Ethics in a Virtual World

By Susan Esther Barnes

My husband was playing an online video game when an ethical dilemma arose. He was in a raid of 25 people, some of whom were strangers, and some of whom were in the same guild as him. (A guild is a group of people who play together regularly, and may have their own set of rules regarding behavior, how loot is distributed, etc). The raid members, working together, killed a monster, which dropped a rare axe that is one of the best weapons currently available in the game. The game allows the players two hours to decide who gets the item. Once those two hours are up, the person who has the item cannot give it or sell it to someone else, even if they want to.

Before the raid started, the players had agreed they would distribute loot using a common system, called “need before greed.” In this system, anyone who could use the item for their own personal use (as opposed to selling it for cash) would use the game’s random number generator to “roll” a number from 1 to 100. The person who gets the highest number wins the item.

This particular axe would have been a big upgrade for my husband’s character. Winning the item would have given his guild a better chance of killing a difficult monster they had been working on over the last few weeks. So my husband rolled for the item, and out of all the people trying to get it, his number was the third highest. The person who rolled the highest number, who I’ll call person A, won the item. No fuss, no muss.

The dilemma arose when person A, upon looking at the item a second time, contemplated the fact that he already had a pretty good weapon, so the axe was only a minor upgrade for him. Further, he is in the same guild as my husband, realized the item would be a much bigger upgrade for my husband, and determined that if my husband had the weapon, it would greatly increase their guild’s chances of killing the monster they had been trying to kill. As a result, he tried to give the weapon to my husband, while sending him a private message that said, “Shh, don’t say anything.”

My husband, who badly wanted the weapon and understood the benefit to the guild if he were to have it, was worried about person B, who was not in the guild and who had rolled the second highest number. Clearly, person A was also concerned about the reaction of person B, or there would have been no need for secrecy. Normally, if the person with the highest number decided they didn’t want the item, it would go to the person with the second highest roll.

A conversation ensued between person A, my husband, and the raid leader, who was also in the same guild as my husband and person A. The raid leader’s opinion was that person A had won the item, and therefore it was up to person A to decide whether to use it or to give it away to anyone he wanted. He thought this would not violate the “need before greed” agreement, since he was giving it away for free rather than selling it.

Although the raid leader’s argument sounded logical, and went along with what my husband wanted to hear, the fact remained that both person A and the raid leader encouraged my husband to keep quiet about it, and not to use the axe until later, when person B wasn’t around. If nothing else signaled that this plan wasn’t on the up-and-up, the secrecy was certainly a sign.

Looking at the situation from person B’s perspective, person A, the raid leader and my husband are all in the same guild. As a result, it doesn’t take a particularly paranoid mindset to think they may all be in cahoots together to get the best loot for their members. How does person B know whether person A rolled for the item with no intention of keeping it, but only to give my husband a better chance at getting it? Even if my husband didn’t use the item right away, if person B saw him with it later, and never saw person A with it, might he figure out what happened and feel cheated?

On the other hand, what obligation does my husband have to his guild to do whatever he can within the letter of the agreed-upon rules to get the best gear possible to give them the best possible chance to reach their goals?

The question arises, does it really matter? We are talking about a video game. The weapon in question is just pixels on a screen. In time, there will be new additions to the game, with new and better weapons. Eventually, everyone involved will move on to other games or other things. In the long view, why not just take the axe? What’s the difference?

It matters because, even though the game isn’t “real” and the axe isn’t “real” and even my husband’s character is just pretend, the feelings of the human beings playing the game are real. If person B feels cheated and angry, his real blood pressure in his real body will go up. His real world view about how people treat each other will change. And the guilt my husband would feel would be real. How he thinks about himself in the real world would change as well. What kind of person you are, your ethics and your values, are reflected in the virtual world, and have real world consequences.

Frankly, this is one of the things I like about online video games. It is in times like this that we get the chance to discover our own true nature, in a way we rarely get to in the real world. How often in the real world have you walked down the street and found a wallet full of money and had to decide what to do?

In this case, my husband asked me what I would do if I were him. I told him I know what I hope I would do, but it’s impossible for me to say for sure, because unless you’re the person experiencing it, you can’t really know how it feels. We all hope we would do the right thing, but until it actually happens to you, you can’t say for sure. Games give us a chance to discover our true selves by presenting us with ethical dilemmas and forcing us to make decisions that matter.

So what did he do? What would you do?

Visiting Mrs. Louie

By Susan Esther Barnes

Periodically, I visit a woman in her 80’s who doesn’t get out as much as she used to, since she is now confined to a wheelchair. It’s hard for me to describe how I feel about going on these visits; it’s complicated. She always seems happy to see me, but she has friends and a daughter nearby, and I don’t see how a visit every once in a while from me can really matter. On the other hand, I know my Grandmother, may her memory be a blessing, would approve, because in some ways it is reminiscent of my visits to Mrs. Louie.

