I'm not going to respond to everything because it seems like that would take an extraordinarily long amount of time, even more than I am willing to spend, which is saying something. But I have seen a few trending notions repeat themselves that I do want to address directly, because I think they're important, and also worth thinking about some more. I also think they're wrong, and need to be called out for it. I'm sorry, there was no nice way of saying that, but I'll lay out my reasons why I think they're wrong and let people judge for themselves if I'm making sense or if I'm pretentious
and full of it. :lol
I do have to ask where your opinion originates from. What is the background of the beliefs that government should censor and government should tell parents what to do? I just am having a hard time understanding why you think that way.
The opinion I have put forth is the only truly justifiable democratic one I have seen in this thread thus far. You're making a distinction between the government and parents, but in a democracy the parents
are the government. Not personally, necessarily, but they voted for the people who do personally make up the government, and even if they didn't, they have acknowledged their duty as democratic citizens to challenge that government via societally acceptable means of doing so, namely not voting for that government's party in the next election and persuading other people to do the same. That's democracy. All this "government vs. the people" nonsense is a false dichotomy; the government is the people, and if you don't believe that, then you're beef is not about violent videogames being sold to minors, it's about much deeper issues with the political system in which you live. And that's fine, I think if that is the case you are on to something, but in the meantime it makes it very difficult to talk about violent videogame criminality when you keep mentioning this abstract, du Toqueville-ian notion of "government as dictatorship" in a democracy.
Personally I do not think that age = maturity some kids can become more mature than any 21 year old I know and can possibly enjoy violent videogames without these games having effects in their sanity. So no I do not agree with that principle. Because just as Spartan said with his friends, many of my friends and I played violent videogames when we were younger and we are all working members of our society.
Two things: 1) doesn't "enjoying violence," in videogames or otherwise, already point to something deeply wrong with the psychological/social/cultural makeup of a person/society/culture? Think about that,
enjoying violence. On what ethical grounds can you defend that? Seriously, I'm curious, because I'm drawing a blank. Violence = bad is pretty much an absolute, maybe somewhat gray in the most extreme cases, but it should certainly never be
enjoyed, because whomever is the recipient of that violence would undoubtedly speak to the complete horror of such a thing.
2) If many of your friends smoke and don't die of lung cancer, I hope you do not think that is reason to believe that you won't get lung cancer from smoking either.
True, but it should represent a majority as well. As far as I can tell, the majority doesn't want this to pass. I wish someone took a poll because I'm pretty sure there aren't that many parents who are very vocal, just a minority. Heck, some probably aren't even aware of this case. Although, if there was a poll, then maybe parents will just go with the flow and say they're against violent video games. Hmmm....
I take it back, the whole "I'm the only one speaking democratically" thing, because this is pretty on message as far as the whole democracy thing goes. But this is why I keep asking you guys to forget all the jargon and interests and implications for a second, and just ask yourselves:
would you encourage a child to spend 2-3 hours a day shooting people in Black Ops? I think most people would agree that they would not, that in principle doing such a thing would be bad, and so if this is already part of the social contract between people, what's the harm in writing it down? And as for the people who would actually encourage children to play Black Ops for 2-3 hours a day, they must have some kind of mental deficiency or harmful self-interest motivating that belief, and the public harm they could potentially do really is criminal.
It costs money that a state doesn't really have.
But can you afford not to? No one is saying this will be easy or cheap, but let us remember JFK's remarks about challenges that seem difficult: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." The issue is not "can we?" but "should we?", and if the answer to the latter is "yes," then the former becomes a question of how, not if.
Clearly we're living in a representative democracy, but it is sometimes the job of the government to protect the people from themselves.
I think this is the issue that is underpinning the whole discussion. I say we do turn this into a civics class, because that's really what we're talking about here. What is the role of government? What is the role of an individual citizen? What is the social contract between government and the people who are governed? Politics, basically, distribution of power, balance and checks, & c.
When, how, and if the government should protect people from themselves, so to speak, is what we're all dancing around. What I basically said at the beginning was that I believe violent videogames is an issue where the government should protect people from themselves by criminalizing the sale of violent videogames to children, if indeed the people really are clamoring for the right to do so.
"Protecting children "does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed." Government has no right to unilaterally filter what ideas children are exposed to, and that is what we are dealing with here.
I would rather elected representatives of the government wield this power than the private sector. The ideas to which children are exposed are already restricted, the question is who should be restricting it? Television networks? Electronic Arts? Gamestop? Or authorities who attain their positions of power through free elections?
But this is also not just about "restriction," this isn't a "negative liberty" (keeping someone from harm) issue, it's a positive liberty (empowering citizens) one. If parents won't ensure that their children
are not restricted to the ideas presented to them in violent videogames, then they really are harming them. We're not talking about a restriction on ideas to which children may be exposed, we're talking about providing some assurance that children won't be restricted to ideas in certain types of videogames, ideas that are pretty indefensible ones to purport or ingest at any stage of life. Entertainment value is not a justification.
It is beyond the scope of their powers and infringes upon constitutional rights
Debatable. The constitution is a living document, it is constantly interpreted and re-interpreted. Whether or not the first amendment protecting freedom of expression extends to the virtual mass-murder of tens of thousands of people is highly contentious. We're not talking about words anymore, we're talking about hyper-intense, ineractive, sensory output, virtual realities here.
BIG difference.
I'm sure some slip through the cracks, but in most cases, the ESRB is more than enough to stop kids from buying an M-rated game without parental permission.
Again, this is based on what, exactly? Are there statistics (not that statistics are all that persuasive) demonstrating this? Who keeps tabs on the ESRB? Whose evaluation of them and their "effectiveness" can we trust?
I can't agree that it is universally or even generally detrimental for children to play [violent] video games.
This is a mindset that simply needs to be corrected. The argument that goes "we can't prove it's doing a specific kind of harm" does not make a thing beneficial. At most we can all agree that violence in videogames is
not bad. I think we'd be very hard pressed to find anyone who would make a compelling case that it is actually
good. Victims of actual violence would certainly not see the possible benignity of violent videogames as a justification for them. Unless someone can make a persuasive argument that violent videogames actually provide some sort of public
good, then they should almost be illegal to make, let alone sold, let alone sold to adults who intend to give them to children.
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I sort of drew a line in the sand there, and I'm pretty sure I came off as really confrontational, which was not my intention. I am passionate about this topic for a number of reasons, none of them particularly personal, just as the culmination of a number of ethical standards and sound reasoning I've developed over time (and have much developing yet to do), so that may have resulted in this post being relatively blunt. I don't think anyone's response has been dumb or irrational or anything like that. They're all good arguments, many of them attractive, even intriguing and if fleshed out a bit more, potentially persuasive. But I will be very surprised indeed if I hear a new argument on this topic that I have not heard elsewhere and already considered and discarded because of some fallacious point or unjustified position, a few of which I have attempted to point out here. I'm not saying I'm right and everyone else is wrong, but I am hoping to demonstrate that if I am wrong and others who have rebuked my claims are right, then it cannot be for the reasons they have provided, because those are not sound arguments. I submit now that almost all of them, if explained more, or approached differently, could absolutely trump everything I have said thus far, and I would not begrudge that being the case.
In sum, I'm not saying you are wrong to think what you do, but if you want to justify those thoughts you are going to have to rectify them with the points I have just put forward, or dismantle my points, for them to be right. So I encourage you all to do so.
If you have the time...
