A Kantian Ethic for Space Exploration?

Friday 04 August 2023

Week before last, in newsletter 246, I discussed formulating a provisional ethic of space exploration. In that discussion I mentioned the ethic that Walter Kaufmann formulates in his The Faith of a Heretic, and I began trying to formulate something similar in terms of virtues. However, the more I have thought about this it seems to be better formulated in terms of imperatives, and if one is going to discuss imperatives in moral philosophy, one must discuss Kant. So I have been reading Kant and Kant commentators. C. D. Broad’s chapter on Kant in his Five Types of Ethical Theory has been especially helpful (it’s also an amusing read), as Broad has a good grasp of Kant’s ethics but obviously feels no obligation to follow Kant slavishly — commentaries like this are always the most valuable.

Much of moral philosophy today is divided between Kant and utilitarianism. There are other schools of thought — axiology (my preferred framework), naturalism (largely derived from Hobbes and Hume, but later given a very different twist by Nietzsche), evolutionary ethics, environmental ethics, and so on — but it is Kant and utilitarianism that dominate the discussion. Partly this is merely a matter of historical contingency, and thus arbitrary to a certain extent, but the division isn’t entirely arbitrary. Kant represents deontology (which, in its vulgar form, is concerned with the motive of an action) while utilitarianism represents teleology (which, in its vulgar form, is concerned with the consequences of an action). In a sense, moral philosophy is a bit like economics before the twin strands of supply side and demand side theories of value were brought together in the theory of diminishing marginal utility.

It really is an obvious failing of twentieth century moral philosophy, and its continuing tradition in the present, that there has not been more of a serious effort to bring together deontology and teleology into a single ethical framework, but the two schools of thought continue to flourish in near isolation from each other. So when one dips one’s feet into Kantian ethics, one enters in to a tradition of thought elaborated in almost every imaginable way by philosophers who have used the Kantian framework. Here I rush in like a fool where angels fear to tread. But the Kantian big picture offers opportunities to synthesize disparate elements. Kant himself presented his work as a Copernican revolution in philosophy:

“We here propose to do just what Copernicus did in attempting to explain the celestial movements. When he found that he could make no progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved round the spectator, he reversed the process, and tried the experiment of assuming that the spectator revolved, while the stars remained at rest. We may make the same experiment with regard to the intuition of objects. If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge.”

Kant wasn’t the greatest writer, but if the above isn’t clear, suffice it to say Kant saw himself as a Copernicus in philosophy, making objects dependent upon the mind as planets are dependent upon the sun (rather than the other way around). This Copernican character of Kant’s critical philosophy is repeated ad nauseam in philosophy, but from a naturalistic standpoint, Kant represents an anti-Copernican reaction, and this is nowhere clearer than in his ethics. Well, with some qualifications, which I will get to.

There is one sense in which Kant’s ethics is remarkable cosmopolitan for Kant’s time, which is that Kant held that the moral law is necessarily recognized by any rational being (he also uses “intelligent being” — I haven’t yet consulted the German text to see if Kant uses two different terms or if it is merely the translator engaging in what Fowler’s called “elegant variation”). Kant was interested in cosmology and wrote books that turned out to be broadly correct in their outlook. Kant also speculated on life on other worlds, so when he said that the moral law held for all rational beings, we must acknowledge that he was already contemplating the possibility of non-human rational beings on other worlds, who, according to Kant, must agree with Kant if only the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals were translated into their language and they read it. In this sense, then, Kant was ahead of his time, and his moral thought could even be called Copernican, as it is not necessarily centered on human beings, but rather upon rational beings.

There is another sense, however, in which Kant’s ethics remains anthropocentric and thus non-Copernican. C. D. Broad in his chapter on Kant sharply contrasts Kant to Spinoza, but Kant and Spinoza share the presupposition that only rational beings are moral agents. Neither had much to say regarding what environmental ethicist J. Baird Callicott would, in the twentieth century, call moral considerability, which is the idea that beings that aren’t moral agents might have a claim on some moral status, and thus deserve to be considered in moral judgments. So far as I know, we don’t have a term that means the non-anthropocentric equivalent of anthropocentrism, but we need a word for this: the idea that only rational or intelligent agents are deserving of moral considerability.

