Question Is it conceivable that an intelligent species could evolve, say on another planet or in the future, that has radically different ethical and moral values and paradigms? Would they be wrong? Or would every possible intelligent species naturally come to similar conclusions about ethics as we have, divide into the same camps and argue about the same issues?

Accepted:
March 30, 2011

Comments

Your question goes to the heart of the basis for moral judgments and their justification. If moral judgments are supposed to reflect universal standards that are binding on all possible rational beings--Kant, for example, seems to conceive of ethics this way--then it would not be possible for a rational species to evolve that would not share the same moral judgments as all other rational species. If, however, one thinks that moral judgments reflect certain norms that are internal to a culture, and/or that reflect the ways in which members of that culture negotiate their relations with one another, then moral judgments might well vary with the nature of the species in question. (One can, for example, imagine a culture in which it was morally wrong ever to manifest any signs of pain or distress, for example.) The deep question here, it seems to me, is whether morality should be seen as applying to all beings of certain types, or whether it should instead be seen as a very particular, species-specific or culture-specific means of negotiating the relations among members of the species or culture in question. Depending on one's answer to that last question, one will answer your original question very differently indeed.