Game, Kohlberg, and Kant

Lately, there are many games which include moral choice as one of their features. Games such as Fable, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Skyrim will determine whether the action that player did is good or bad, and give the consequence based on how well mannered the player in the game. Personally, not only it makes game more interesting and gives much agency to the player, but also I believe it could help the player to measure the morality of every action that s/he did in their lives. Even though currently there are no evidence showed that the player who plays a game with moral choice feature increased in the number of his/her moral action (at least from what I know), I think it’s a good idea to see how exactly some action are seen as having positive or negative moral value. By doing so, maybe we can further improve the moral choice in our game.

Through out my research, there are two theories about moral value that captivated me. They are Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and Kant’s moral philosophy.

     1.     Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Kohlberg stated that there are six moral stages that a person would progress throughout their life. Each stage differs in how a person creates a moral reasoning based on a certain end, with the higher stage means the more mature his/her reasoning is. An increase of moral stages doesn’t mean the person completely changed his/her reasoning. However, s/he got a broaden perspective about the situation which in turn leads him/her to a better judgement. These six stages are :

a.     Obedience orientation

In this stage, a person has the very basic level of reasoning. S/he valued an action based on its consequences that it gives to him/her. An action is seen as wrong if the person who done that got a punishment, with the more severe the punishment a person got, the worse the action is. His/her end is his/her own survival.  

b.     Self-interest orientation

When a person came to this stage, s/he already understands how the rule works, and s/he able to use the rule to get his/her own interest. In this stage, the person knows that every person has his/her own preferences, and it’s his/her right to try to achieve it. S/he sees the rule not as an end, but as a means to achieve his/her new end, his/her own interest.  

c.     Interpersonal and conformity orientation

In this stage, a person aware of the important of the society, even though it’s still in an early phase. He still sees an action or rule as a means to get his interest, but his interest has grown. Not only about his physical survival and material gain, he also sees the importance of what the other people think about him. Known as the stage of the good boy or good girl, this stage makes a person conforms to a certain action that the other people see as good and bad.   His end at this stage is the other’s recognition and the relationship between them.

d.     Social-order orientation

Undergo a further improvement from the last stage, a person in this stage understands the important to obey the rule. Not only for self interest, but also to maintain the society. S/he sees a rule as a way to bring the structure, to prevent chaos in the society. An action that against the rule is thought as a bad moral action, since it would cause a problem to the balance in the social life. His/her end in this stage is to maintain the social system.   

e.     Social contract orientation

This stage and the next one are said as a very complex one. There are few people who managed to go to these stages. The social contract orientation stage shows that the rule is not absolute. A person in this stage treats the rule as the same as a contract. Which makes s/he will only hold the rule as long as it gives many benefit to a lot of people. Different than the second stage which looks an action from the benefit it gives to the doer, a person in this stage has an end to get “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”.   

f.      Universal ethical principles orientation

The last stage measures an action based on its justice value. An action or rule may and must be obey only if it just. A person who arrived at this stage  is known to have a strong empathy. S/he knows and feels what a certain action would bring to the others. S/he views an action not based on what benefit it gives to him/herself or society, but greater than that, to the universal right. 

Based on their ends, we can group the six stages into three. Self for stage one and two, social for stage three and four, and universal for stage five and six. These groups could be useful when we try to search the similarity with Kant’s moral philosophy which I will describe next.     

      2.     Kant’s Moral Philosophy

Famously known with his Categorical Imperative (CI), Kant stated that reason is the foundation of moral creation. There are three formulations of CI, but in here I will only describe the first, the universal law formulation. According to the first formulation of CI, a person is to “act only in accordance with that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. Maxim itself is the principle of a person’s will. Maxim comes in the form of ‘I will do [A] action, in [C] circumstance, in order to get [E] end’. Based on the first formulation of CI, O’Neill and Rawls form a procedure for moral reasoning. There are four steps to moral reasoning:

1.     Formulate  a maxim that enshrines your reason for acting as you propose.

2.  Recast that maxim as a universal law of nature governing all rational agents, and so as holding that all must, by natural law, act as you yourself propose to act in these circumstances.

3.   Consider whether your maxim is even conceivable in a world governed by this law of nature.

4. If the answer of number three is yes, then ask yourself whether you would, or could, rationally will to act on your maxim in such a world.

