The Gamer's Dilemma Summary

In “The Gamer’s Dilemma”, Morgan Luck seeks to align the moral standards of virtual murder and pedophilia. To this end he examines five arguments that are used to defend virtual murder while denounce virtual pedophilia. They are as follows:

• Social acceptability

A. Here Luck attempts to dissuade the notion of moral relativism. He does so with an illustration from history that of slavery, by showing that slavery was socially acceptable he claims thusly that it must be viewed as morally correct in the realm of this argument.

• Significant likelihoods

B. The argument here is simple, as no harm is actually done in either virtual act, but it’s translation to the physical act would cause harm, then if the likelihood of one engaging in the virtual act translating this to the physical is lesser than another than it should be viewed in a more understanding light. Luck claims there is no or insufficient evidence to support this argument.

• Enjoying the competition rather than the kill

C. Luck’s dismissal of this argument comes from the trend of increased graphical violence, and that even should murder not be a necessary component to advancement in a game we still partake in it for enjoyment. Therefore we still engage in immorality.

• Unfairly singling out a group for harm

D.

Here Luck fails to find an immediate distinction between the wrongness of murder and molestation in the physical, and that following the logic of this argument if a game were to allow you to molest all groups it must be morally permissible.

• The special status of children

E. Here luck diverges from treating murder and molestation as one, and instead says unless we can prove molestation is as harmful as murder then this argument fails.

His argument breaks down to this either (a) there’s nothing wrong with both virtual murder and virtual pedophilia or (b) both virtual murder and virtual pedophilia are morally wrong. Having made this claim Luck further calls for the equivalent treatment of both