Warning: this article might contain elements of preaching that will annoy even me.
The issue of torture in WoW has come up on many blogs already, most commonly concerning the quest in Borean Tundra where you have the option of torturing a Mage-Hunter at Amber Ledge in order to save a member of the Kirin Tor. I have seen many arguments on many blogs already, and I must say this is a discussion I’m very interested in.
If moral relativism is going to be our guide, you’re never going to get an answer to this question, and all the debate in the world, despite the noble intentions of the debaters, is completely useless and a waste of time for everyone involved. Debate and discussion are both made for finding out the truth, so if all we do is toss blog comments back and forth polished with a few personal accusations and vague implications concerning one’s political party, we might as all well shut up and leave this to people who actually have the courage to address moral issues sincerely and without a bunch of pent-up anger and emotion.
But I’ve yet to find any blog giving an actual reason for why torture is wrong, or even touching on the actual nature of torture. At most they merely touch on how torture is painful, useless, doesn’t work, etc., all of which they attempt to support with a few token books or studies on the subject, such as Rejali’s Torture and Democracy. Unfortunately, a book from a university professor does not seal the deal on the subject. I haven’t read the book, so I’ve no place to refute its arguments, but I do know the work does not state that torture is useless, only that its results are unreliable and unpredictable, as all humans are and all interrogators and advocates of torture understand as well. In any case, we’re not here to discuss the finer points of the efficacy of torture. We’re discussing its moral nature.
The common moral argument against torture is that it’s evil and painful. Unfortunately, that’s also completely useless. Pain is not a moral argument. Pain is a non-ethical sensation that can be used for both good and evil. That is simply moral relativism, and moral relativism is, like frivolous debate, utterly useless in all forms. Morality is not, in fact, arbitrary. There are a number of reasons for every moral prohibition in any religion, be they societal, legal, provincial, or simply logical. Morality exists and has existed throughout history to give our society some semblance of order and coherence. Without any form of morality a society cannot exist, and without a coherent reason there can be no moral prohibition against anything.
So, what is torture first of all and in what context are we discussing it? Torture, like all words, can be used to describe a number of very different things. Therefore, let’s put things into their proper context: we are discussing the moral validity of torture in a time of war. We are not talking about personal torture or anguish or other things like that. Please keep off the beaten path.
Now then, let us define torture. Torture is simply the application of force on a person to extract something desirable from them. We must all first realize that torture is not so tritely limited to the application of pain, nor is it limited to the gears of war. There are other enemies of the mind that can be just as effective and far less “painful,” upon which the common moral outrage against it breaks down entirely. Pain is not an immoral thing, nor is discomfort, shame, or a thousand other displeasures we experience everyday. In many cases pain is used as a good thing.
Furthermore, exactly how is torture bad in wartime against captured combatants because it causes them pain or discomfort? Is not that the point of war: to cause the pain, discomfort, and ultimately the death or total defeat of our opponents? Do these debaters understand the nature of shooting a high-powered rifle or machine gun at an enemy? Do they somehow imagine that all guns on the battlefield have flags in them like in Looney Toons? That they’re all harmless sticks we wave around for the sake of appearances? Do they not understand the horrible pain and agony inflicted on someone’s body when it is hit by a bullet, and that on the battlefield the only reason we shoot at enemies is to purposefully kill or wound them into submission for cold tactical gain?
Do you not understand what war is?
The gathering of intelligence from an enemy is, it would seem, a more permanent goal than killing on the battlefield, but this isn’t the case either. The battlefield is not limited to an open No Man’s Land of opposing machine gun lines. It exists in interrogation chambers too, as well as diplomatic seats, agencies, and the other war apparatuses of nations. The information gathered by torture or interrogation is not limited to the salvation of the world, as its opponents would like to sarcastically exaggerate. Much like any military skirmish, its value can range from saving one soldier or tipping a front in a side’s favor. As such, interrogation or torture is a gun, something to be used in time of war to gain the upper hand against an enemy. It is not an infallible savior, and no interrogator treats it like one, but it can be an effective tool and so should be used if the practical rewards might be worth it. In the same way, no military commander worth his salt considers blindly firing a gun at an enemy line the only way to win a war. Hardly. A commander keeps his options open and uses the tools available to him.