If for example, your maxim stop at step three, caused of there is no chance all people hold the same maxim that you propose without create a problem in the society, it makes you have a perfect duty to not act with that maxim. Perfect duty means that one must always or never do a certain maxim. However, if your maxim passed the step three, yet fails at step four, you will get imperfect duty. Imperfect duty means that one should sometimes do a certain action, even though there is no punishment for not doing it. More on Kant’s moral philosophy can be found at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

We can see that from the step one of moral reasoning, a person only concerns with making a maxim based on his/her condition and intention without any regards to the other person. At the step two and three, we see that a person trying to find whether his/her maxim is accepted and held by the other person. For the last step, we see that a person trying to know whether the maxim is the correct action beyond the personal needs and social conformity. From these, it seems there is a similarity between kohlberg’s stages of moral development and Kant’s moral philosophy. 

Thus, it can be said that a person values the morality of an action  in a sequential steps starting from the individual level to the social level and the last the universal level, where the latter is better than the former. Based on this, I think it would be better if the moral choice in a game can guide the player throughout every steps. At first, system must ask the player to create the decision only for his/her own survival, for example s/he needs to do a certain action or his/her health would be depleted. Then at the middle of game, system must drive the player to make the correct action that conform with the people around him/her, such as uphold a certain action that his/her society regards as the right behaviour (not stealing the others properties, etc). Finally, near the end of the game, system must force the player to make an action that produce the best result for all, for example a player needs to do an action that give the most benefit to all of the clan in the game, even though s/he will be treated as a heretic.

However, does this means we could help the player to get a better morality only by using moral choice system? I believe and hope not. Although the theory which I proposed before could be useful, but there are some big problems in that. First, it needs a lot of resources to create it and by looking at how unstable the game industry itself, it could be a quite gamble. Second, to get the player arrives at the last morality level, it cost a lot of game play time, and by looking at how big the number of people who didn’t finish their game, it wouldn’t be very fruitful. To find the solution of this, I think we need to shape the moral value outside the narrative structure. We can start from the main game play system, which the player experiences all the time throughout the game and it usually iterates in a relative short time.

Sadly, I found that as a system, the current game only supports the first level, the individual. Let’s take an example from the game of chess. At the first time we play chess, we still struggle to remember and understand every rules of it. Every time we want to make a move (thus, create a maxim), what we really think of is whether we make the move accords with the rule. This is similar with the first step in Kant’s moral philosophy and the first stage of kohlberg’s morality development stage, where our end is simply to avoid the punishment, cannot play the game. After we accustomed with the rule, every time we make a decision where to move, we try to make the right maxim which is not only because the rule stated it, but also to gain an interest, winning the game. This conforms with the second stage of Kohlberg’s morality development, where our end is the personal benefit.

However, anomaly happened after that. When we already got quite experience playing chess, every time we want to move our pawn, we will try to think whether the opponent understand our strategy and intention (our maxim). This is similar with the second step of Kant’s moral philosophy, where we try to cast our maxim to the others to know if they hold the same maxim with us or not. However, in chess, the purpose why we did that is still only to gain a personal interest. Moreover, after we cast our maxim, we don’t try to conform with the others.  When the other person (the opponent) also holds our maxim, it means that s/he know our strategy, which could make us don’t get our interest. This in turn, will lead us to search another maxim that not conform with our opponent. This shows that even what we did is at the second step of Kant’s moral philosophy, our purpose is still at the second stage of Kohlberg’s. The cause of this is the goal of the game. In every game, the goal is the primary reason why we play. It guides every our thinking and action. However, if we play without the interest to a certain goal, than the game will lost its meaning. We wouldn’t play the game anymore, just doing another daily activity. This condition is the reason why the player stop at the second stage of Kohlberg’s, and because it is not allowed to skip any stage, the player will never pass the individual level of morality.   

So does that means the game will never be able to help us getting a higher morality? I don’t think so. Even though the goal that appears in every game hinders us from achieving a higher level of morality in game, it can help us to prepare entering the next level in reality. In chess, although the purpose is to not conform with all, by making us create a lot of maxims and see their conformity with the others will help us to get more understanding of other people’s way of thinking in real life. Chess trains us to not only create a better maxim, but also to see the others acceptance. Before we know it, when we finished our game, we already equipped with a lot of accepted maxims, or at least the big picture of how to gain them.

To conclude, although it would be very hard for the game to help the player reaches the higher level of morality, game can provide us a simulation of creating a maxim that accepted by the others. To achieve it, we don’t need to go to such a long distance building a sophisticated moral choice system in our games (even though it would be awesome). What we really need is just provide a better goal. A goal which makes the player creates a maxim and sees its correspondence with the others. However, just like in chess, the purpose should not to comply with it, but instead to search the hole in it, or to create a non existing maxim. By doing this, the player will not only get one, but many maxims which will help him /her to get a better understanding of other people.