Patrolling the Premises

I recently read this article decrying the famous trolley problem’s newfound fame and ubiquity. While I may have quibbles regarding some of its arguments, I still found it a very interesting and thought-provoking piece. I’d like to, for the moment, set aside the question of the trolley problem’s pedagogical benefits to instead focus on the idea forwarded that its framing is morally hazardous. In case you don’t feel like reading the article (though I do recommend doing so), it argues that the framing of the trolley problem as a dilemma, with only two solutions, is one in which we are discouraged from thinking about why things are as they are, and what that state of affairs might imply. We must, in the world of the trolley problem and other similar hypotheticals, only navigate our own individualistic moral route through the world as it is declared to be and as it must always be, devoid of context.

This understanding of morality as something that one person does to try to make the world better or worse is a trendy one now. Through this lens, plastics pollution is the fault of those who do not recycle – despite most ‘recycled’ plastics being burned or shredded and left in landfills, and despite most plastics pollution being discarded fishing gear or unrecyclable single use plastics. Through this lens, the solutions to poverty and homelessness are individual acts of charity rather than societal attempts to eliminate the causes of poverty and homelessness or providing centralized services to rectify these issues as they emerge. Through this lens, the only meaningful way to achieve change is to vote for the right person and if you don’t then you have no right to complain – though it’s far from guaranteed that there will be a ‘right person’ on the ballot. Don’t get me wrong – recycling, charity, and voting are all good things to do, and if everyone did them we’d likely be in a better place than we are now – they just shouldn’t define the extents of your moral vision. Confining our understanding to individual actions is an effective way to prevent the idea of working to create systemic change from ever even occurring as an idea to someone, much less being actively pursued by them.

I am reminded once again of the CIA’s funding of the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, from which emerged the edict to “show, don’t tell.” Similarly to the immediacy of the moral hypothetical, the writer is constrained to tell what is happening in the moment – without ever examining in detail why things are the way they are. Hypothetical problems like these state arguments via the very premises they’re built on, and we don’t have the same defenses against this kind of axiomatic structural rhetoric that we do against more formal arguments. Teachers forcing us to take absurd premises seriously serves to make us more vulnerable. We can mostly spot a loaded question – we are far less prepared to defend against loaded hypothetical premises.

These sorts of gross false dilemmas are omnipresent in political discourse. “You don’t like us bombing (country)? What, you want us to just do nothing while the people suffer?” and so forth. These formulations of the conflict eliminate any ability to interrogate the underlying power structures outside of the declared bounds of problem-solving. To even suggest such an idea is to be considered childish, idealistic, unrealistic.

The more that I think about it, the more ubiquitous this structure of do-or-do-not starts to seem. Taking games as an example, they do not allow meaningful interrogations of their structure – that is, because the structure of the game cannot be modified outside of cheating or special modification tools (which are increasingly rare and discouraged by developers), the player is only given the choice of whether to be a hero or a casualty in whichever virtual war they’re conscripted into. Even games which are more interested in providing a wider range of choices are still constrained by the imaginations of their creators and the consequent flexibility of their systems, and end up arguing a worldview through these structures, intentionally or not.

If the medium is the message, perhaps every game is best understood as a separate medium, rather than ‘games’ being a medium unto itself. Every game has its own unquestionable axioms and premises, which the player must accept in order to be able to effectively play it. Perhaps this is another reason why AAA games are so conservative in their design – when you’re on top of the world, it’s no longer to your benefit to encourage your audience to see other ways in which that globe might rotate.

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