The Role of Stories in the Ethics of Virtual Worlds

In a previous post, I cited Marshall McLuhan's famous, and yet apocryphal quote "looking to the past to understand the future is like driving by looking in the rear view mirror." A rapidly changing technological base creates a path into the future with a lot of twists and turns, in which the future comes at us with increasing rapidity. The question is - how do we get a headlight into the future that will allow us to look forward instead of backwards in order to make decisions about what we need to do. The answer, I believe, is stories. Stories provide a headlight into the future, a way to explore possible worlds and possible outcomes.

My favorite example of this kind of story is Micheal Crichton's Jurassic Park. This cautionary tale is an attempt to explore the ethics of bio technology in a narrative form. Crichton's argument is that if you have unregulated bio tech research and have scientists working primarily for profit or fame, then all hell will break loose and nature will strike back at you. This book is a masterpiece of writing technique and makes a compelling narrative argument. But, it is only one possible narrative argument.

I teach a class in writing stories to explore the ethcis of technology, and, in this class, I have students find a flaw in Crichton's argument and provide a narrative alternative. Consider, for a moment, some of the stories that have swayed public thinking in a major way. These include: The Jungle, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hard Times and Frankenstein; just to name a few. Each of these stories has presented one single narrative argument, one possible world. What we really need is to have authors take on more sides of the argument and allow us to see a variety of possible worlds.

In the same way that scientific debates lead to a better understanding of what is true, narrative debates can allow us to acheive a better understanding of what is good or what is desirable. And, here we are back to writing again. In Plato's Republic, he dismissed the poets to focus on rationality. Perhaps, now, in the 21st century, we will realise that rationality isn't everything and invite the poets back in.