Some scientists think it's quite possible we will soon find evidence of microbial life in the Solar System, if not on Mars, then maybe in the subsurface oceans of a gas giant's icy moon, such as Europa, Enceladus, or Titan. Suppose we do find alien life nearby. Presumably, we wouldn't or shouldn't casually destroy it. Perhaps the same goes for possible future artificial life systems on Earth.
Now you might think that alien microbes would have only instrumental value for human beings. Few people think that Earthly microbes have intrinsic moral standing or moral considerability for their own sake. There's no "microbe rights" movement, and virtually no one feels guilty about taking an antibiotic to fight a bacterial infection. In contrast, human beings have intrinsic moral considerability: Each one of us matters for our own sake, and not merely for the sake of others.
Dogs also matter for their own sake: They can feel pleasure and pain, and we ought not inflict pain on them unnecessarily. Arguably the same holds for all sentient organisms, including lizards, salmon, and lobsters, if they are capable of conscious suffering, as many scientists now think.
But microbes (presumably!) don't have experiences. They aren't conscious. They can't genuinely suffer. Nor do they have the kinds of goals, expectations, social relationships, life plans, or rational agency that we normally associate with being a target of moral concern. If they matter, you might think, they matter only to the extent they are useful for our purposes -- that is, instrumentally or derivatively, in the way that automobiles, video games, and lawns matter. They matter only because they matter to us. Where would be without our gut microbiome?
If so, then you might think that alien microbes would also matter only instrumentally. We would and should value them as a target of scientific curiosity, as proof that life can evolve in alien environments, and because by studying them we might unlock useful future technologies. But we ought not value them for their own sake.
[An artist's conception of life on Europa]
Now in general, I think that viewpoint is mistaken. I am increasingly drawn to the idea that everything that exists, even ordinary rocks, has intrinsic value. But even if you don't agree with me about that, you might hesitate to think we should feel free to extinguish alien microbes if it's in our interest. You might think that if we were to find simple alien life in the oceans of Europa, that life would merit some awe, respect, and preservation, independently of their contribution to human interests.
Environmental ethicists and deep ecologists see value in all living systems, independent of their contribution to human interests -- including in life forms that aren't themselves capable of pleasure or pain. It might seem radical to extend this view to microbes; but when the microbes are the only living forms in an entire ecosystem, as they might be an another planet in the Solar System, the idea of "microbe rights" maybe gains some appeal.
I'm not sure exactly how to argue for this perspective, other than just to invite you to reflect on the matter. Perhaps the distant planet thought experiment will help. Consider a far away planet we will never interact with. Would it be better for it to be a sterile rock or for it to have life? Or consider two possible universes, one containing only a sterile planet and one containing a planet with simple life. Which is the better universe? The planet or universe with life is, I propose, intrinsically better.
So also: The universe is better, richer, more beautiful, more awesome and amazing, if Europa has microbial life beneath its icy crust than if it does not. If we then go and destroy that life, we will have made the universe a worse place. We ought not put the Europan ecosystem at risk without compelling need.
I have been thinking about these issues recently in connection with reflections on the possible moral status of artificial life. Artificial life is life, or at least systems that important ways resemble life, created artificially by human engineers and researchers. I'm drawn to the idea that if alien microbes or alien ecosystems can have intrinsic moral considerability, independent of sentience, suffering, consciousness, or human interests, then perhaps sufficiently sophisticated artificial life systems could also. Someday artificial life researchers might create artificial ecosystems so intricate and awesome that they are the ethical equivalent of an alien ecology, right here on Earth, as worth preserving for their own sake as the microbes of Europa would be.
15 comments:
The Distant Planet thought experiment is an interesting one, because it seems like it might reveal bedrock intuitions. Personally, if you lock down the thought experiment tightly enough (e.g.--not just 'isolated from humans' but 'isolated from all sentient life', the life will never evolve into or come in contact with conscious life, etc.), then I don't share the intuition that a planet with simple life has anything of any kind of value over and above a barren planet.
