You have heard that it was said,'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Matthew 5:27–28
Most of us would agree that this is too strict a standard for mere humans. If we substitute 'infidelity' for 'adultery' [1], we can concur that such an act is usually on the wrong side. But merely fantasizing about infidelity hardly counts as a crime. First, we don't have full control of our thoughts and fantasies. Second, we cannot enforce norms about what people do in the sanctuary of their minds. Most importantly, fantasizing doesn't hurt anybody. As Nietzsche put it: “The thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.”
But suppose that someone wanted to defend the Gospel passage. Let's leave aside the concept of sin and focus on non-dogmatic arguments. A virtue ethicist might say that by thinking about adultery, I am compromising my character and failing to realize the best version of myself. A Buddhist might say that unwholesome thoughts are dangerous for one’s peace of mind and should be cleansed (article). A consequentialist could try to prove that the fantasy does in fact hurt me more than it benefits me. How can it hurt me? By distracting me from more important things, desensitizing me to bad actions, or making me more likely to hurt other people (for example, by committing infidelity). An infidelity fantasy may be the first step in a process that could result in actually committing infidelity.
In general, it seems that these critics' standards are too rigid: it’s hard to see how a simple, inconsequential fantasy could corrupt my character. On the contrary, indulging in a harmless fantasy might be healthier on the long run than trying to repress it; and while almost everyone has such fantasies, there is no proof that having them will hurt people or increase the probability that they will act wrongly.
Let’s face it it: our imagination is a weak thing. Consider a hypothetical scale of intensity of experience, where 100 corresponds to actually having an experience, and an exceptionally vivid dream will perhaps go as far as 80. How far can our imagination go on this scale, unaided by drugs or technology? I would say no more than 20; others may see it differently. At any rate, an imagined experience is so much feebler than an actual experience that any effects on a person's constitution must be heavily discounted.
That many are bound to disagree with this point, is shown by the historical attempts to ban and censor any new medium that allows the reproduction and trafficking of fantasies. It happened to the novel. It happened to movies. And it happened to videogames (no citation needed). Whenever a new medium becomes popular, the fears about its potential to corrupt people results in a phenomenon sociologists call moral panic.
At the root of these reactions we often find the same idea: fantasizing about bad things will increase the probability that people will do them. For example, fantasizing about killing someone or seeing a movie where people get killed or playing GTA may desensitize people to violence and make them more violent.
The latest moral panic targeted videogames, but there was nothing new about that reaction. The diffusion of the latest and shiniest medium was bound to reawaken the age-old concern. Meanwhile, research on the connection between videogames and aggressive behavior has given conflicting results, with evidence for a weak detrimental effect at best (see this meta-meta analysis).
But the fact that Timmy has been crying wolf the past fifteen times does not mean that the wolf can’t come this time. It’s dangerous to disconnect an alarm because until now it has given only false positives. The medium that corrupts people has never materialized, but it might be invented someday.
Meanwhile, I see a clear pattern in the evolution of media: the experiences they provide are increasingly more vivid and immersive. It is one thing to read a description of a battle. It is another thing to see that battle on a movie screen. Videogames take it a step further by making the experience interactive. The final step in this progression is immersive virtual reality (IVR): a complete simulation of the sensory experience, which is in principle indistinguishable from real life.
The question is: what happens when we invent the Matrix? That is the point where fantasy and reality truly intersect.
There are obvious dangers associated with this. With IVR, people could engage in fully immersive experiences of doing bad things without any of the associated consequences. One would interact with individuals who are in all respects identical to real people, except that they are just sims: Chalmersian zombies with no feelings or consciousness, all their actions directed by the simulation’s software.
There would be no hard consequentialist arguments against doing very bad things to those sims, just like there are no hard consequentialist arguments against murder fantasies. In fact, if I can prove that shooting up people in IVR makes me more relaxed and has no measurable negative impacts, that would be a favorable argument for me doing just that.
Yet something feels off about this. This is somewhat hard to admit, because I do enjoy playing GTA, and I actually think that it has a positive effect on me (e.g. it makes me more relaxed, hence kinder). However, killing someone in GTA is closer to a cartoonish murder fantasy than to an actual experience of murder. The proportions might be reversed in the case of IVR.
Of course, most people would not enjoy a hyper-realistic experience of murder, and when the novelty fades out, I predict that IVR videogames will turn away from gritty realism and veer more towards stylized worlds, where the boundary between fantasy and reality is exploited rather than discarded. But there would still be potential for creating programs that simulate all sorts of experiences in great detail — and not all of them would be nice.
What happens if you go through the entire experience of murdering somebody, except that nobody is actually murdered? Could it desensitize you to violence? Make you a worse person? Corrupt you somehow?
Or am I just buying stock in the next moral panic?
For what it’s worth, my intuition tells me that there’s something wrong with doing nasty things in IVR, even if nobody gets actually hurt. But it’s hard to justify this on purely consequentialist terms. One could try to show that doing so has negative effects on the user, but proving these things is always difficult, and anyway that’s not my point. I wouldn’t like to be friends with a person who enacts violent murder fantasies in IVR, even if otherwise they seem perfectly sane and normal. Yet this person could argue that they did nothing bad and there is nothing wrong with them; which may actually be true from the consequentialist point of view.
Virtue ethics, however, offers an easy way out. It is not virteous to do bad things in the Matrix, even if nobody gets hurt. Why not? Because it does not comply with the aesthetic and intuitive ideal of a "good person" (admittedly, my ideal: this is subjective). It is not conducive to the actualizing of one’s highest potential. And it is probably not favorable to the development of one’s character.
These are attempts to argue from the viewpoint of the doer when the deeds are decoupled from their effects. It may not be very solid, but it fits my moral intuitions.
Or maybe I’m just repeating the mistake of those English priests who thought that novels would corrupt the souls of impressionable youths and bring about the apocalypse.
Going back to our first example, some will suggest that having extramarital sex in the Matrix is a great thing, because it reduces the chance of committing infidelity in real life. Honey, why are you so mad? She’s just a sim! But I don’t buy it. Perhaps I am more of a virtue ethicist than I previously thought.
You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who has sex with a sim has committed adultery in their heart.
[1] Consensual extramarital sex theoretically counts as adultery, so it’s better to narrow down the definition.
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