Self-Awareness, Morality, Elephants, and the Prime Directive
This morning, jaylake posted a link to a Centauri Dreams blog entry that discusses the philosophy of Star Trek's Prime Directive and then extrapolates more nuanced principles that might be more effective, more practical, and more ethical than the broad concepts that Trek put forth. (Go read it; I'll wait. It's fascinating.)
I generally believe that humans live on a planet full of aliens. Every encounter with a species not homo sapiens is an encounter with the Other in some way. I think that people tend to forget this because we live with some aliens so very intimately (dogs, cats, and so on). We also objectify them to make them feel less unfamiliar (we put them in zoos, treat them as performing toys, and so on).
I found myself distracted about halfway through the blog post by the implications of the tests for intelligence, mainly because some creatures we treat as animals actually pass this test (elephants have demonstrated a moral code and self-awareness both in and out of clinical environments) and yet we do not treat them with the precepts being discussed in this article. Is this because they do not display the trappings of what we recognize as civilization (culture, technology, and so forth)? Is it because we're so used to thinking of them as animals, in other words, not equal in worth or consideration to humans by any definition we might consider, that any other categorization is impossible? By the time I got to the sentence where the author says "...the ethical concepts embedded here may be profoundly anthropocentric..." (emphasis mine), I actually laughed out loud about the amount of time it had taken him to get to that idea--the author's assumption of privilege is automatic. The idea that a defined system of respect is owed to one category of creatures but not another just irritated me. I got so riled it was hard for me to finish reading the article.*
One of the assumptions being made in this piece--but not addressed by it--is that once a new Prime Directive or code of metalaw is in place, all members of a species will abide by it. This assumes an equal level of affluence, education, and privilege across an entire world, which is a beautiful idea but practically impossible. Current events demonstrate its impossibility; witness the Kenyan Wildlife Services' efforts to stem poaching. They'll be busy as long as there are people who are poor and are willing to supply bush meat and ivory to rich people.
Furthermore, how do we treat an alien race until we determine it's worthy of the treatment being encoded in these ideas? Do they merit an automatically assumed respect or do they become objects, the same way we treat elephants? Do we kill them and eat them for lunch until we suddenly discover a moral code and self-awareness (and how do we determine the existence of a moral code and self-awareness if we're treating them like objects)? We do it here and now. Plenty of people eat cetaceans. Primates are still treated like clever, uneducated children or, more tragically, like abundant natural resources to be used up and tossed away. We're kind to dogs and cats, but some of that is evolutionary: with their neotenized appearance, they have evolved to take advantage of the human attraction to cuteness.
We've got a longer way to go on this concept of systematized, defined respect than the author--or most of those who argue about it--are willing to concede. If we can't treat the aliens we meet every day (or the astonishing mega-fauna that we both idolize and hunt to extinction) with the consideration espoused by either the classic Prime Directive or this more nuanced approach, how will we treat true aliens upon meeting them? Theory is nice; practice is nigh on to impossible--and it makes me furious. I find that the older I get, the more skeptical I become of the possibility that we can achieve the ideals we try to espouse, which makes me sad. I find that, instead of giving in to despair, my sometime solution is to try to approach all of these human aspirations with a cautious optimism: hoping for the best but being aware that we fail more than we succeed. (It's a sometime solution because I find myself angry about this issue often and only occasionally remember that we're getting better about intraspecies respect year by year.) The very fact that we have these discussions, that the ideas of a more nuanced approach can be developed at all is a goodness, of course. We may yet achieve at least some of what we strive for. At any rate, furious and skeptical and wildly frustrated, I nevertheless hope so.
* I concede that my passion probably gets in the way of some of my thoughts about this issue. I know that sometimes I get into such a state that there's a point at which my feelings matter more to me than rational consideration, and this is a problem. I also note for the record that I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan; I fully admit to my own evolutionary desire for meat and animal products. I don't think that this constitutes complete hypocrisy--if cows demonstrated self-awareness in the way that elephants do, I might feel differently. Pig intelligence makes me uncomfortable about eating pork and bacon. Yes, there are problems here; no one said this wasn't complex and challenging. Still, I'm trying to think all of this through with some shred of objectivity....
