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Space Exploration Needs Extraterrestrial Ethics
An anonymous reader writes "Professor Andy Miah notes there's already international government policies taking hold on outer space — and a need for new ethical guidelines. 'For instance, what obligations do we owe to the various life forms we send there, or those we might discover? Can we develop a more considerate approach to colonizing outer space than we were able to achieve for various sectors of Earth?' And what rights do astronauts have? 'Could our inevitable public surveillance of their behavior become too much of an infringement on their personal privacy?' But more importantly, professor Miah notes that 'the goods of space exploration far exceed the symbolic value,' pointing out that 'A vast amount of research and development derives from space exploration ... For example, the United Kingdom's 2007 Space Policy inquiry indicated that the creation of space products contributes two to three times their value in GDP.'"
You only need "ethics" to guide your behavior when you are dealing with entities weaker than you.
When dealing with aliens, "terror" and "weakness" will be sufficient. With the occasional "being dissolved by acid blood" for the truly tricky situations...
Who let the facehugger have the baby!?!?!
Oh, yeah, there was an article too. Yeah, yeah, we need ethics, blah, blah. OK? Am I on-topic yet?
But I mean OMG WTF? The baby! It has a facehugger! Rescue it already!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Except that most of Asimov's robot stories were actually about the fact that the 3 Laws were simplistic and impractical, and that sufficiently developed robots would look to bend or break the laws eventually.
The Prime Directive had its own problems as well.
The point is that it is not easy to define a universal set of rules that would apply in all situations.
May I suggest this rather simple but effective ethics:
Value sentience.
To the degree that something is sentient (has feelings) it is valuable and worth treating well (helping to feel good, helping to avoid suffering).
There are weird corner cases that are hard to figure out and certain issues that aren't clear (if you should decide to bring them up please realize that they're not really arguments against the idea), but as a foundation this is a pretty good system. It rises above the intellectual muck of "animal v. human" and provides a way to begin thinking about aliens and even artificial intelligence.
Unresolved issues: What is the relative worth between entities A and B when they have equal sentience but when A will live twice as long as B? What is the value of an entity that is certain to come into being but hasn't yet? What is the value of the process that can certainly cause an entity to come into being, but hasn't yet been undertaken? What is the value of an entity whose sentience has been practically put on pause due to reversible coma or suspended animation? How do you accurately (as opposed to intuitively) measure sentience?
"Don't be evil."
"Unless it's _really_ profitable."