Friday 9 November, 2018

Today I played this game for two hours. As the game story progresses, I find that the same man frames both characters. So they escaped not just for a purpose, but for revenge, in a sense to prove their innocence. However, I still hold a negative attitude towards the question of the morality of intentional escape from prison. Because in the plot of the game, the main characters in the escape in order not to be arrested back to jail, they hurt the prison officers who came to hold back them, robbed the farmer's car and even killed people. So also if they want revenge and prove their innocence, they have committed more crimes on the way out. Besides, the problem can be analyzed with Kantianism. First, I make a moral rule: "A man can escape prison when he has a purpose or wants to prove his innocence." Then we universalize the rule. If all men could break out of prison for their purposes, the prison could not be trusted, for it could not hold the prisoner at all. By that, it leads to a logical contradiction. So, it is wrong to follow that rule, and the problem I made should be unethical.

Great job! You’ve got some interesting thoughts here. I particularly enjoyed your Utilitarian and Kantian breakdowns of the morality of a prison break. It’s great to see people applying what they’ve been learning in class to their gameplay experiences. How does the fact that both people were framed factor in to that analysis? Does you universalized rule hold true if the prisoner was innocent (i.e. what if the rule was “A man can escape prison if he’s innocent, but not if he’s guilty)?

This is an excellent example of thinking about. If a man is innocent and goes to prison, he eventually escapes and didn't hurt anyone in the escape. So I think the behavior is moral. The premise of my thinking here is that this person didn't hurt anyone on the way out of prison. If this person hurts someone else, then this behavior becomes unethical in my judgment. It sounds reasonable, and it seems too subjective. Beyond that, if you use Kantianism, it's immoral in any case. Because the essence of Kantianism is that if an act is immoral, then the result is unethical.