It’s not that people are inherently bad. It’s that ethical thinking is hard to do.
We are simple to understand: we avoid unpleasant work and seek out pleasure. Some types of thinking are easier to do because they require less energy and produce more immediate pleasure. Ethical thinking is not so. We should find ways to make ethical problem solving more immediately fun. (That it’s ultimately rewarding is widely accepted.)
Points on a leaderboard or it didn’t happen. We clearly reward people who have the discipline to work on their physical beauty. That’s a good thing: rewarding discipline is an important tradition. We need to round out the definition of working out for beauty’s sake to include mental work outs, from great TV shows to interactive puzzles.
Nintendo’s games for adults strategy has done tremendous good by inserting mental activity back into the public’s idea of health. Expanding such games to include moral teasers would not only be profitable it would also be a public good.
These games don’t have to be abstract. Any simulation game where you go through realistic scenarios according to a different set of conventions can be a moral brain teaser. Currently, most of those scenarios are ones where the player is freed from the convention against murder. That’s not always a bad simulation for people to think their way through.
But these game scenarios could get very complicated, very quickly without leaving legions of thrill-seeking players behind. Every player likes a challenge.