Ethics

If we consider the possibility of superior life forms and the possibility of their interference of our own human species for their own gain, and then looking back at our own treatment of animals (inferior species), are Zoos ethical?

Comments

A nice question. The thought is something this: there might be creatures out there who are as intellectually advanced when compared to us as we are when compared to, say, three-toed sloths. If it would be wrong for those creatures to exploit us in various ways, doesn't this at least raise the question of whether it's acceptable for us to put sloths in zoos? Or conversely, if our superiority to the sloths makes it okay to put them in zoos, mightn't a race of super-intelligent aliens be justified in putting us on display or "serving" us for dinner?

I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether it's wrong to enzoo the sloths, though I think that the answer depends at least partly on whether they're able to thrive in that sort of setting. But there is a point that seems to me worth raising: mere comparitive superiority may not be the issue. There may be a difference between us and the sloths that puts us in a different moral category. At least some philosophers (Kant being the most notable) think that beings who are capable of moral reflection and of guiding their actions on the basis of those reflections have a special moral standing. As Kant would put it, they should never be used merely as means to an end but always as "ends in themselves." Let's follow the philosophical tradition and call such beings persons. (Note that persons in this sense need not be biologically human.) The thing to notice is that the right question isn't how good you are at moral reflection. Even if you are better than me at sorting out hard moral cases, the fact that I'm capable of recognizing some things as right or wrong and acting accordingly is good enough to get me counted as a person. That means that if something like the Kantian picture is correct, the aliens would be wrong to exploit us even if they're smarter than us. But it also leaves it open that different standards apply to non-persons, including the sloths. In particular, it leaves open the possibility that it may be acceptable to treat non-persons as means to our ends without treating them as ends in themselves.

There might be reasons not based in the idea of personhood why this isn't so, though the further down the phylogentic scale we move, the less plausible it may seem. Furthermore, we needn't say that we can treat animals in any way we like. At the very least, we can agree that we shouldn't be cruel to them; perhaps we have much stronger obligations to care about their well-being. And it may be that there are some non-human animals (dolphins? bonobos?) that already count as persons in the moral sense. If so, then it would be hard to see how we could justify exploiting them. But it seems right to say that whatever the best view of non-persons, no person should be used as a mere means -- not even by an extraterrestrial with a four-digit IQ.

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