This Christmas, my parents definitely surprised me by giving me a Playstation 3, something I had neither asked for nor expected. I was very thankful, but a little surprised by the selection of games that accompanied it: Skyrim, Borderlands 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops II. All of them were rated R particularly for graphic violence (Borderlands 2's cover is a man in a bloody, eyeless mask pretended to shoot himself in the head- ironically, it's one of my favorite games for the sardonic interpretation of the meaningless of violence, but that might be me reading into it a bit :).
Call of Duty, however, was by far the most graphic and violent of the three games, not only because of the knifing but because of its stark realism, rather than the almost cartoonish style of Borderlands. But I digress. One of the intriguing aspects of the game was the multiple endings available to the player based on a few decisions you made, all of which seemed to be unconnected to the actual decision (I read about all the endings on wikipedia after I finished the game and was thoroughly disappointed). For instance, if you choose to shoot a man in the head or in the chest, he'll either die or come back at the very end. If you choose to shoot a different man in the head or the knee, he'll either die and sink with the ship or the Chinese air force will come to his aid and he'll survive. Did I mention it was violent?
The most gratuitous, however, was a decision you had to make as a mole in a terrorist organization. The leader, the villain of the story, forces you to kill a captured soldier, one of the main characters in the plot line. As the mole, you can either kill the soldier or try to shoot the leader (you fail if you do). But get this: if you try to shoot the leader, a cyber attack will be unleashed at the end of the game, the leader will escape from prison, and snap the neck of an old soldier in a wheelchair. As I read this on wikipedia, I was instantly regretting my decision to not kill the captured soldier, but later thought better of the decision, considering the limits of my knowledge.
To be cliche, hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to see after the facts the outcome of a decision and realize that things would have been different if you had chosen otherwise. This is the foundation of wisdom and repentance But we cannot hold ourselves accountable to something that we couldn't have known. When reading or watching a murder mystery again, it's easy to point out and read into the story who the culprit really is- but it fails to treat the first time viewer fairly, who could never have been expected to know the ending. Likewise with the Bible, it's easy to think that some of its characters are idiots and completely lack faith (some did, much as we do). But that's because we know the ending of the story- they didn't.
In my ethics class this past semester, we talked extensively about consequentialism, an ethical theory that suggests that an action is morally right or wrong based on its outcome. It's an attractive theory in many ways, including our intuition that we should try to do the most good that we can. Consequentialist theories all suffer some issues, but I think the crucial issue is this: we're not in a position to know the outcome of our actions. True, we can reasonably assume certain outcomes and should be held accountable if we do something foolish even with good intentions, but we really don't know the full ramifications of any given action; we know that dropping a pebble in water will cause a splash, but we don't know where the ripples end. We can't know the full consequences of our actions. God does.
I think that we can't always see why a particular action is good, or why, when God gives revelation to a person, telling them to do something absurd, that action will (ultimately) end well. But we're not in a position to know that, and we have to believe God. Faith is a fundamental aspect of the moral life, because we are not the ultimate moral arbiters of the universe. And thus, even though my choice had a terrible outcome, I shouldn't have shot the captured soldier in Call of Duty.
(I personally think that a version of virtue ethics is probably the best way of looking at Christian ethics, but that's another story :)
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