Mindlessly banning torture everywhere would be like mindlessly banning guns on the battlefield simply because they cause pain.
The other common argument against torture is that it violates the Geneva convention or some other moral standard. Wonderful, except that this matter simply doesn’t apply in Azeroth. The Geneva Convention is a piece of paper signed by a few nations, but it is not a moral code nor something we should follow blindly in the meantime, and it has severe limitations. In today’s battles against un-uniformed combatants, the Geneva Convention falls flat on its face. It was made in a time of established battle lines and Western Nations killing each other so efficiently and openly.
Now then, we have to discuss the actual context of this moral quandary here, otherwise we’d be just blithering about in the dark whining about moral injustices. Exactly what are the Blue Dragonflight attempting to do? Nothing less than the expulsion of all reckless use of magic from Azeroth. In and of itself, that might not be a bad thing, and the Kirin Tor are hardly fighting for the right to use magically Blood Elf-style. The problem is that Blue Dragonflight are completely oblivious to the fact that their efforts in the Nexus are quite literally going to either end the world or rip it to pieces and kill millions of innocents who have nothing to do with Magic. If Malygos wished to end magic’s reckless use, primarily by causing the end of the Kirin Tor, he might attempt to wage war against the Kirin Tor solely or to at least explain his reasoning to the Kirin Tor—who seem half in agreement with him anyway on the matter—before declaring war on all magic users, making a giant hole in the ground with which to blast all magic from Azeroth into the Twisting Nether and attacking the other four Dragonflights for merely opposing him. If there’s any a guilty party in the Nexus War, it’d be Malygos and his kin. There are other, more sensible means of reigning in the reckless use of magic, a noble goal in and of itself that both sides actually agree upon in the general sense. The methods and intents of either side, however, are what determine their moral validity.
If you understand this, you realize that the Kirin Tor and the rest of us adventurers are fighting for our very survival, not some spat of arcane-soaked land in the Borean Tundra. This is a battle of life and death, not a political diatribe of nations. We have no desire to kill Malygos. We don’t want to kill the Aspect of Magic. If anything, it’d be great if we could have access to his wisdom and knowledge, or even as an ally against such vile villains as the Lich King and Yogg-Saron. Unfortunately, we are at an impasse. If we do not stop Malygos, millions of people will die or Azeroth itself will be ruined. We are not, in fact, randomly going in to kill Malygos because we’ve been ordered to. We’re killing Malygos because he’ll kill us sooner or later, the moral or even logical quality of his actions be damned.
Another line of logic against torture is that people take pleasure in it, but that’s a different moral conflict altogether. The bloodlust or innate psychosis of a human being is the matter of a person’s soul and is, quite frankly, irrelevant to the needs of a warring nation or people or even the moral validity of torture itself. If a person enjoys torturing someone, it is not an argument against the actual use of torture, but the extent or intent of that torture. A person who goes overboard, cutting off someone’s toes one by one or what not because he likes blood, is a monster, but that doesn’t give us any moral reason not to pressure a valuable prisoner into giving us information. It only gives us another objection to the misapplication of pain, but we’ve plenty of those already. Anyone who raises this point is simply wasting our time.
If you want to know, I had no moral quandaries in torturing the Mage-Hunter at Amber Ledge, nor did I have any problem with the mercy killings at the Broken Front. There is a limit to the stupidity and emotional frailty of the modern world. My biggest objection to the whole matter was why I simply couldn’t heal them as a Priest with the powers of Elune at my command, but that is a natural idiosyncrasy of an MMORPG. I clicked the button and understood exactly what I was doing and that it was not only the most practical solution, but the right solution. Of course, you must also realize that you don’t have to do these quests at all if your moral conscience objects to them too strongly.
