122A. What is Morality?

Like many other things, morality is not a binary. Due to confusion with ideology, morality isn't always viewed positively. What happens without it, and how to restore it?

This is an example of me wading into a subject I know that society generally prohibits me from discussing. Like my paper on Ideology in Gaming. There are going to be more papers like this, and talking about these subjects is going to feel weird even though none of these concepts are unfamiliar to you.

This paper was prompted by my insights and inspirations I had while debating another thought leader on LinkedIn. Normally I would remove their name and just copy paste the discussion here, but we’ve been debating for like 3 days now and the real truths are starting to emerge after all the more superficial layers have been argued through.

This entire discussion is already very public on LinkedIn and this paper is in no way an attempt to judge or attack the person debating me, or his associates. In fact, the person is well qualified to debate, which is refreshing, and is a verifiable thought leader. So no disrespect is intended on my part.

Here is the original link:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chrisheatherly_does-video-game-monetisation-harm-children-activity-7327827461038055424-o6Au?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAArO78BdvOJZ4f1Z2rIkXJIWsvg_BKxMsk

Morality Defined

According to my AI:

I have no objection to this definition. If any of my readers find this insufficient, please let me know in the comments.

A Bit About How I Became an Ethicist

As my regular readers know, I’ve been a journalist since 2001 writing for consumers of interactive media. I ended up wading into the ethics of gaming right out of the gate in 2001 when I exposed a hacker group called BlackSnow Interactive that was attacking Dark Ages of Camelot and Anarchy Online. As that situation started heading towards court, I followed each development at UnknownPlayer.

After I returned to university in 2007 to study conventional economics on my quest to create a new academic field of game economics, the quality of my writing improved also as a result. By 2012 I was starting to write for Gamasutra at their request. Note that I’ve never accepted money or perks from any source in the 24 years I have been writing as that would make me vulnerable to influence. That didn’t mean that the places that held my papers could ignore influence from their advertisers, however.

By 2013 I was writing fairly high level papers on the morality of various aspects of online gaming. My paper on Monetizing Children , a taboo paper then and now, got the attention of UK regulators working in the Office on Fair Trade. They said I seemed to be the only person in the industry willing to address this issue publicly, and they asked me to help them with their campaign to create regulations protecting children in online gaming. So it’s not like I was the best ethicist at the time in the gaming space. From this view I was the only ethicist in the space.

Being an ethicist is not a career anyone wants. Unless you have a cushy tenure track academic position, this is potentially a career ending move. But how do you say no to regulators that need your help protecting children? I could not say no. Then of course I was punished by industry, giving me no incentive to stop on the path of ethicist. It is not like my choice would be forgotten if I changed my mind later.

The UK OFT would ultimately ask me to appear at the 2013 Panama ICPEN summit to testify about my knowledge of abuse of children in online gaming. I presented evidence from Marvel Superhero Squad Online (Gazilion Entertainment), which demonstrated almost every dirty trick I wanted to show. The only other witness to testify was a VP from Disney giving a presentation on Club Penguin. This was Disney’s most family friendly game.

On the day I write this, I realized that the person I was debating on LinkedIn was also a VP of Disney, working on Club Penguin at that very time. Neither of us were aware of our connection prior to this, but his arguments mirrored those of the VP that did testify so I had a weird feeling of Deja Vue when debating him. The VP from Disney that did show up in Panama fled the conference under cross examination from the senior German regulator, right in the middle of his first question. It was a huge conference hall and the sight of a Disney VP running across it to avoid cross examination shocked everyone in attendance.

If she thought she wasn’t doing anything wrong, I would imagine she would have answered the question. So to me this suggests some level of awareness of right and wrong.

What is Right and Wrong?

Can we ever answer this question? A lot of effort seems to go into this, so I’m tempted to say yes. But that doesn’t mean the answers come easily. Religions try to answer this question, laws and courts try to answer this question, and leaders in every country and company are often judged by this metric. People can be moral but still be bad leaders, so I’m going to suggest that intelligence and morality have a complex relationship.

A criminal mastermind might be incredibly intelligent and also quite immoral. Likewise, morality to some extent is defined differently in every culture and every religion. This makes the topic very complicated and controversial.

Also, just as people don’t want to be told/shown that they are less intelligent than another person, they also don’t want to be told they are less moral. Part of this is just desire to avoid embarrassment, but also both men and women are prone to rank seeking behavior, and being seen as inferior in either category could result in loss of rank.

