not think you can hold to your own ethical views consistently. You seem to be saying that the only legitimate arena for moral judgment are immoral acts condemned by the law. That is, I can only tell you, "You're immoral," if you're doing something illegal. Alright, on that account, you yourself can not judge lying, adultery, racism, hatred, sexism, arrogance, etc. etc. as immoral because none of these things are prohibited by law.

Last point. This irrational fear our culture has against "judging" does no one any favors. Certainly wrong moral judgment can have nasty consequences, but so can failure to judge. If one tries to be Mr. Nice Guy and always tries to minimize the amount that he is "judging" someone, he is inevitably going to let some pretty wicked things slip through the cracks.

Further, if I myself am acting wrongly by judging you and other GTA players, then by your own moral standards you couldn't even judge my own judgment to be wrong. That is, you would be judging judging, which would be self-referentially incoherent. Instead of engaging in pretentious moral games that border on relativism, I think we should all just admit that "judging" is perfectly normal, then duke it out with reason and logic to determine who is judging correctly and who isn't.

Later.

Alright ladies and gents, I must say that I agree with Dr. Wags. I'm a huge 360 fanboy but I won't touch GTA4 with a ten foot pole, and this out of principle.

Instead of making an argument here, I'll simply make my point with an illustration aimed at the GTA defenders. Suppose a game came out where the protagonist could molest children. Would you support such a game? Would you play it? What would you think of the people who did? What would you think of the people who actually enjoyed that portion of the game? Couldn't people who enjoyed such a game use the EXACT same arguments that you use to defend GTA?

If it's OK to commit virtual assault and murder, why wouldn't it be OK (in your opinion) to commit virtual child molestation? After all, it could easily be argued that murder is significantly more evil than sex abuse, since it ends a human life and the other doesn't. Hence, if it's wrong to commit virtual child rape (or adult rape, for that matter), it should also be wrong to commit virtual murder.

And please don't respond by telling me it's a free country and no crime is being committed in either GTA or the fictional child-molestation game. I'm not talking about the legality of playing GTA but the ethicality of it.

Cheers.

Oy! I'm late to the party. Well here goes:

Windows XP
Athlon 1300 mhz processor
512 mb RAM
ATI Radeon 9600
111 gb hard drive

I haven't played a game on this thing in years. Half-Life 2 was the last thing it ran tolerably well, so I've been hooked on my 360 since I can't afford a new PC.