When we were kids, my sister and I used to visit our Grandmother and her brother, Uncle Mitch, may his memory be a blessing, for about a month every summer. Grandma and Uncle Mitch lived in an apartment in San Francisco. In the summer, they spent about half the week in their apartment, and long weekends in Felton, where Uncle Mitch had a part-time job as a courier and caretaker for what we called “the lodge” (interesting story there, but that’s for another time).

Periodically, when we were in San Francisco, Grandma would send us to the apartment across the hall to visit Mrs. Louie. Mrs. Louie was about Grandma’s age, and once when I asked why we went to visit her, I think Grandma said something vague about Mrs. Louie being lonely because her family and most of her friends had died.

Sometimes visiting Mrs. Louie was a little boring, and I remember she told us some of the same stories numerous times, but I don’t remember particularly disliking our visits with her. It had a feel of normalcy, like it was no big deal, but, on the other hand, I still remember it more than thirty years later, so there must have been more to it than that.

I remember I liked how animated Mrs. Louie got when she told us about the raccoons she and her husband used to feed where they used to live, and how sorry she felt for the people who bought the house after them and who probably wondered why so many raccoons showed up in the evening demanding dinner.

Similarly, when we were in Felton, periodically Grandma would take us down the hill to visit Mr. and Mrs. Wertheimer. I didn’t have the words for it then, but now I know the Wertheimers were morbidly obese. Each of them had a special piece of furniture to recline on, sort of like a couch with a raised part for their upper body, since they were too heavy to sit on regular furniture. Every year at Passover when we talk about eating while reclining, it reminds me of the Wertheimers’ couches.

I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the Wertheimer’s weight. I don’t think it ever occurred to me to ask about it. As with Mrs. Louie, I didn’t particularly look forward to visiting the Wertheimers, but it wasn’t something I tried to avoid. Talking with them was like talking with any other grown-ups; it was just part of life.

As I got older, I encountered people who spoke down about people who were elderly or overweight. Even now, I know otherwise good-intentioned people who for some reason talk to the elderly in a different manner than they use with other people, almost as if they were talking to children. I never understood that. As far as I could tell from visiting Mrs. Louie and the Wertheimers, elderly and overweight people are just like everyone else. They aren’t more or less smart, or lazy, or interesting. They are just people.

It wasn’t until after Grandma died that I was mature enough to wonder why she made sure we visited Mrs. Louie and the Wertheimers every year. Maybe it was just because she was being nice to them. Clearly, they didn’t get out much, and didn’t get many visitors. I don’t think it was only because she liked visiting them herself; she could have done that without us.

I also came to wonder whether she was doing it for us rather than them. I wonder whether she was teaching us the value of having compassion for people who are lonely. I wonder if she planned for us to learn to see elderly and overweight people as people who are just like everyone else. I wonder whether, if I were given a chance to ask her why we made these visits, she would look at me in surprise and say, “It’s what we do.”

Ethics and Kashrut

By Susan Esther Barnes

Last week, a kosher poultry processing plant in New York was shut down due to health violations, including a lack of soap and sanitizers in the employee restrooms and processed chicken being stored in a tank without running water. This case brings to mind the much larger kosher meat processing plant, Agriprocessors, which was the center of a huge bruhaha a little over a year ago when it was accused of being in violation of labor laws as well as the mistreatment of animals.

At the time of the Agriprocessors scandal, the question arose, “How can meat be considered kosher if the animals and the workers are mistreated?” After all, one of the purposes of kashrut (the set of Jewish dietary laws) was to make sure the animals to be eaten would be slaughtered in a humane way, causing as little pain to the animal as possible. In other words, the animals were to be treated with compassion, and thus ethics and kashrut appear to be bound tightly together.

However, in the December 2009 issue of the journal Sh’ma, Daniel Alter writes, “Talk of the ethics of kashrut hurts Jewish ethics. It renders a tradition that possesses immense wisdom irrelevant at best and nonsensical at worst.” He later goes on to say, “Ethics is ethics; kashrut is kashrut,” as if they were two completely unrelated things.

This idea that one can separate ethics from the dietary laws – or anything else for that matter – is a foreign one to me. I would argue that ethics do, and should, permeate every part of our lives, from what we eat, to what we wear, to how we behave when we drive to work in the morning. How can we say food is “kosher,” meaning “fit” to eat, if the animals and/or the workers were treated unethically? Can something truly be considered to be ritually pure if it was prepared by someone who wasn’t paid a living (or even lawful) wage? What would be the point of ensuring an animal is killed quickly and painlessly if it were allowed to suffer needlessly in the days beforehand?

When we say laws are unrelated to ethics, or when we claim the letter of the law is more important than its ethical considerations, then we are worshipping at the altar of the idol of the law. And I think we all know bad things happen when we start worshipping idols.