Category: Ethics

When the culture war opened a gaming front, I began to see racist posts in gaming groups on Facebook and other social media. Seeing these posts, I wondered whether they are made by gamers who are racists, racists who game or merely trolls (internet, not D&D).

Gamers who are racists are actual gamers that are also racists. Racists who play games (or pretend to play them) are doing so as a means to recruit others into racism. While right-wing hate groups recruit video gamers, there seems to be no significant research into recruitment through tabletop games like D&D. My discussion does not require any racists who game; all that is needed is gamers who are racist. Unfortunately, you can easily find them on social media.

An easy way to summon racists is to begin a discussion of diversity in gaming or mention of the revised 2024 rules. But surely there are non-racists who disagree with diversity in gaming and the changes WotC has made in the 2024 rules? Is it not hyperbole and a straw man to cast all critics of diversity as racists? This is a fair and excellent point: to assume every critic of diversity and the game changes is a racist would be bad reasoning. But while some racists are openly racist, others use stealth. They advance arguments that seem reasonable and non-racist while occasionally letting a hint of racism show through. But not so much racism that it cannot be plausibly denied.

There is also another problem: the honest non-racist critic and a stealthy racist will often advance the same arguments. So, what is the difference, other than the racism? The answer is that the critic is arguing in good faith while the racist is arguing in bad faith.

As a philosopher, I will start with the philosophical definition of an argument. In philosophy, an argument is a set of claims, one of which is supposed to be supported by the others. There are two types of claims in an argument. The first type of claim is the conclusion.  This is the claim that is supposed to be supported by the premises. A single argument has one and only one conclusion, although the conclusion of one argument can be used as a premise in another argument.

The second type of claim is the premise. A premise is a claim given as evidence or a reason to logically accept the conclusion. Aside from practical concerns, there is no limit to the number of premises in an argument. When assessing any argument there are two factors to consider: the quality of the premises and the quality of the reasoning. The objective of philosophical argumentation is to make a good argument with true (or at least plausible) premises. Roughly put, the goal is to reach the truth.

Philosophical argumentation is different from persuasion as the goal of persuasion is to get the audience to believe a claim whether it is true or false. As Aristotle noted, philosophical argumentation is weak as persuasion. Empty rhetoric and fallacies (errors in reasoning) have greater psychological force (though they lack all logical force). The stage is thus set to talk about bad faith.

The foundation of arguing in good faith is the acceptance of the philosophical definition of argument: the goal is to provide plausible premises and good reasoning to reach the truth. This entails that the person must avoid intentionally committing fallacies, knowingly making false claims, and misusing rhetoric. A person can, of course, still employ persuasive techniques. Good faith argumentation does not require debating like a stereotypical robot or being dull as dust. But good faith argumentation precludes knowingly substituting rhetoric for reasons. A person can, in good faith, argue badly and even unintentionally commit fallacies because a person can make bad arguments in good faith. A person can, obviously, also make untrue claims when arguing in good faith. But as long as these are errors  rather than lies and the person put in effort to check their claims, then they can still be arguing in good faith. 

Arguing in good faith also requires that the person be honest about whether they believe their claims and whether they believe their reasoning is good. A person need not believe what they are arguing for, since a person can advance an argument, they disagree with as part of a good faith discussion. For example, I routinely present arguments that oppose my own views when I am doing philosophy.

One must also be honest about one’s goals when arguing from good faith. To illustrate, a critic of changes to D&D who is open about their belief that they are detrimental to D&D would be acting in good faith. A racist who argues against changes in D&D hoping to lure people into racism while concealing their motives would be arguing in bad faith. As would be suspected, a clever racist will conceal their true motives when trying to radicalize the normies. There is also the possibility that a person is trolling. But if someone is trolling with racism it does not matter that they are a troll for they are still doing the racist’s work for them.

While there are objective methods for sorting out the quality of arguments and the truth of claims, determining motives and thoughts can be hard. As such, while I can easily tell when someone is committing an ad hominem fallacy, I cannot always tell when someone is engaged in bad faith argumentation. This is more in the field of psychology than philosophy as it involves discerning motives and intentions. However, sorting out motives and intents is something we all do, and we can divine from a person’s actions and words what their motives and intents might be. But we should use caution before accusing someone of arguing in bad faith and this accusation certainly should not be used as a bad faith tactic. To use accusations of bad faith as a rhetorical device or an ad hominem would be bad faith argumentation and would, of course, prove nothing. But why should people argue in good faith?

There are two broad reasons why people should do so. The first is ethical: arguing in good faith is being honest and arguing in bad faith is deceitful.  Obviously, one could counter this by arguing against honesty and in favor of deceit. The second is grounded in critical thinking: bad faith argumentation generally involves bad logic, untruths, and a lack of clarity. As such, arguing in good faith is ethical and rational. Bad faith argumentation is the opposite. Why, then, do people argue in bad faith?

One reason is that bad faith reasoning can work well as persuasion. If one rejects truth as the goal and instead focuses on winning, then bad faith argumentation would be the “better” choice. 

A second reason is that a person might risk harm, such as social backlash, for arguing their views in good faith. In such cases, hiding their views would be prudent. As a good example, a person who wants to get people to accept human rights in a dictatorship might argue in bad faith, hoping to “trojan horse” people into accepting their views. If they openly argued for human rights, they risk being imprisoned or killed. As an evil example, a racist might argue in bad faith, hoping to “trojan horse” people into accepting their views. If they were openly racist in a D&D Facebook group, they would face censure and might be kicked out of the group. So arguing acting in bad faith is the only way they will be able to poison the group from the inside. A third reason is that bad faith reasoning can lure people down a path they would not follow if it were honestly labeled. Such a use does raise moral questions; some might advance a utilitarian argument to defend its use for good while others might condemn such deceit even if it is alleged it is to achieve a good end.