It seems to me that values are necessarily relational. Nothing is ever 'valuable' simpliciter, things are only 'valuable TO' or 'valuable FOR' someone/something. But for the Distant Planet thought experiment to have the conclusion you want, it seems like the value of life is non-relational. And that strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of what value IS.
Thanks for the comment, Garret! I feel the pull of thinking that value must always be value *for* someone/something that is sentient, but ultimately I don't think that is correct.
I'm sketching up a follow-up blog post that will dive into this issue a bit more. Currently, I lean toward a meta-ethics / theory of value relies on what well informed, intelligent, and social reasoners would be expected to converge on in circumstances favorable to long-run reflection. Such reasoners would, I hypothesize, find value in -- among other things -- complex and informationally rich systems. And they wouldn't (here you would presumably disagree) tend to regard such systems as having only instrumental value for sentient beings. Just as societies will tend to evolve reasoners who aren't wholly selfish, who honestly signal concern for others, so also will societies tend to evolve reasoners who value life, complexity, and the natural world.
This topic has been much on my mind of late, and my conclusion is that the intrinsic property that makes something a moral patient is goals. Life, in general, has the goal of maintaining it’s out of equilibrium existence. When selecting an action to take (or avoid), an agent should take into consideration the goals which will be impacted, and to what extent those goals will be impacted. Finally, these goals should also be be given relative values. So when considering life, the goal of all life on a planet continuing its existence should be evaluated as pretty high, whereas the goal of a single microbe continuing its existence is relatively small.
So Garret’s idea that value is for or to something is correct, and that value is for or to a goal. But this evaluation is subjective. I have to place a value on my goals and a relative value on your goals, but only to the extent of the impact the action I may or may not take has on those goals.
This logic applies pretty straightforwardly to artificial life and robots (same thing?). Most extant robots don’t have a goal to maintain their out of equilibrium existence, but they do have various other goals, and those should be taken into consideration.
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It might be possible to reach a similar end point through a slightly different path. I've thought that Terrence McKenna's novelty theory might carry within it a moral value that we should do what's possible to promote uniqueness. The moral opens possibilities and the immoral diminishes them. It is not so much the intrinsic properties of life and things but it the position of those things with respect to the past, the future, and playing out of possibilities.
Of course, McKenna's theory as written is pseudoscientific hogwash but the idea of the universe existing and evolving to work through all possible forms might have a poetic truth.
Even if we can conclude that microbes on Earth aren’t capable of pleasure or pain, or aren’t conscious at all, I’m not sure we would have grounds to immediately generalize this conclusion to newly discovered alien microbes. Might alien microbes have properties that Earth microbes don’t, even if those properties wouldn’t be immediately apparent to us? As such, I think that even if it’s true that nothing but conscious life is valuable (and like you, I don’t think this is true) destroying a planet of alien microbes would be premature.
Really interesting discussion, and like others, one I have been grappling with. I am inclined to agree with Garrett that values are relational but also that it is a mistake to think this relation should be sentience. That seems mistaken unless we want to rethink what we mean by sentience. It is unclear to me that plants for instance have sentience but it does seem possible to talk about them having interests (in thriving) and maybe even goals? (survival).
I think there's a slightly deflating possible answer to this: maybe things are valuable on the basis of rarity. That explains quite a lot of value judgments here on earth, and also offers a quick and easy value judgment for alien microbes: if they were the first alien life we'd ever found, we'd think they were incredibly valuable. If it was the 1000th microbe-carpeted exoplanet we'd found, we would not be so bothered.
This rarity reading also seems like a more natural way than "rights" to understand how we'd treat these microbes: we would be happy to kill a few as samples in exploratory testing, because we would know that they could grow back; we would not be willing to kill all the microbes on the planet, because that would lead to an absolute loss of a rare thing. If microbes actually had "rights," we'd struggle to explain why it was OK to kill some but not all.
