Sunday 5 October, 2008

I have played the game for several hours over the past few days. I have been having trouble of thinking of a third journal entry. I talked about so much in the last two that I thought I was out of stuff to write about.

After looking through my notes on utilitarianism I recognized that CJ may actually be doing well for his people. CJ goes around through out the game trying to better his gang and community. In his world doing good means something completely different from ours. The only way to make life better for his gang is to kill the drug dealers. So his people will stay drug free. Also in the gang environment the only way to make your people happy is to eliminate other gangs. Now this may sound wrong to us but we live completely different lives. But as long as he raises happiness with in his gang he is morally justified for what he has done.

For the past several days I thought that this game was just morally wrong and had no ethics. But looking at it from this prospective it looks like I was wrong. According to utilitarianism CJ was morally justified in his actions. I never thought I would say that he was right in what he did.

This is one of the failings of act utilitarianism. Through the perspective of act utilitarianism evil deeds done for the benefit for a larger group is morally justifiable. For example, killing a few people for the good of thousands would be morally justifiable, which is morally questionable.