As descriptive morality varies from culture to culture I personally find it less useful. In my work I’m dealing with all cultures and all continents. They can and do fight almost constantly over what is morality. To me that indicates that what they are fighting over is not morality, but something I might describe as cultural rank seeking behavior.

Normative morality is that narrow band of overlap where all cultures seem to agree. It is good that we have at least some area of agreement as otherwise travel might be quite hazardous. It is here where I operate as an interactive media ethicist. As interactive media is a new field, a lot of work can be done to merge IM and normative morality. I’ve been working hard at this over the last 12 years. Not everyone is thrilled by this work, as these frameworks could be the prerequisite to the adoption of future international law and regulation.

Laws are important as without them chaos reigns and a lot of people can be harmed, accidentally or intentionally. Knowing what is permissible in advance can vastly increase the safety of related actions and commercial endeavors. Likewise, having those rules change can be disasterous for existing businesses, which I believe is the primary reason why businesses might oppose my ethics work. Viewed from this lens, it doesn’t mean that a business opposed to new moral frameworks is immoral, it just means that changing their business model might threaten their profitability. It could even put them out of business if those changes are too expensive. So it is rational that they might be tempted to resist those changes even if they understand the “greater good” aspect of it.

Of course a business and it’s leaders could actually be immoral by societal and international standards, even if those are not yet well defined yet. While it may be an entertaining exercise to differentiate between the two groups, I personally don’t care. Intent would only be important in a criminal proceeding. My goal is to increase public safety, commercial enterprise/investment safety, and stabilize the expansion of interactive media by setting out clear goals that the most people can agree upon. Those goals then can become the framework for rules which are created by regulators and lawmakers.

Morality is Hard

Children are born egocentric, meaning they think they are the center of the universe. Typically they figure out this is not true around the age of 5. Some may sort this out sooner, and some may figure it out later or even never. In this sense “morality” is a bit like intelligence.

When I asked AI what age do humans hit their peak cognitive power, I got this response which I thought was very interesting:

In terms of peak processing power, humans peak in their late teens and as they lose neuroplasticity their intelligence “horsepower” declines. I’m well aware this applies to me also even though I train my brain hard every day to delay this process. We are mortal and we don’t last forever.

The facial recognition part is actually a very difficult task, and our ability to do this is delayed the more we talk to electronic devices instead of humans. It’s a trained/learned activity and if you don’t do it, you don’t learn it. Thus I observe people in their 20s being lied to routinely and not realizing it because they have not developed that cognitive ability. This also means they just assume no one has this ability. People who grew up without electronic means of communication are going to peak at higher levels than people who had these devices. I’ve talked to older people engaged in organised crime who actually alerted me to this. They bragged about how easy it was to lie to younger people.

When you think no one can detect your lying, and thus there will be no consequences, there is a propensity to lie. From my experience non-neurotypicals are very bad at lying and avoid it. They don’t realize that “normal” people are different in this regard and this makes life very hard for those on the autism spectrum. Suicide rates are especially high. Being what you might call an “autistic savant”, facial recognition was especially hard for me. But I was developing in other areas at ~3X the normal human rate. So I achieved the functional facial recognition threshold about age 30 like a “normal” person. But I’m twice that age and do not think I have peaked yet, making me extremely adept now at this.

This can put me in peril as I often have much younger bosses at work and know when they are lying to me. I have to keep this secret as a person who lies can go to great lengths, perhaps any lengths, to protect what they think is a secret. I’m going to go into much more depth about this in a moment.

My perception of “EQ” or emotional intelligence is that it is the ability to know when and how to lie appropriately in any particular situation. A neurotypical person who is good at this is going to be held in high esteem and this high EQ can make them a qualified diplomat, negotiator, or politician. Austism spectrum people don’t hold lying and EQ in the same regard. They will be tempted to see a high EQ as a bad thing, and a sign of a person with low moral aptitude. This is one of the biggest differences between the two groups, that both groups generally don’t understand.

Since “Moral Aptitude” isn’t even listed as a cognitive ability, even though it is, I asked AI about this specifically:

When I gave my example of the criminal mastermind with high intelligence but low moral aptitude, it wasn’t the best example. That mastermind actually understands morality very well and will situationally apply that morality (or exploit other’s morality) based on the predicted outcome. This is what makes then so dangerous, but also so successful. A high end nonneurotypical that is willing to engage in this situational morality (rare but not unheard of) is extraordinarily dangerous. And, most likely, undetectable by a neurotypical.