In the next essay I will look at some arguments against some of WotC’s policies that can be made in good or bad faith

A few years ago the owners of D&D, Wizards of the Coast, issued an article on diversity. In the previous essay, I advanced two arguments in defense of some of what Wizards proposed. One is the utilitarian argument stolen from Plato that harmful aspects of art can harm a person’s character and could increase their chances of behaving badly in the real world. The second is a Kantian style argument that it does not matter whether immoral content causes harm, what matters is that the content is immoral. I ended the essay noting an obvious concern with my argument: the same reasoning would seem to apply to two core aspects of D&D: killing and looting.

As an aside, I lived through the Satanic Panic D&D faced in the 1980s. The argument against D&D was like Plato’s argument but with a Christian modification that D&D would lead people to Satanism and other cults. Like most other moral panics from the right, this was debunked long ago. Now back to killing and theft.

Using Plato’s argument as a template, it is easy to argue that violence and looting should be removed from D&D: engaging in fictional violence and theft could corrupt people and make them more likely to behave badly in real life. I can also reuse the Kantian argument: even if hacking up dragons and looting their hoards had no impact on people, allowing the immoral content of killing and stealing would be immoral. This would allow for an argument from analogy: if D&D should be cleansed of racist elements for moral reasons, then it should also be cleansed of violence and theft on moral grounds. There are two main options in terms of where this reasoning should take us.

The first is to accept the analogy and agree D&D should also be cleansed of violence and theft. This would radically change the game, although some people have run violence-free campaigns. The second is to take this analogy as a reductio ad absurdum of the original argument. If using the same logic (what is known as parity of reasoning) leads to an absurd conclusion, then this can be taken as refuting arguments with the same logic. A well-known example of this is philosophy is Gaunilo’s reply to St. Anselm’s ontological argument.

Since D&D is inherently a game of combat and looting, it would be absurd to remove these elements. This would be analogous to removing cars from NASCAR. Since the violence argument is reduced to absurdity, the diversity argument is absurd as well. D&D should remain unchanged: killing, looting and no diversity changes. While this line of reasoning is appealing, it can be challenged.

For this reasoning to be good,  fictional violence and theft must be analogous to fictional racism within the game. Interestingly, someone agreeing with this reasoning would need to agree that racism, killing and looting are all bad but they should not be removed from the game. Someone who thinks that racism, killing, and looting are all morally fine would not need to make the absurdity argument. They could just argue there is no moral reason to remove any of these from the game. So, can a person believe that killing, stealing and racism are bad while consistently supporting diversity on moral grounds while also allowing in game killing and looting? The answer is “yes” and supporting this requires arguing that the analogy between killing and racism breaks down.

The obvious way to do this is to point out a relevant difference between racism and killing: while racism seems to always be wrong, there are arguments that support morally acceptable violence. These include such things as Locke’s moral argument for self-defense and centuries of work in just war theory. In contrast, there seem to be no good forms of racism or cases in which racism is morally defensible. While someone might use violence for self-defense against a wrongful attack and be morally justified, there seem to be no cases of racism in self-defense: that one must use morally acceptable racism to protect oneself against wrongful racism. Likewise, there is no body of ethics that constitutes just racism theory. To be fair to the racists, they could argue in favor of the ethics of racism and I certainly invite good faith efforts to publicly make such a case.

Because there are moral distinctions in violence, D&D could include ethical violence with no moral problem. It would not be corrupting, nor would it be inherently evil. In D&D people typically play heroes doing heroic deeds such as fighting evil foes and looting their foes to continue their heroic efforts. There are, however, three obvious counters to this argument.

One is that there are arguments that violence is always wrong, and one could be a moral absolutist about violence. If violence is always wrong, then it would be wrong to include it in D&D. While not without its problems, pacifism is a coherent moral view and would certainly make D&D morally problematic if it were correct.

The second is that people play non-good and even evil characters in D&D who engage in evil acts of violence. I have played evil characters myself, my favorite being my delusional anti-paladin D’ko.  One could argue that playing evil PCs would be immoral. The obvious reply is that if one is playing the role and it is not impacting the person, then there would be no moral problem: no one is being harmed, and the evil deeds are fictional. If someone were to get into the role too much and engage in behavior that did hurt other people then that would be wrong as real harm would be done. This could even be harm done at the table. For example, a player who has their character rape defeated foes and graphically describes this to the other players could be doing real harm.  Also, a Kantian might disagree about the distinction between fictional and real evil and argue that to will evil even in play would still be evil.

The third is that even in games where all the PCs are good (or at least not evil), the DM must take on the role of any evil NPCs the players interact with and engage in fictional acts of evil. As such, it would seem hard to avoid including unjust violence in D&D. From a utilitarian perspective, this would be morally acceptable if the fictional violence did no harm, either in terms of corrupting people or inflicting suffering on those involved. Again, a Kantian approach might forbid even harmlessly playing an evil being as a DM but some Kantians are notorious as killjoys.

As my closing argument, I contend there is a meaningful distinction between playing an evil character doing evil acts of fictional violence and having the game content mirror the racism of the real world. To use an obvious analogy, this is the distinction between an actor playing the role of a racist in a movie and knowingly acting in a movie that serves as racist propaganda.  As such, D&D can retain violence, and players can play evil characters (within limits) while avoiding moral harms. But the racism should certainly go.