Jesse M. — May 2, 2008 at 6:16 pm

Your argument mostly seems to focus on the possibility that while aliens might be recognizably “intelligent” in certain ways, they might be extremely inhuman in others–all the sci-fi aliens you mention seem utterly lacking in companionable, friendly emotions like love and affection, which of course makes it harder for us to feel empathy for them, but which also seems pretty unrealistic for a social species. So to avoid stacking the deck against them, please imagine an alien species which really are pretty similar to humans in all broad mental features, including emotional ones. Alternatively, since you mention “rational animals like dolphins”, you could imagine animals such as dolphins which have been genetically engineered to have capabilities for language and thought similar to humans–you might argue that such genetic engineering is itself unethical, but if it was already a fait accompli, would you really argue that these beings would not deserve the same basic rights as people, or disagree that it would be unethical to enslave them or hunt them for food? Another science fiction possibility which might actually have a fair likelihood of being realized within this century is mind uploading, where an actual human brain is mapped and simulated at a microscopic level on a computer–such a being would not be biologically human, but if the technique was successful it would have a normal human personality, memories, and identity. Again, would you argue that this being would not be deserving of the same rights as humans, or that we would not owe the same ethical duties to it that we owe to humans?

For that reason, the argument I’d make against the white supremacist is that his conception of moral duty isn’t a real human ethics, precisely because it doesn’t take the human as its category of ethical analysis.

But here you haven’t attempted to argue for the notion that biological humanness should is itself an ethically significant category, you’re just asserting it. If I argue that the real significant category is something like “self-aware sentience”, and that humans owe their special ethical status to being members of this category rather than to their genetics, then I can similarly dismiss your conception of moral duty as “not a real self-aware sentient being ethics” because you don’t take self-aware sentient beings as your category of ethical analysis. You might say that you aren’t trying to have a “real self-aware sentient being ethics”, because you think we owe moral duties to humans that we don’t owe to other self-aware sentient beings, but of course the white supremacist could also say he isn’t trying to have a “real human ethics”, and argue that he owes moral duties to white people that he doesn’t owe to other races. You could appeal to moral intuitions that there is something inherently wrong about causing suffering to other humans, or exploiting them in the way we exploit animals, even if they aren’t members of your own race; but I think most people would feel the same moral intuitions about the hypothetical beings I describe above if they could actually meet a real-life example of such a being and have conversations with them, form friendships with them, and so forth.

James Poulos — May 2, 2008 at 6:32 pm

You give the game away by needing to hypothesize aliens who are so human-like that it makes us, has humans, uncomfortable to think of them as not at all human. If you want to propose that the ethics of we humans shouldn’t have anything to do with our being human — even though it should apparently have lots to do with generalizable human characteristics — I don’t see how you’re in any different boat than I am when it comes to making assertions. Bottom line is I think my human-ethics argument is about a zillion times stronger than the white supremacist’s argument, and I think this is so not only because we can tell reasonably persuasive stories about WHY this is so, but because such stories have actually persuasively been told through reason over the real course of human history. And I daresay that, as much as it might be reasonable to feel weird about torturing a computer that we’ve engineered to be ALMOST like a human but just not quite, it’d be even weirder to build that computer, which is about as horrible an idea as I can think of, not least because it makes a total hash of the ethics of REAL HUMANS, which I suppose I propose must anchor any REAL HUMAN ethics. It’s possible that one day we’ll discover a race of aliens which is so like us that treating them unlike humans creates major ethical problems for us. If so, they’ll be — I wager — humans themselves. If not, no one, including them, will be able to tell.

Jesse M. — May 2, 2008 at 7:13 pm

You give the game away by needing to hypothesize aliens who are so human-like that it makes us, has humans, uncomfortable to think of them as not at all human.

“So” human-like? All I said is that they wouldn’t be lacking in warm, friendly, social emotions. Given that such emotions seem to have arisen independently in different lineages of large-brained social animals on Earth–look at smart birds like parrots, whose last common ancestor with us would have been a much more antisocial reptile–I think it’s actually more implausible than not to suggest an alien civilization would be completely lacking in such emotions. Watch the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (or perhaps just the ‘Entertaining Parrots’ segment here) and see if you find parrots significantly more “alien” than smart nonhuman mammal species like monkeys.

In any case, my argument wasn’t meant to be based specifically on aliens, it was just a general argument about the inadequacy of using DNA as a basis for humanity’s special place in the ethical cosmos. The other thought-experiments, like mind uploading, work just as well for this purpose. You call mind uploading a “horrible idea”, but you don’t actually address what you think our ethical response should be if uploads already existed (and there are plenty of people in transhumanist circles who would like to be uploaded themselves, so if the technology exists I think it’s pretty likely to happen). Putting REAL HUMANS in caps doesn’t help me understand why this category should be central to a good ethical system. And you say “I don’t see how you’re in any different boat than I am when it comes to making assertions”, but I think I am in a different boat–I’m appealing to what I think our ethical intuitions would actually be if such beings existed, while you’re basically refusing to deal with the possibility, and perhaps implying that we should intentionally suppress whatever natural empathy we might feel for such beings for the sake of not muddying the waters of “human ethics”. I think any ethical system worth its salt should be able to deal with the complexity of arbitrary real-world situations, and not create arbitrary boundaries just because it’s easier for us to make decisions when we have nicely-defined boundaries. And as I said before, I also think a good ethical system should have a “universal” quality, so it could be applicable in any imaginable situation, and not be based on totally contingent features of our history (like the fact that there are no other branches of the hominid family tree still kicking around anywhere on Earth).

It’s possible that one day we’ll discover a race of aliens which is so like us that treating them unlike humans creates major ethical problems for us. If so, they’ll be — I wager — humans themselves.

“Humans themselves”? Should I take this to mean you don’t believe in evolution? Surely the chance that natural evolutionary processes would produce genetically identical beings on another planet is like a googolplex to one.