As I discussed about intelligence and EQ back in 2012, one can generally tell if someone else has a higher IQ or EQ. But they cannot tell how much higher. They don’t understand what they don’t understand, and so have no way to evaluate these differences. So if you had 130 IQ, you would not be able to tell the difference between a 140 IQ and a 160 IQ person. Plus since cognition is a wide basket of skills, they might be better than this at some things and worse at others. Thus the use of these numbers is of limited use.

I have to stress that while neurotypicals lie, a lot, most of them are not malicious. They are just doing their best to survive. They operate at the highest moral level they understand/perceive, and don’t understand moral arguments above their cognitive level. They will engage in situational morality to avoid various punishments.

What is Situational Morality?

This is where you understand the concept of morality (both globally and locally) to some upper limit, and apply that when you believe you are being observed or otherwise held accountable for your actions. But when you believe no one will notice, or if you are under threat and want to avoid punishment, you will “step down” to a lower morality level if you think it could lead to a better outcome.

What makes this definition most complicated is the “upper limit” part. Because people just don’t all operate at the same cognitive level, especially when you consider age. Since people aren’t taught how to deal with these differences, or even to acknowledge that they exist, they often make poor choices.

The following video is short (<3 minutes) and contains violent scenes of police brutality, so please be prepared before viewing:

I use this video because it shows different levels of moral aptitude along with examples of situational morality. Thus with my doing a bit of explaining, these dynamics can all make sense in just a few minutes.

The arrested person here suffers from dementia. They have no record of criminal activity in their life, and are non violent. They were kidnapped from a Walmart store when their caregiver (wife) wasn’t looking, punched in the face hard 6 times, and then arrested and taken to jail where the staff there further abused this cognitively disabled person. For my non American readers, this is uncommon but not rare, and this police violence level would be considered “restrained” in the USA.

The dementia patient has close to zero cognitive ability. They can walk, and they can recognise objects and people on a basic level. In other words they can tell the difference between a human and a beer can. They have very limited ability to talk and communicate their needs. As moral aptitude is a high level cognitive function, they are at essentially zero. Legally, this means they can’t be held responsible for their actions. They didn’t break any laws before being attacked, but even if they did it is generally accepted globally that such a person is not responsible for their actions and thus can’t be criminal. They do require a high level of supervision, and this is where his wife could have done better.

The 2 people at the jail (one is dressed like a nurse’s aid or such) seem to possess basic functional cognitive ability and presumably matching moral aptitude. Both are abusive to this old man, which is a violation of basic moral standards. The reason here is because they were told (lied to) by the police officers that he was intoxicated. So they assumed he was operating at a higher cognitive level but acting at a lower morality level. This made him “immoral” and thus deserving of abuse.

This is very basic moral aptitude, but alas is pretty normal. They do seem to reconsider their actions when they start to think he is not intoxicated. Then they calm down and seem less abusive. This is a case of situational morality because in their basic moral understanding a person that is disabled should not be abused, but a person who is morally inferior is fair game. That moral inferiority (which is quite subjective) on the part of the old man allows them to be extremely immoral but that’s okay.

The police on the other hand are careful not to mention their false intoxication claim to the wife, and are very strategic in how they lie and when. They may be “average at best” in cognitive ability, but once they realize they made a mistake all sense of morality vaporizes as they act to protect themselves and each other. From my experience growing up on the streets of Los Angeles (I was homeless for 5 years from age 17 to 22) this is extremely common situational morality with police, and it is learned behavior. So the longer they “serve” in that role, the more their functional morality declines. Their aptitude doesn’t drop, they just choose not to be moral, despite it supposedly being a key element of their employment.

Sadly, the jail staff are just acting the way they’ve been trained. This is proscribed situational morality. The police know they are acting illegally and could end up in jail themselves. And they know what’s waiting for them there. This is not proscribed behavior, this is occult situational morality. This can get very dangerous, especially from a position of authority, because the deeper the hole they dig for themselves, the harder they dig. And they can never stop digging.

The difference between the two can be really hard to determine. Using the example of the former Disney executive that I’ve been debating, the guy is clearly of above average cognitive ability. And he is able to discuss complex moral arguments so it is fair to assume he has high moral aptitude. At the same time, it’s likely that he worked in an environment that had proscribed situational morality. For a long time. So perhaps that was normalized.

