If you make enough donations to a local church or provide enough purified water to ailing settlers, then you can still have very good karma despite being a mass murderer. But here’s the catch: since the amount of negative karma you earn is finite, enough good deeds can totally erase whatever ill effects this has on your moral character. As you might expect, you gain a massive amount of negative karma from engaging in such a heinous act. Your moral character is determined by how these deeds add up a positive balance results in good character, and a negative balance results in bad character.Įarly in Fallout 3, you can detonate a nuclear bomb located in a large settlement that results in the deaths of (at least) dozens of innocent people. This game employs a karma system where performing a good deed (e.g., helping someone in need, defeating malicious people or creatures) earns you positive karma and where performing a bad deed (e.g., stealing, killing an innocent person) earns you negative karma. To illustrate the problem, consider a well-known example from the popular video game Fallout 3.

Aggregating good deeds and bad deeds reduces being a morally good person to a numbers game, and that doesn’t seem like the right move. There are some reasons to be skeptical of this understanding of moral character. And presumably, his decision to join the ZPD at the end of the film is at least in part motivated by a desire to make the city a little safer. In one instance, when he and Judy are fleeing from Manchas, he takes a moment to open the sky tram door and yells to Judy, “Get in.” In other words, he briefly halts his own escape on Judy’s behalf – behavior that seems indicative of a morally good disposition. The most obvious is that he plays a vital role in uncovering the conspiracy against predators, but he has some other virtuous moments tucked away in the film as well. And to be fair, there’s definitely some evidence that could lead a person to this conclusion. One of the most interesting discoveries from teaching Zootopia is that my students almost universally thought that Nick was, at his core, morally good.

It’s easy to think that he’s a decent fox just trying to get by in a city that won’t cut him a break. Nick’s circumstances become even more understandable when we get some insight into how he was as a kid and how he was discouraged by others from trying to be an upstanding citizen. Moreover, he appears to have the proper permits for his activities, and his worldview seems more realistic than Judy’s naive optimism. Even when we first meet him and observe the duplicitous nature of his business practices, his charisma and wit compel us to downplay whatever moral reservations we may have about him. Let’s start with an obvious observation: it’s hard not to like Nick Wilde.

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