Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough by William Irwin, Michel S. Beaulieu
Authors: William Irwin, Michel S. Beaulieu
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words, as long as these rational agents all freely agree to engage in such behaviors, then there is nothing morally wrong in objectifying them.
The experience of summoning Guardian Forces (GFs) in Final Fantasy VIII can help illustrate this point. Members of the players’ party can summon various Guardian Forces that overtake their bodies and transform them, all for the purpose of defeating the enemy with a greater show of power. These Guardian Forces must be discovered within the game, and often a player must defeat them in battle before the GFs will agree to assist the player.
But how can we decide whether we should ever use people as mere instruments? Don’t fully rational persons have the freedom to make their own well-informed decisions? There is one camp of “moral sanctity” Kantians who would argue that it’s immoral to objectify a person, no matter what. 5 But there is another group of “moral autonomy” Kantians who would contend that as long as all parties are fully aware of the risks of the situation, nothing immoral occurs in consensual objectification. As long as the party members are well aware that they can be killed when they are transformed by a GF and that they lose the ability to control their bodies, then nothing immoral is taking place. In fact, “moral autonomy” Kantians often argue that to deny a person the freedom to so choose would itself be immoral because such a denial violates a person’s autonomy as a rational, free decision maker. In other words, refusing to allow people to make their own choices is to reduce them to objects, because, after all, mere objects lack choices. 6 Based on Kant’s philosophy, however, neither can be more important than the other—both are indispensable.
PART THREE
ABILITIES YOU NEVER KNEW YOU HAD
7
FINAL FANTASY AND THE PURPOSE OF LIFE
Greg Littmann
Hey, where are you four brats off to now? What . . . ? You’re going to go save the world . . . ? Did you get hit on the head or something!?
—Woman in Ur, Final Fantasy III
The oldest game in the world must be pretending to be someone else. Even before children learn to speak, they start to copy the adults around them and they soon start to act out better and more exciting lives, whether it be putting a stop to crime or exploring new planets. Some people grow out of it as they get older. Suckers. The rest of us just start playing more sophisticated games. Thanks to the steady advancement of computer technology, things have never been better for those of us who enjoy exploring lives that are not our own, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the Final Fantasy series of video games, which has offered new lives to hundreds of thousands of people since 1987. The phenomenal success of the Final Fantasy series makes it a natural resource for investigating the question of the purpose, or the best purpose, of life in the real world. After all, role-playing games are only successful if they tempt us with lives that seem worth living.
Of course, just because we enjoy pretending that something is happening doesn’t automatically mean that we think it would be good in real life. For example, we might be having fun when a Cactaur impales us with a thousand flying needles in a Final Fantasy game, but that doesn’t mean we think that suffering a comparable injury in the real world would be a good thing. Similarly, if we are playing Final Fantasy XI Online , we might regard it as a little harmless, black-humored fun to run around the Batallia Downs slaughtering the poor little Pixies, but no sane person thinks that killing intelligent creatures just for fun is all right in real life.
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of what kinds of lives we should be living in the real world, by contrasting the “lives” that are held to be well lived in the worlds of Final Fantasy with the sorts of lives recommended by philosophers. In particular, we’ll look at what the
The experience of summoning Guardian Forces (GFs) in Final Fantasy VIII can help illustrate this point. Members of the players’ party can summon various Guardian Forces that overtake their bodies and transform them, all for the purpose of defeating the enemy with a greater show of power. These Guardian Forces must be discovered within the game, and often a player must defeat them in battle before the GFs will agree to assist the player.
But how can we decide whether we should ever use people as mere instruments? Don’t fully rational persons have the freedom to make their own well-informed decisions? There is one camp of “moral sanctity” Kantians who would argue that it’s immoral to objectify a person, no matter what. 5 But there is another group of “moral autonomy” Kantians who would contend that as long as all parties are fully aware of the risks of the situation, nothing immoral occurs in consensual objectification. As long as the party members are well aware that they can be killed when they are transformed by a GF and that they lose the ability to control their bodies, then nothing immoral is taking place. In fact, “moral autonomy” Kantians often argue that to deny a person the freedom to so choose would itself be immoral because such a denial violates a person’s autonomy as a rational, free decision maker. In other words, refusing to allow people to make their own choices is to reduce them to objects, because, after all, mere objects lack choices. 6 Based on Kant’s philosophy, however, neither can be more important than the other—both are indispensable.
PART THREE
ABILITIES YOU NEVER KNEW YOU HAD
7
FINAL FANTASY AND THE PURPOSE OF LIFE
Greg Littmann
Hey, where are you four brats off to now? What . . . ? You’re going to go save the world . . . ? Did you get hit on the head or something!?
—Woman in Ur, Final Fantasy III
The oldest game in the world must be pretending to be someone else. Even before children learn to speak, they start to copy the adults around them and they soon start to act out better and more exciting lives, whether it be putting a stop to crime or exploring new planets. Some people grow out of it as they get older. Suckers. The rest of us just start playing more sophisticated games. Thanks to the steady advancement of computer technology, things have never been better for those of us who enjoy exploring lives that are not our own, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the Final Fantasy series of video games, which has offered new lives to hundreds of thousands of people since 1987. The phenomenal success of the Final Fantasy series makes it a natural resource for investigating the question of the purpose, or the best purpose, of life in the real world. After all, role-playing games are only successful if they tempt us with lives that seem worth living.
Of course, just because we enjoy pretending that something is happening doesn’t automatically mean that we think it would be good in real life. For example, we might be having fun when a Cactaur impales us with a thousand flying needles in a Final Fantasy game, but that doesn’t mean we think that suffering a comparable injury in the real world would be a good thing. Similarly, if we are playing Final Fantasy XI Online , we might regard it as a little harmless, black-humored fun to run around the Batallia Downs slaughtering the poor little Pixies, but no sane person thinks that killing intelligent creatures just for fun is all right in real life.
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of what kinds of lives we should be living in the real world, by contrasting the “lives” that are held to be well lived in the worlds of Final Fantasy with the sorts of lives recommended by philosophers. In particular, we’ll look at what the
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