Abstract:

According to cognitive psychology, human thinking can be intuitive and reflective. Both of these modes of thinking have advantages but also disadvantages – respectively depending on the context they are used in. The intuitive thinking is fast and effortless but vague. The reflective thinking is slower but therefore more careful in its judgements (Kahneman 2011). But since “laziness is built deep in our nature” (Kahneman 2011, 35), humans in most situations use their intuitive thinking. This even counts for contexts in which reason and therefore reflective thinking is seen as most important, e.g. philosophy (Brosow 2018). For example, in moral dilemma situations, humans tend to have their answer relatively fast and justify them afterwards (Haidt 2001).

With this in mind and due to the inherent properties of immersion and presence (Slater 2003), VR games have the potential to make the stories more realistic for the players. By this we mean that the players’ response to moral dilemmas presented in them is closer to their real-life reaction than it would be if the moral dilemma is presented in, for example, a written text (Rovira et al. 2009) since VR games can create ideal conditions for intuitive reactions by implementing time pressure (Suter and Hertwig 2011). This potential can be used in philosophical-ethical learning contexts. Frank Brosows (2020) TRAP-Mind-Theory can be used to show how intuitive thinking is the starting point for philosophical reasoning and how one can come from the first to the latter.

Our claim is therefore that VR games offer an ideal introduction to moral dilemma discourses in philosophical-ethical learning contexts to practice philosophizing with the students since they strongly provoke intuitions that can be reflected on.

The article therefore deals with the question of how VR can promote the ability to philosophize about ethical problems. In addition to general considerations of mediation, it also goes into how moral dilemmas must be implemented in VR games to be useful for dilemma discussions. By this, we hope to create a framework that can be used for developing VR-based computer games that deal with moral dilemmas.

References:
[1] Brosow, Frank (2018): „Zur Relevanz kognitiver Verzerrungen für die Didaktik der Philosophie und Ethik“, in: Bettina Bussmann / Markus Tiedemann (Hg.): Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft. Jahrbuch für Didaktik der Philosophie und Ethik 19 (2018), Dresden 2019, 57-80.
[2] Brosow, Frank (2020): „TRAP-Mind-Theory. Philosophizing as an Educational Process“, in: Journal of Didactics of Philosophy IV, 14-33. URL: www.philosophie.ch/jdph.
[3] Haidt, Jonathan (2001): The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. In: Psychological Review, vol. 108, no. 4, 814-834.
[4] Kahneman, Daniel (2011), Thinking fast and slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[5] Renata S. Suter, Ralph Hertwig (2011): Time and moral judgment. Cognition, Volume 119, Issue 3,454-458.
[6] Rovira, Aitor; Swapp, David; Spalang, Bernhard and Mel Slater (2009) The use of virtual reality in the study of people’s responses to violent incidents. Front. Behav. Neuroscience, Volume 3, Article 59.
[7] Slater, Mel (2003) A note on presence terminology. Presence connect 3.3. 1-5.

Keywords:

Philosophizing, virtual reality, intuition, TRAP-Mind-Theory, moral dilemmas, ethics.