Topics Ethics

Question I recently asked a question about cops and robbers, and as Mr. Pessin pointed out, it's difficult to answer such a question when the subjects are children, who are often considered unable to grasp complex ethical problems. Having thought about it a bit, I'd like to ask about a related phenomenon, but with adults. There are more than a few adults who engage in Live-Action Role-Playing (LARPing), which frequently involves dozens, even hundreds of participants coming together in an area (often a rented campground) and engaging in unscripted role-playing. In fantasy LARPing, they take on the role of an imagined person (such as a wizard or a knight), speak in-character, "kill" each other with styrofoam swords, save each other from giant puppet "dragons," and so on. In doing so, they, too, simulate acts of violence against one another. I wonder whether these acts of pretend violence can be subjected to ethical evaluation, or whether the pretend nature of the activity frees the adult LARPers from needing to think about their actions in ethical terms. What is the nature of the activities they are pretending to do, and how are they ethically relevant, if at all?

Accepted:
May 24, 2012

Comments

You are on to a puzzle or problem that has vexed some philosophers at least going back to Plato. In some of the Platonic dialogues it is proposed that art (like theatre) is an imitation of life, and that if something is evil in life (like a mother killing her children) there is something evil or not good about imitating it or acting it out as one would in the play Medea. From that point of view, acting out murder (but using only fantasy violence, viz. no one is physically killed) would not itself be good (and a traditional Platonist might even call it evil or murderous). But (after Aristotle and much history) we seem to have moved beyond Plato and enjoy theatre, films, novels that depict horrific evils. I personally am drawn to a middle ground. Let's say the LARPing includes evil and good knights, wizards, and so on, and we wind up with epic battles akin the one that occurs at the end of The Hobbit. Off hand, this seems no more objectionable than performing Hamlet. But imagine the LARPing is more gruesome: imagine some of the people dress as SS and they make a fantasy death camp, and the SS characters get as committed to "mass killing" as those Stanford students got worked up into being jail guards in that social experiment years ago (in which the students moved from a role-playing enactment to bordering on serious abuse). I think such an event would be ethically relevant or, more specifically, I think it would reflect a profound deviancy and degeneracy. But where to draw the line? If the LARPing involved re-enacting the Illiad they would have to act out slaughtering children, civilians, defiling the body of Hector. My hunch is that the ethical status of the LARPing depends crucially on the subject matter or framework (the more evil acted out, the more justification there would have to be to the effect that it served some good, e.g. it was educational or the evil is ultimately overcome, etc) and intentionality (e.g. are the players performing evil acts only because they are unable to get away with what they really want, viz. to actually commit murder?).

Minor note: I have sought (however successful or unsuccessful) to address your question from a moral point of view, rather than an ethical one. I address some of the above and related issues in a book that may be of interest: Aesthetics: A Beginner's Guide (OneWorld Press, 2011). Given the topic, I was amused that in the audio Bolinda book-on-tape version, the text is read by an actor who appears on the TV show: City Homicide.