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Question If we made contact with an alien species which was clearly intelligent/sentient, but at a very different level to us, for example, if in the future humans found a planet inhabited by a species which was approximately as intelligent as our distant ancestors (and ancestors which were less intelligent than us for genetic, not simply environmental reasons), should we consider one alien to be as important as one person? Whatever conclusion I come to seems to throw up problems: if we say yes, then should we consider the life of a chimpanzee to be as important as that of a human? If we say no, then presumably we would have to concede that if we met aliens more intelligent than us then we would be less important than them. Or perhaps there's a base level of intelligence above which all sentient beings are equal, but how would we determine that base level? On the other hand, if we move away from intelligence and look for something else like signs of a capacity for love or mourning to evaluate a species moral worth, this implies we might have to start to consider animals like dogs or elephants, which seem to show some of these, morally equal to humans. I know the question of whose life is 'more important' is probably an odd one, and even sounds pretty unpleasant, but we could conceive of a situation where it came up. For example, imagine a twist of the trolley question where you have to decide whether or not to change the direction of a runaway tram and either let two people die, or actively kill one person. Well, what if the question was let a human die or kill a less intelligent (but sentient) alien? (Presumably if it was a chimpanzee or a dog most people would kill the animal rather than let the person die.) And of course, there are many other questions it would lead to such as what if we wanted to colonize the planet, and in a way which avoided slaughtering the aliens or badly damaging the environment of the planet, but they clearly didn't want us to? Should we worry about their wishes if we feel they are being irrational? Sorry if I've been a bit long winded, and I know this is all very hypothetical and a bit scifi, but I think it's an interesting question and I hope I'm not the only one!

Accepted:
March 19, 2010

Comments

I think it is important to distinguish intelligence from sentience. As you suggest, it is possible that there exist beings that are much more intelligent than humans are just as, for example, humans are much more intelligent than, say, dolphins. On the other hand, I don't think it makes sense to treat sentience in this way: it isn't the case that a being much more intelligent than us is also much more sentient than us. Rather, I think it makes more sense to say of any being that it is either sentient or not -- and then perhaps also note that differences in mental lives, sensory apparatuses, etc. mean that different types of beings are "differently" sentient (but not more or less sentient).

This distinction is important because sentience could be taken to be an important criterion for moral considerability: one might well believe that the moral claims of sentient beings are stronger than the claims of non-sentient beings. If this were the case, then all sentient creatures, no matter how intelligent, would deserve a high degree of moral consideration.

Even if you acknowledge that sentience is an extremely important criterion, this would not be the end of the story. For example, there might be principled reasons to think that, when claims are in conflict, we humans should prioritize human claims over alien ones -- perhaps there is a justificatory story to tell that grounds this sort of parochialism. In any case, we can expect that, were we to interact with the aliens you hypothesize, moral claims might conflict, and it would be good to have principled reasons for working out those conflicts.

Finally, I don't think your question is at all odd: I think the question of how we decide which other things are worthy of our moral consideration--and how we prioritize those claims and resolve any conflicts that arrive -- are important ones that environmental philosophers have discussed in interesting ways. So, I think it is important for philosophers to investigate the various moral claims that other sentient creatures, non-sentient creatures, non-living objects, as-yet-unborn life or as-yet-uncreated objects, uncreated things, ecosystems, etc. might make on us.