Question Hi- I got this question from Harvard Econ. Prof. Greg Mankiw's blog. He got it from Richard Rorty. Here it is: "Aliens from another planet, with vastly superior intelligence to humans, land on earth in order to consume humans as food. What argument could you make to convince the aliens not to eat us that would not also apply to our consumption of beef?" What's the answer!?!?! Thanks!

Accepted:
June 19, 2007

Comments

It's a fine question, isn't it. Short, sweet, and deeply provocative. In the interests of full disclosure, however, I should, at the outset, let you know that I don't think we should eat beef--in part because of the sort of reasons this question elicits. That being said, I don't think that the claim the question seems to advance is by itself decisive--namely that it's human's superior intelligence that provides grounds for eating beef. After all, if minimal intelligence itself justified eating an organism, then humans with minimal intelligence (including the aged, those with brain injuries, infants and fetuses, the mentallly retarded, public officials, etc.) would be candidates for consumption, and various computers would have moral standing. But establishing moral standing isn't simply a matter of determining intelligence. Rather, I'd say that what principally (not exclusively) marks an entity as one not to be consumed is its sharing or its capacity to share (or have shared) in certain projects and forms of life, especially individual projects and forms of life, we find both valuable and respectable.

The projects and forms of life I refer to commonly depend upon a certain standard of intelligence, but they also depend upon certain emotional and sentimental capacities. So, the very fact that we could present or attempt to present arguments on our behalf to the aliens (that is, to engage in the forms of life that include crafting arguments, making moral defenses, arguing for the value and standing of something) might do it. The aliens might also be made to understand and appreciate our the projects that we develop across time like our sciences, industries, and nations. But we might also succeed in getting the aliens to value and respect and understand of those human forms of life that compose our arts, literatures, friendships, love affairs, and families, etc. In addition, and perhaps crucially, we should also show the aliens that these projects and forms of life matter to us, that we care about them, that we value them, that it's a matter of profound importance to us whether they continue to exist or not, that we have an interest in their existence and therefore our own. The 'replicants' in Blade Runner establish their own moral claim to existence, I think, in much this way. (A typical computer, by contrast, might be able to argue and even produce art; but since it wouldn't matter to the computer whether or not we switched it off and recycled its parts, doing so wouldn't be much of a moral issue.)

If, however, the aliens have no capacity to sympathize with us, to feel for themselves that those projects and forms of life are valuable, to care that we care about such things, then even if our lives can be adequately explained to the aliens and even if our intelligence were on par with theirs, we're done for. For myself, with regard to beef, I have found that the discoveries of animal behaviorists, anatomists, etc., expose certain forms of life among cattle with which I can sympathize and about which I have come to care--in particular, their social relationships, their ways of fearing, suffering, desiring, and enjoying, as well as these things mattering to them. And so, for the most part, I refuse beef as I would hope the aliens would refuse us.