I generally believe that humans live on a planet full of aliens. Every encounter with a species not homo sapiens is an encounter with the Other in some way. I think that people tend to forget this because we live with some aliens so very intimately (dogs, cats, and so on). We also objectify them to make them feel less unfamiliar (we put them in zoos, treat them as performing toys, and so on).
I found myself distracted about halfway through the blog post by the implications of the tests for intelligence, mainly because some creatures we treat as animals actually pass this test (elephants have demonstrated a moral code and self-awareness both in and out of clinical environments) and yet we do not treat them with the precepts being discussed in this article. Is this because they do not display the trappings of what we recognize as civilization (culture, technology, and so forth)? Is it because we're so used to thinking of them as animals, in other words, not equal in worth or consideration to humans by any definition we might consider, that any other categorization is impossible? By the time I got to the sentence where the author says "...the ethical concepts embedded here may be profoundly anthropocentric..." (emphasis mine), I actually laughed out loud about the amount of time it had taken him to get to that idea--the author's assumption of privilege is automatic. The idea that a defined system of respect is owed to one category of creatures but not another just irritated me. I got so riled it was hard for me to finish reading the article.*
One of the assumptions being made in this piece--but not addressed by it--is that once a new Prime Directive or code of metalaw is in place, all members of a species will abide by it. This assumes an equal level of affluence, education, and privilege across an entire world, which is a beautiful idea but practically impossible. Current events demonstrate its impossibility; witness the Kenyan Wildlife Services' efforts to stem poaching. They'll be busy as long as there are people who are poor and are willing to supply bush meat and ivory to rich people.
Furthermore, how do we treat an alien race until we determine it's worthy of the treatment being encoded in these ideas? Do they merit an automatically assumed respect or do they become objects, the same way we treat elephants? Do we kill them and eat them for lunch until we suddenly discover a moral code and self-awareness (and how do we determine the existence of a moral code and self-awareness if we're treating them like objects)? We do it here and now. Plenty of people eat cetaceans. Primates are still treated like clever, uneducated children or, more tragically, like abundant natural resources to be used up and tossed away. We're kind to dogs and cats, but some of that is evolutionary: with their neotenized appearance, they have evolved to take advantage of the human attraction to cuteness.
We've got a longer way to go on this concept of systematized, defined respect than the author--or most of those who argue about it--are willing to concede. If we can't treat the aliens we meet every day (or the astonishing mega-fauna that we both idolize and hunt to extinction) with the consideration espoused by either the classic Prime Directive or this more nuanced approach, how will we treat true aliens upon meeting them? Theory is nice; practice is nigh on to impossible--and it makes me furious. I find that the older I get, the more skeptical I become of the possibility that we can achieve the ideals we try to espouse, which makes me sad. I find that, instead of giving in to despair, my sometime solution is to try to approach all of these human aspirations with a cautious optimism: hoping for the best but being aware that we fail more than we succeed. (It's a sometime solution because I find myself angry about this issue often and only occasionally remember that we're getting better about intraspecies respect year by year.) The very fact that we have these discussions, that the ideas of a more nuanced approach can be developed at all is a goodness, of course. We may yet achieve at least some of what we strive for. At any rate, furious and skeptical and wildly frustrated, I nevertheless hope so.
* I concede that my passion probably gets in the way of some of my thoughts about this issue. I know that sometimes I get into such a state that there's a point at which my feelings matter more to me than rational consideration, and this is a problem. I also note for the record that I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan; I fully admit to my own evolutionary desire for meat and animal products. I don't think that this constitutes complete hypocrisy--if cows demonstrated self-awareness in the way that elephants do, I might feel differently. Pig intelligence makes me uncomfortable about eating pork and bacon. Yes, there are problems here; no one said this wasn't complex and challenging. Still, I'm trying to think all of this through with some shred of objectivity....