Main Character Syndrome

October 21, 2024

a person taking a selfie

(Aeon) – While Chalmers’s p-zombie is a part of a philosophical hypothetical concerned with the nature of mind and consciousness, the non-philosophical take on people as NPCs is deeply morally worrying. Having taught and written for a number of years in the areas of ethics and moral psychology, one of the central ideas that I have tried to explain and make more vivid is that morality is something that we do together, that our ideas about who we are require each other’s engaged participation, and that an empathetic openness not only to each other’s moral agency, but to each other’s emotional states, is central to our shared lifeworld. We must see others as fully human, and be engaged with each other as moral beings to understand who we are, and who we are in relation to others and to the world. (Read More)