Kant’s justification is perhaps intellectually unpalatable to modern animal-rights advocates, but it is consistent with his radically anthropocentric ethical theory.
Kant gave a short philosophical exegesis, recorded in the Lectures on Ethics, in which he questioned how the ethical person can justify kindness to animals when most ethical theory places humans at their center because of the importance of human agency and self-awareness to ethics. Kant was concerned with how humans, as autonomous, rational beings, are not synonymous with objects and must be respected as subjects instead. Kant argued in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals that morality is fundamentally rooted in the idea that one should view our treatment of others as not merely a means to our own ends, but as an a means of advancing the greater ends of humanity itself. For our purposes, we turn to Kant’s innovations in ethics. Kant was a prodigious thinker, influencing theology, epistemology, and the Enlightenment. However, Undertale stands apart from those games because it raises a unique philosophical question.Ī bit of philosophical history: Immanuel Kant lived and did his work in the Prussian city of Königsberg in Preußen during the latter portion of the 18th century. Even 1999’s Omikron: the Nomad Soul attempted to bring the player- qua-player into the world of the game. Games like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide are recent examples of games interested in “playing with the player”. This isn’t to say that Undertale was the first video game to include a narrative. Undertale, the recent game by Toby Fox, set off a storm of interest in the idea of the “metanarrative”: a narrative that raises questions about a game’s inner structure and the role of the player in that structure.
This essay contains spoilers for Undertale
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