Symbolic acts of violence are all around us but when we direct a virtual character to commit a heinous crime, or if we rip (or delete) a photograph of someone we hate, our malicious intentions are morally wrong. Our virtual acts of violence are not innocent, writes Christopher Bartel as part of a series with Aesthetics for Birds.

Is it ever morally wrong to commit violent or immoral acts in a video game? Video games are just images, right? No matter what I do in a video game, I am just interacting with images, and harming an image doesn’t cause any real-world harm. So, all of my actions in games must be morally neutral. This is a perfectly reasonable (and common) line of thought. But I think it’s wrong. Here’s why.

Forget about video games for a moment. Let me ask you a different question: is it ever morally wrong to harm a photograph? Photographs are just glossy pieces of paper that share a visual resemblance to people, places, and things. Like video games, photographs are just images.

But it can be morally wrong to harm a photograph. Imagine that a white supremacist burns a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. Or imagine someone burning a photo of the Pope, or of the Queen of England. Are these actions really morally neutral? I don’t think they are (which I’ve argued for here and here). How we behave toward inanimate objects is not accidental. We have our reasons and our reasons can be morally problematic. 

How we behave toward inanimate objects is not accidental. We have our reasons and our reasons can be morally problematic.