Extraterrestrial Ethics

A bewildering variety of ethical-moral systems have been devised by humans and human societies on this planet. The Golden Rule, which appears in the teachings of most of the world’s major faiths, and the Ten Commandments of the Mosaic tradition are prime examples of traditional religion-based ethics. Buddhist moral teachings involve a code of behavior known as the Noble Eightfold Path, consisting of understanding, right-mindedness, careful speech, moral action, sane living, steadfast effort, attentiveness, and concentration. Confucius insisted, alternatively, that a superior man has nine aims: To see clearly, to understand what he hears, to be warm in manner, dignified in bearing, faithful in speech, painstaking at work, to ask when in doubt, in anger to think of difficulties, in sight of gain to remember right.

The Navaho people traditionally adhere to five basic canons of ethical behavior:

1. Security -- health, long life, and industry are primary goals of life.

2. Decorum -- sobriety, self-control, and adherence to custom are valued.

3. Reciprocity -- care for parents in old age to repay them for their parentage; loyalty and altruism among relatives.

4. Benevolence -- behave to everybody as if they were your relatives, a broad ethical generalization including hospitality and other forms of generosity.

5. Avoid Excess -- excess, even in approved behaviors, is evil.³⁰³⁹

Many ethical systems seem "wrong" by Western standards, as for instance the old Eskimo belief that geronticide (allowing the aged to die) was moral. Still stranger perhaps are the Ik, a human tribe inhabiting northern Uganda which displays no love.Under conditions of extreme privation, the society has adopted an every-man-for-himself ethic.Children are turned out to scrounge their own food almost as soon as they can walk. Wives go out in search of food and feed themselves, bringing nothing back for their starving husbands. One observer reported that in two years he never saw one act that could even remotely be construed as love.²⁹¹⁷

There have been few real attempts to forge a general theory of moral systems in keeping with the spirit of ethical relativism urged by cultural anthropologists having field experience in dealing with "alien" cultures.³⁰⁴⁰ One notable exception is the taxonomy of moral judgement devised by Harvard social psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg in relation to the development of ethical standards of behavior among human children.^3024,865 Kohlberg recorded and classified verbal responses to specific moral dilemmas. These he used to define six sequential stages of ethical reasoning through which people may pass during their mental maturation. Typically, the child moves from primary dependence on external controls to increasingly sophisticated internalized standards. Kohlberg used 25 different "dimensions of morality" to characterize each of the six stages of ethical maturity, two of which are given in the table on the following page. Sentient beings on other worlds, given a basically human mentality, might be expected to pass through similar stages of moral judgement -- or to stress any particular one of them.

Some anthropologists hold that there exist a number of universal issues upon which any society must take a value position. In developing this approach, Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodbeck discovered that most societies have a dominant worldview along five major dimensions of value orientation.³⁰⁷⁰ In theory, claim the anthropologists, we should be able to characterize the value system of any society in terms of its position on each of the five issues (Table 22.1). A more refined system will be needed, however, before this approach profitably may be applied to extra terrestrial cultures.

However, the above generalizations may be hopelessly anthropocentric in the extreme. As E.O. Wilson notes:

Self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions -- hate, love, guilt, fear, and others -- that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.⁵⁶⁵

ETs having different kinds of sentience and alternative modes of emotionality will undoubtedly also differ from us considerably in their ethics. The hive mentality of a genetic sentient, for instance, could not recognize any morality of individual behavior because such behavior is not subject to individual choice (it is preprogrammed genetically).⁹⁷⁴ A neocortical alien, freed from the shackles of hormonal emotionality, might develop a coldly rational but highly complex system of situational ethics in which summed probabilities of success would be balanced against danger in a kind of calculus of personal gain. Intelligent but extremely solitary creatures such as sentient octopuses might harbor no ethical notions of truth or reciprocity, never having had seriously to deal with other beings of their own kind on a social basis. Theirs may be a perfect libertarian, "love thyself, help thyself" morality. Another society of creatures having an excess of female births may permit infanticide or uxoricide (wife-killing) as a dominant component of the local ethos.³⁰⁹⁶ In still another culture, cannibalism may be biologically necessary for the survival of the race, elevating murder or suicide to the stature of deeply moral behavior.^2948,3238 Yet it is probably true that the ethicality of each sentient race is in some sense hostage to the biological, ecological, and psychological heritage of the species (Table 22.2).^3051,565

But perhaps a "universal" system of ethics can be imagined. A few xenologists openly have speculated that a fully generalized and universally applicable moral code may have to be based upon negentropic principles inherent in all biological, intellectual, and sociocultural processes in the cosmos^1532,2617 This viewpoint leads to what the author would like to call thermodynamic ethics.

From a thermodynamic standpoint, both life and culture may be viewed as highly improbable states of matter which absorb information from the environment in order to build internal complexity. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, such processes are permissible if an energy flow may be established. Consumption of negentropy is the major activity of all lifeforms. Absorption of entropy (randomness, disorder, loss of information) is the very antithesis of life. Dr. Ernst Fasan, a well-known international jurist, suggests that the ultimate immoral act is for one sentient being to "inflict entropy" upon another.³⁷² Robert B. Lindsay, a physicist, has proposed a generalized ethical rule which he terms the Thermodynamic Imperative:

All men should fight always as vigorously as possible to in crease the degree of order in their environment, and to consume as much entropy as possible.³⁰¹³

Thermodynamic ethics dovetails comfortably with many cherished ideals of virtuous conduct. For example, lying is immoral because it results in the assimilation of useless or erroneous data by another. Sloth is "evil," since it contributes no negentropy to the universe. Murder is wrong, unless its commission prevents more severe entropic disturbances elsewhere in the system (e.g., prevents a mass murder or terrorist action). Motherhood is "good" in low-density societies, because each individual born augments the negentropic biological mission. In high-population environments, however, motherhood may not be "good," because the presence of too many individuals tends to break down the social system and destroy stored cultural information.

The general theory of thermodynamic ethics permits xenologists to make one further prediction. Civilizations at higher cultural scales control more energy than lower cultures. More energy means that more entropy can be consumed. It therefore follows that energy-rich societies can afford more comprehensive and complex systems of morality and law. In short, though they may not choose to do so, Type II civilizations can afford "higher" ethics than Type I cultures.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 898