Much like those with dementia, children are a vulnerable part of society that can be exploited. Protecting them is a universal moral mandate in every culture. It can be argued that a culture that cannot protect their children cannot protect their future. But what happens when the interests of industry clash with the rest of society?

Institutional Proscribed Situational Morality

I realize with each layer this discussion of morality gets more complex, so I appreciate you making it this far. Morality is extremely complex. In older times, priests or monks would train for decades to be able to proscribe morality to their followers, and it was a position of high respect and moral responsibility. A moral lapse from the top was rare and a serious incident.

As governments and companies have replaced places of worship as the dispensers of morality, you no longer have people trained and vetted for their morality dictating what is right and wrong. In DEI campaigns, supposedly a step up in morality, people are selected for their ability to populate an excel spreadsheet with proscribed “good” ethnicities and genders. This means rejecting the highest merit candidates if they don’t fit the sheet. This is not moral behavior, and because it is organised from the highest levels of major institutions, this is institutional proscribed situational morality.

Note that while you can perhaps educate people to have a better understanding of morality, it’s far easier to lower your high moral aptitude members to lower levels through a combination of punishments and incentives (sticks and carrots). Having everyone operating at the same morality level is critical for unity, even if that means you have to lower everyone to the same level. If your organisation requires a high degree of control over its workers, this is how you are going to do it.

When I predicted this drop in morality level across the board in AAA interactive media in 2017, I think I was proven spot on. But I didn’t have the ability to articulate what that would look like with the detail I am using here. With the EU now using my “Darkside” term rephrased to “Dark Patterns”, we now have an official common language to describe what I first introduced in 2017.

In order for these Dark Patterns to be implemented globally across the industry, they had to be standardized and the industry had to be purged of anyone that was not willing to “adjust” their morality levels to accommodate the new policies. I had previously assumed this was collusion across the AAA oligarchy. But recently I came to the conclusion (using AI assisted research) that this was directed from the top by the ESA.

50 plus years ago we had a similar problem with Hollywood and Big Tobacco. Actors and actresses were required and paid to smoke on set in movies to promote cigarette use among viewers, especially children. This was pervasive. If you did not play ball, you were not going to get work. Cigarettes were being promoted as not only safe, but even good for your health.

The key point I want to make here is that actors and actresses were not bad people. They were flooded with misinformation designed to convince them that promoting cigarette use was positive moral behavior. Those with average or below moral aptitude likely never questioned this. In that environment they were not immoral people, they were just mis programmed. Those of higher moral aptitude probably realized what was up, but knew their careers would be over if they did not play ball. Thus given the threat they were under, it is hard to fault them for making their morality conditional.

The same thing has happened in game development, with cigarettes replaced by loot boxes just as I predicted back in 2014. You either played ball or your career was over. There is a special place in Hell for snitches. So when the person I was debating on LinkedIn told me I was a “zealot”, I knew exactly what he meant. I’ve heard this from various sources, this is how the industry paints me. I’m not involved in religion or politics. What they are saying is that given the penalties for not playing ball, only a fanatic would be suicidal enough about their person or career to try to challenge the system all by themselves.

There are two things they don’t consider:

1. At the highest levels of awareness/morality, the person’s own welfare becomes secondary to the common good. This trait/concept is promoted across every major religion on Earth. It doesn’t come from religion, it is a species trait. In the old days this was a good thing. Industry has gone to great lengths to turn morality into a dirty word, or paint it as the domain of the religious.

2. Protecting consumers is not bad business. Adopting a business model that puts you in an antagonistic relationship with your customers is a doomed-to-fail model. I’m an economist first and foremost. I’m here to make sure industry is profitable and everyone in the supply chain (including end users) benefits. It is not me that needs to play ball. It is industry that has adopted a failed path and is running out of time to course correct. If they want to go all the way to bankruptcy, that’s not the ideal path for anyone. But it does create space for the next paradigm of interactive media industry. I would prefer that someone with the cognitive ability to recognize bankruptcy when they see it will overcome the various institutional obstacles to right the ship.

If industry leadership is insufficient to meet this challenge, regulators will step in and take control. This is the worst case scenario, but it seems to be the choice that the interactive media oligarchy has made.

In the next paper, 123B, I will discuss how I went about creating the moral framework I use to advise industry, consumers, and regulators about standards for interactive media products and business models. You will see this has been almost verbatum copied into the Digital Fairness Act, and functions as the backbone for all of the legal instructions attached to it.