Very few people attempt to understand the military context of any of the quests in WoW or even consider what we are fighting. If you want to make a moral judgment about the actions of a virtual character in a virtual game, at least attempt to consider the nature of the virtual world before you start running around pronouncing doom and hell on someone. If you were fighting a ruthless, amoral power that can raise any corpse left behind into a mindless soldier to be used against your people on the field of battle tomorrow, would you consistently bury your dead in a normal manner in a conspicuous graveyard? No, you’d burn the corpses and scatter the ashes to the wind and make sure that, if you had to leave someone behind on the battlefield, he’d be dead and his corpse would be useless to said enemy.
Let’s stop treating war like some video game and discuss these issues practically, without throwing in any stupid real-world references or epithets at Bush, Gore, Obama, or some other political enemy we all love or hate. And let us stop pretending we adventurers have some form of moral high ground, as anyone who participated in the DEHTA quests, myself included on my Death Knight, is, by these debaters’ standards, a pure, cold-blooded murderer. Explain to me the moral validity of killing trappers with their own traps to save a few bunnies and you might get me to listen to your objections against the Kirin Tor. Otherwise, stop trying to feed your own egotistical desires to be on the moral high ground.
The reason participating in the DEHTA quests isn’t a moral issue is that this is, as they say, a game, and none of the stuff we do in WoW is actually real. Morality is an issue of reality, not games. The quandaries of loot stealers and what not is a far more serious issue than what we’ve been discussing since they deal with real people in the real world.
Lastly, some might object to my arguments by placing the obligatory “would you be okay with raping someone in-game?” question. Let me first say that it is a ridiculous situation that will never come up in the game, if only because it is entirely pointless, making the question entirely pointless as well. But I will answer this question if only to combat real-world moral stupidity and because this addresses a deeper moral question about actions in video games. No, I would not be okay with it simply because there is no point to raping someone besides fulfilling a base, immoral, sexual, and altogether REAL lust.
There are innumerable points to killing something in a game, be it experience, the gathering of materials, or even the mere relieving of stress and pleasure (I kill bunnies when I feel like it), but all those things are, one way or another, virtual desires that, if the person is sane and moral, will never exist in a person’s actions in the real world. Consequently, if someone does have a real desire to kill someone in the real world, and is using virtual killing to assuage and fulfill that desire, that killing does become immoral and problematic, to say the least. But most players in Wow don’t have that quality, and as long as they keep their game desires confined to the game, they have should have no moral worries.
However, what is the point of raping someone in a game? Only to get off on it. Raping something in a game appeals to a real lust in a person’s body, and so it has a number of moral objections to it, most from my evil Christian morality, that the modern moral relativist has no comprehension of. I am no hypocrite when I object to this but don’t object to flinging someone around with Death Field in Knights of the Old Republic II, as long as that person keeps that pleasure confined to its place. Suffice it to say, raping someone in a game is evil because it consistently has real, perverse consequences in a person’s mind in the real world, one way or another, whereas killing in a game, for the most part, does not.
To sum up, torture is a tool, one that can be used for good and evil depending on the methods and intents, like all other tools, and all actions done in a video game can and most oftentimes are neutral if they are done with mental responsibility, i.e., keeping your actions and emotions concerning that game in their proper place. This is the reason why no moral flag comes up in my mind when fighting at Black Mesa or killing Forsaken* in the Howling Fjord. I know where morals lie and what they are.
If you’re going to have any discussion on morality, you’d best know the same.
) have a longer workweek and fewer holidays than those east of the Atlantic. The Europeans have more time. Anyone with more time will, in the long run, beat someone at any activity. The pianist that plays for 8 hours a day will always be better than the one that plays for one, even if they have equal talent.
