
Moral Design - dwynings
http://fadeyev.net/2012/06/19/moral-design/
======
fadeyev
Author of the post here. Thank you for your comments.

I'd like to address the main criticism that I see in the comments, which is
that I did not specify what it is that I mean by morality, and what moral
system I'm using to make my judgement.

The post is not meant to be a complete essay, rather it is a short outline of
an idea, much like the rest of the stuff I publish on my blog, most of those
posts building on each other like bricks rather than standing alone as a
finished structure. That's absolutely my fault and it doesn't help with public
consumption, and this is something I need to work on. I am, and will be,
writing more thoughts on the subject as the post in this submission hardly
covers much ground, but nevertheless, I do stand by the idea presented there.

To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework,
only that there be one. Morals can come from religion or philosophy (or both),
and they should be used to guide design decisions rather than those design
decisions being made in isolation. Design decisions made without a moral
foundation focus on effectiveness alone, which is not a useful indicator for
the good's true worth (again, assuming your life is not amoral, in which case
none of that would matter), and what I mean by "true worth" is how that good
benefits society and man in light of your moral framework.

~~~
eevilspock
I feel that much of the negative comments are a defensive reaction. Coming to
Hacker News and pointing out, even if indirectly, that the tricks of the
startup trade are of questionable morality is like showing up at an decadent
dinner party and pulling out photos of starving third world children.

~~~
slurgfest
Which tricks?

------
zenogais
You start by assuming you know what morality is and moral is and then launch
into an examination of profitable designs that are immoral under your system.
This discourse would be far more interesting if you abandoned your
preconceptions and ask "What is morality?", "Does morality deeply influence
design? how?", "What morality influences good, timeless design?", "Is there
some morality at which all (good|bad) design aims?" - If you really want to
start a moral design discourse you should start from square one.

~~~
eevilspock
I say that being a meth dealer is immoral, and your response is that I can't
make such a statement without first dispensing a treatise on morality?

~~~
andrewflnr
You should absolutely be able to give real, concrete reasons why being a meth
dealer is harmful to people. Otherwise anyone can (and does) spew out things
they think are immoral. In the case of meth, it's easy. With Farmville it's a
bit more complicated.

~~~
eevilspock
If you play it, and get sucked in, or see your friends sucked in, or even
worse, have children and see them sucked in... No, it's not complicated at
all.

I've had friends who've gone the cocaine death spiral. One lived a life of
lies. [An HN relevant anecdote: He was responsible for our source control,
wasn't taking backups or checking disk space monitors. Full disk, corruption,
85 devs losing a week manually rebuilding central source from local copies
(before Git). He was fired]

~~~
capsule_toy
I've seen people sucked into tv dramas, tv dramas are evil.

I've seen people sucked into WoW, WoW is evil.

I've seen people sucked into Final Fantasy, heck... every RPG is probably
evil.

Actually, it seems like any form of entertainment can be rather addictive, the
world would be better if that whole industry went away.

You're right, this is easy.

~~~
eevilspock
Is the immorality of being a meth or crack dealer not easy for you to
recognize? If not, there's no point in continuing to debate.

If it is AND if you actually played a game like FarmVille and got addicted
despite being very intelligent, despite being aware of how inane the "game" is
and how it cynically taps into some primitive part of your brain, you'd
realize that your examples are to FarmVille what selling donuts are to dealing
crack/meth/heroin.

An extremely important distinction that @saraid216 and perhaps you may have
failed to make: The claim is not that X itself is immoral or using/playing X
is immoral, but that the intentions and methods of the dealers/creators of X
are.

~~~
zenogais
Scads have been written on the problems around morality so it is certainly not
an over and done with "couldn't be more obvious" issue. The problem is we deem
it one of these issues with no further debate - it's a nearly universal modern
prejudice to which most of us are blind. There is tons of literature dealing
with questions like: Have there been different moralities throughout history?
(Hint: There have. In reading Aristotle we see that lying was considering
virtuous and pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind.) Is thinking for
humans really otherwise than an instinctual act? If not then what does that
say for personal responsibility? Is there perhaps something valuable to
sustaining life in lying, selfishness, self-deception, etc? Of course you
probably deem all of these easily answerable questions, but I assure you a
little digging below the surface and they are remarkably difficult and
fascinating questions most of which still do not have answers.

------
gyardley
_All good design is moral design, and only moral design can ever be good._

Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims.
There's been no shortage of good design used for vile aims, and there's tons
of good causes with poor design.

~~~
pjscott
Your disagreement with the author -- if it can really be called a disagreement
-- completely vanishes if you categorize designs along separate good-evil and
effective-ineffective axes.

~~~
jtheory
Not using those exact terms, but the article discusses this explicitly as
well.

------
cjbprime
I liked your post, and agree with it.

Instead of arguing about whether ethical statements are meaningful given the
lack of an explicitly chosen ethical system, we could just try to think about
what systems are compatible with the claims you made.

