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.

A photograph of my grandfather is not my grandfather. It has no feelings and cannot be hurt. It is merely a glossy piece of paper that visually resembles my grandfather. Now, imagine that I burn the photograph. Does my burning the photograph mean anything? In one sense, you might think not. There is nothing morally wrong with burning glossy pieces of paper. And I might have some understandable and morally innocent reason to burn the photograph. Suppose I decide to simplify my life, to get rid of all the stuff cluttering my house packed away in boxes that I never open. I am not a sentimental person after all. So, after binge-watching hours of Marie Kondo, I decide it’s time to get rid of my boxes of old photographs by burning them. It is a purely pragmatic decision to declutter my life. This seems fine because I am merely thinking of the photograph as an image—just another photo tucked away in a box. 

However, if my reasons for burning the photograph are directed instead toward the subject of the photograph, then something more is going on. Suppose that I harbor some malicious and vindictive animosity toward my grandfather. In this case, my burning of his photograph is potent with meaning. I am not just burning any old photograph, rather it is him that I am fictionally burning. But, why do I want to burn his photograph? What are my reasons for defacing his image? Is my animosity toward my grandfather justified? Was he worthy of such animosity? Or am I being unreasonably malicious?