Gamer’s de se imaginative resistance: a descriptive–philosophical resolution to the gamer’s dilemma

The Gamer’s Dilemma is a philosophical puzzle concerning an inconsistency between virtual murder and virtual child molestation. Virtual murder is typically regarded as permissible and virtual child molestation as impermissible despite the fact that both acts cause no actual harm given their virtual nature. This puzzle has been approached in two distinct ways: a normative approach, which focuses on the normative properties of virtual wrongdoing itself, and a descriptive approach, which focuses on gamers’ intuitions about such acts. In this paper, I illuminate the latter approach. Although the descriptive approach is often regarded as an empirical or non-philosophical one, I develop a descriptive yet philosophical account of the Gamer’s Dilemma—an account that explains the inconsistency in terms of gamers’ imaginative responses rather than in the normative status of virtual actions. I introduce the notion of de se imaginative resistance and argue that such resistance typically arises in response to virtual child molestation but not to virtual murder, drawing on the distinction between belief-like and value-like imagining.