"unless we want to rethink what we mean by sentience"...thanks
That sentience like thought could be considered...
...microbial means/meanings for plants, animals, humans and oneself...
Nabokov the novelist exhorted to caress the details; so alien microbes are felicitous fodder for fiction
I’m very much of the opinion that intrinsic value resides by means of sentience exclusively. (Or whatever synonym one might use, such as “consciousness”, “utility”, “phenomenality”, and so on.) But I also grasp that science today is in no position to demonstrate what constitutes sentience. Thus it can’t measure various parameters of sentience in living creatures or technological creations. So I can see how one might deny the logical narrative that their own sentience facilitates a general sensation of awesomeness regarding existence, and thus a belief that all elements of reality must have intrinsic value. It’s a position that I expect to be overcome some day, but how?
First note that the hard problem of sentience is so bizarre that many just throw their hands up and reason that this must be otherworldly. Then beyond dualism, some figure that the question here must be backwards — sentience must be all that exists while the perceived world is simply a fabrication of that sentience. Then beyond idealism, some get so worked up that they decide sentience must be a fundamental element of all that exists and is simply concentrated in us. Panpsychism however is yet another unfalsifiable “solution” that effectively tells us nothing. Then there’s a group who pride themselves on ejecting the funky notions above and more. What illusionists commonly fail to mention however that their computationalism is also pretty funky. I’m partial to my own thought experiment to display this. Their position holds that if some amount of properly marked paper were scanned into a computer which then processes it to quickly print out a second set of properly marked paper, then something here would experience what you do when your thumb gets whacked.
Still the only bit of magic that I perceive in computationalism is the presumption that “thumb pain” will occur when the brain processes whacked thumb information into new information, though critically without that new information going on to animate certain causal brain physics which should itself exist as the experiencer. So if augmented I think their position could be salvaged. Then once that physics becomes experimentally verified it should generally be grasped that this is what intrinsic value is made of.
Until then professor I think you’ll be relatively free to presume that rocks and microbes have intrinsic value without suspecting that you’re simply projecting this by means of your own sense of awesomeness. It is my hope however that scientists will soon straighten out this aspect of academia. As theorized by Johnjoe McFadden, I suspect that intrinsic value is constituted by certain parameters of electromagnetic radiation associated with the synchronous firing of neurons. It’s one falsifiable theory in a pool of countless that aren’t.
I'm inclined to agree with James of Seattle and chinaphil (just seconding their remarks) - something like uniqueness or rarity seems important here for the value consideration (and perhaps this is what blooms into an intrinsic value as applied to everything, including rocks in their uniqueness?)
Er whoops - wrong James - James Cross! James of Seattle brought up a different consideration. But I liked all the comments!
Thanks for all the comments, folks!
On rarity/uniqueness: I'm inclined to think that this is an important part of the picture, though I'm disinclined to think it's the whole story. One potential trouble: If the universe is finite, everything that isn't zero probability will repeat infinitely often.
On sentience: I am completely on board with the idea that we don't yet have a good theory of this. Despite that, I'm disinclined to think that microbes are sentient, on the following combination of grounds: common sense says otherwise and is a default starting point that we ought to abandon only with good positive evidence, there is no good positive evidence for microbe sentience, the overall trend of mainstream scientific theories of consciousness is against it. All of that is, of course, only tentative grounds.
On goals: It's not an unreasonable thought. Does an autonomous vehicle also have goals? A computer virus?
"f the universe is finite, everything that isn't zero probability will repeat infinitely often".
The Eternal Recurrence pretty much makes any morality meaningless. Morally whatever we do we will also do its opposite forever. Any choice and its opposite will always be made again and again.
Would a categorical imperative against "killing" imply using antibiotics is wrong because it kills bacterial life-forms? Of course, this strikes against common sense, but what would a fanatically committed altruist say in such cases?
Do viral and bacterial agents hold moral rights to being protected?
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