Utilitarianism, from College to Arcade Games and Jobs
One day back in 2016, when I was at the Playdium Amusement Centre outside Mississauga’s Square One, something quite interesting happened. I was finishing off playing Namco’s Time Crisis 3, an arcade game made in 2002, when just a few seconds before the credits screen came to an end, the screen went black and went to the Mode Select screen, erasing my current score. I think it was about 1.24 million points.
When I looked around to see what was going on, I noticed that there was a very young child holding the blue gun of the arcade cabinet towards my right. A video game enthusiast or someone who wanted to get a strong score would probably overreact and start screaming, bothering that child. But for me, I actually kept my cool as much as possible, because I know that the child was so excited into this to try it out for themselves.
Thinking upon the idea where something a bit valuable to myself be ruined by the needs or wants of a child reminds me of this example that Peter Singer, a philosopher behind utilitarianism. He describes in this example, a child is drowning in the middle of a lake. An individual dressed up in business clothes and shoes worth $500 is walking by the lake and notices the child not being able to swim. They are then faced with an ethical dilemma of whether to keep on walking and save up the value of those shoes but have the child die, or to go save the child by swimming, but risk having their shoes be ruined by water, mud, and so on.
Utilitarianism, based on what I’ve learned in my past courses, and in my own words, is an ethical theory that focuses on the consequences of a group of people from one’s actions. For instance, if I am running a conference on supporting rights for the LGBTQ+ community, by practicing my speeches and deliveries, I am imposing a consequence where my audience will listen to the context and look at the big picture of what I’m saying. With this, they would share ideas on the messages I’m delivering instead of my method of delivery itself.
I originally learned this in detail back in the fall of 2012 when I was taking a humanities course at Champlain College Saint-Lambert. We were looking at different humanities perspectives. One of them was on civil disobedience. Another was existentialism innovated by Jean-Paul Sartre. We even took a look at the story of Nelson Mandela being detained on Robben Island in the 1960s, as well as the philosophy of Desmond Tutu. We also watched an experiment Jane Elliot done in the 1960s after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to show children what discrimination was like and how that affected the outcome when the roles of discrimination were reversed.
Regarding the scenario I described, I didn’t actually expect that to happen. I didn’t really think in the past about a possible scenario that this can be raised, but Peter Singer was mentioned again in the fall of 2013 when I was taking my last humanities course in college regarding ethical behavior. Personally, I thought it was really cool and interesting to understand it. Nevertheless, it was actually raised up again in one of my professional development courses back in 2015, during my first internship at the Conrad Centre.
It was only until my internship at IBM Canada that utilitarianism is actually so important within a job in a company. In one moment where I was on idle time, I was continuing through a course in one of IBM’s proprietary education tools, and learned certain philosophies that do influence the conduct of employees. A couple of ethical theories were risen that seem to make a strong impact to how we engage in work, which are deontology [an ethical theory where the actions of people are based on duties and obligations, such as laws and standards] and utilitarianism, of course.
What it basically says is, by basing my actions on utilitarianism most, or all, of the time in a job, I am making a strong influence on not just myself, but to the department or the company as a whole. Of course, multiple factors do come into play to how either the means justify the ends, as my original college instructor taught us once, or the ends justify the means. But I think the overall idea is more about identifying the goals that I want to reach to determine how I should take my actions, or what would the result be like when I commit this action.
Knowing that a company itself is a group of people that are working hard to reach some certain goals in regards to its business operations and what they want to do, utilitarianism is the most practical ethical theory to follow as compared to deontology or counterparts such as egoism, cultural relativism, or virtue theory, to name a few.
Let me describe an example to show what I mean. When I worked at The Weather Network over two years ago in Oakville, Ontario, as a QA Developer, my first initial philosophy was egoism. From having frequent meetings and checkups with my boss, my manager, and my counselor, I then realized, “Hmm, I don’t think it’s quite appropriate here.” It did took some time for me to get used to the overall tasks, adjust to my boss’ expectations, and adapt to the corporate culture, but by the end of March, what my boss was hoping to see was coming to light. I was pretty much adaptable to the requirements, and I focused my attention on making sure that the development team got reasonable, accurate feedback from me performing scenario and regression tests.
On the last day of that internship, April 29, 2016, my boss invited me to meet up with the entire web development team. For all of this adjustment and putting myself to follow utilitarianism to help out the entire team, they were so excited and happy on how much of a very helpful impact I made to them in trying to improve and deliver some reasonable updates and features to the existing customer audience The Weather Network had. It was something I didn’t think for once it would happen, but nevertheless, they, and I, felt like I was family with them.
Now, how does this topic of ethics tie in to this scenario I was talking about at first? Basically, when I found out my current score was reset back to 0, I had a thought of overreacting because it took me almost half-an-hour to finish Time Crisis 3. But then I realized that it would not only bother the child, but it would also bother the surrounding people as well, since at the time, so many families came to the Playdium Amusement Centre to play a mix of arcade and redemption games in the dark, with so many lights and effects. So I decided to keep my cool and say to myself, “All I really needed was the fun, not the score,” and moved on.
What ethical theory do you follow while at work? And how does that influence your role and your work-life balance? Utilitarianism does not always work, but a simple arcade game can entail it.
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Until next time, stay fresh!
Gregory P. Desrosiers, UWaterloo Soft. Eng. 2019
© 2018 Gregory Desrosiers
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://selfscroll.com/utilitarianism-from-college-to-arcade-games-and-jobs/
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