Utilitarianism seems to back up your argument just fine, since you suggest
that you don't object to using powerful addiction techniques _in principle_ ,
which suggests you're not being deontological -- you care mainly about real-
world results.

Presumably you'd be much more accepting of Zynga-style gamification when used
to encourage things like Wikipedia editing, or to motivate successful weight
loss. You suggest that what actually matters is the consequences on someone's
life and time of using these techniques, which is a consequentialist argument.

So, while you haven't committed to using a utilitarian framework, I think that
users posting here who want to talk about moral framework assumptions could
start by assuming utilitarianism and asking whether your conclusion makes
sense. Seems like it does to me; it's not easy to imagine Farmville (or
anything with similarly cynical intent) as a net positive on the world.

------
AshleysBrain
What if people enjoy farm managing games? What if they extract more enjoyment
with paid add-ons? Does that mean the design decisions are still immoral?

~~~
blu3jack
Zynga's games have become a short-hand for immoral game design. I understand
why some people don't like the games, but I'm sad to see this go into popular
culture as a truism. It's cheap, it's sloppy, and it's ignorant.

The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more
nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy
errors:

1\. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is
not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun
addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game
mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.)

2\. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social
game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread
that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money
on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely.

You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy
conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching",
and "advancing."

------
cabalamat
Relevant: The Acceleration of Addictiveness --
<http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html>

------
skrebbel
On Farmville:

> _The design of the game is inherently immoral, and it is immoral not because
> it is badly made, deceptive, or ineffective, but because the ultimate aims
> of the design are destructively selfish: one gains, the other loses._

What? How is people giving a company money for _having fun_ playing a game
"destructively selfish" of said company?

~~~
cabalamat
> How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game
> "destructively selfish" of said company?

The same way that giving a company money for alcohol/tobacco/cocaine/etc might
be destructive to the buyer and selfish for the seller.

~~~
stfu
Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are
substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how
sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more
draw the argument into the gambling direction.

But I personally think that the addiction argument is highly problematic
construct. For example we all remember the studies demonstrating that people
are addicted to "the internet" or "mobile telephones". When the first animal
was domesticated one probably could also have done a study into how they are
conditioning human behavior, by requesting food, affection, play, etc. A lot
of this seems context based.

~~~
saraid216
> Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are
> substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter
> how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One
> might more draw the argument into the gambling direction.

We could have fun and bring up spiritual health. :D

------
mrpsbrk
I really like the opening statement of the post "all good design is moral
design", but i find it completely baffling to see it dispensed like that, like
simple statement of fact. I do agree with it, but i also think it does lead to
very unintuitive consequences that most people and most designers would not
accept easily, edge cases that the post does a neat job of hiding.

I'll try to find time to write a little more about that, but in the meantime,
i dearly deeply heartfelt-ly recomend "The Shape of Things" by a guy named
Flusser, and inside this particular book an essay by the name "War and the
state of things". It will really bake your noodles later on.

[http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30...](http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q&f=false)

------
saraid216
Claims like "design decisions need to be moral" often forget that there are an
annoyingly large number of moral systems that can and do collide with each
other.

~~~
eevilspock
You're sidestepping because morality is inconveniently annoying.

How would you feel if your 8 year old child spent hours playing FarmVille? She
thinks it is more fun than playing outside or with her friends.

Now what do you think about a company that claps with glee upon hearing the
above?

~~~
saraid216
Not really. I fully agree that Zynga is evil. Their CEO says so; it's hard to
get more authoritative than that. As someone who knows a fair bit about game
design, pedagogy, programming, and philosophy, I generally find Zynga and its
products to be a dirty stain slightly worse than the wide, wide gamut of bad
porn.

That said, I don't stoop to emotion-driven fallacies when taking a look at
these things. I actually bother with knowing what I'm talking about.

But to actually answer your question,

My children enjoy Farmville and their ilk, and also spends time playing
outside and with their friends. It is not ruining their lives. I may find
their tastes discouraging, but their tastes are not immoral according to the
moral system I've personally adopted and hope to pass on.

I will say it's amusing to be lectured on morality by "eevilspock".

~~~
eevilspock
I do have an evil goatee. Actually it's extremely apt if you ever saw that
Star Trek episode and understand Evil Spock's original Machiavellan attitude
and his revelation at the end.

You labeling my statement and/or the article author's an "emotion-driven
fallacy" is amazingly obnoxious rhetoric. The line that follows is even worse.

No one claimed that choosing to play FarmVille is immoral. Talk about logical
fallacy. Discussions of morals and values are by definition emotion-driven. "I
actually bother with knowing what I talk about." Yuch.

~~~
saraid216
> Discussions of morals and values are by definition emotion-driven.

Pop quiz. What are the four main types of ethical systems? Explain how
"clapping with glee" figures into each one.

~~~
eevilspock
Pop quiz. What is a douchebag?