It is this attitude, and the unnamed presupposition — maybe I could call it noöcentrism, though I will admit that is an unlovely coinage — that led me to dislike Kant, and which is partially responsible for my preference for G. E. Moore. Moore’s moral theory is sometimes called “ideal utilitarianism,” so it is taken to fall on the other side of the divide, opposite Kantianism, but Moore was largely responsible for bringing the idea of intrinsic value into moral philosophy. In his Principia Ethica and his shorter Ethics, Moore formulates a simple test for intrinsic value: what would you like to exist, unrelated to any other consideration? This interested me, because it implies that anything might have intrinsic value, whether or not it is a moral agent. One might wish the Grand Canyon to exist merely for its intrinsic value, and apart from any consideration as to whether there is a conscious agent who enjoys and appreciates the view. If you asked me to choose between an empty universe, and a universe that consisted only of a rattlesnake, I would pick the rattlesnake, because a state of affairs that consists of a rattlesnake seems more valuable to me that an empty universe. In this way, the rattlesnake has intrinsic value, quite apart from anything else that the rattlesnake might be related to. So it seems natural to me that axiological ethics can encompass non-anthropocentric, and even non-noöcentric states of affairs, but how does, or how ought, Kant to enter into this?

Let us say, merely for the purpose of argument, that the universe is chock full of intelligent beings, so that they are plentiful. By the Kantian account, that means that there are moral agents throughout the universe, and each of these moral beings will exercise its moral agency within its own corner of the universe. But the universe itself? It is worth nothing unless it is worth something to any of these moral agents. In this way, the universe might be filled with moral agents, but they would be like pinpoints on the map of a galaxy. Even in a populated galaxy, vast stretches would be seemingly morally irrelevant; the moral agents would be like islands in an amoral sea. This is the moral universe from a Kantian perspective, and I find it dissatisfying.

When I started thinking about Kantian imperatives from the perspective of an ethic for space exploration, I searched on “Kantian environmental ethics,” and of course I found a significant literature of environmental ethicists who have worked within a Kantian framework. I found a book by Toby Svoboda, Duties Regarding Nature: A Kantian Environmental Ethic, in which Svodoba employs a Kantian framework to argue for environmental stewardship because this makes us better persons. A blurb on the book reads:

“…on Kantian grounds, there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain (environmental) virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant’s account of indirect duties regarding nature can ground a compelling environmental ethic: the Kantian duty to develop morally virtuous dispositions strictly proscribes unnecessarily harming organisms, and it also gives us moral reason to act in ways that benefit such organisms.”

Here nature is valued, but only as a consequence of an indirect duty; direct duties are all and only those duties to rational beings. Svoboda goes a long way toward accommodating nature — as far as the Kantian framework allows — but he still remains largely within that framework.

I also found “A Kantian Argument Against Environmental Destruction” by Nico Dario Müller. Müller takes a different tack than Svoboda, acknowledging the limitations of restricting the value of nature to indirect duties. Müller develops what he calls sentientism, which includes non-human animals within the Kantian kingdom of ends, which allows us a greater scope for valuing nature:

“Instead of arguing that its approach to the environment is not exploitative, we can argue that its exploitation is not objectionable. Once we move the line of moral concern to include animals, the demand that we exploit the rest of the natural world for the benefit of moral patients becomes much less repugnant.” (p. 228)

I think that Müller is right that including other sentient, but not intelligent, beings within the kingdom of ends nets us a much more comprehensive ethic than Svoboda’s approach (which is also the approach of other Kantian environmental ethicists), in which all of nature other than rational beings can only be brought within the sphere of the ethical by contributing to the cultivation of virtues on the part of said rational beings. However, this still falls far short of what is needed for an ethic of space exploration. In particular, Müller’s account is vulnerable to the kind of critique that G. E. Moore made of Mill’s utilitarianism in Moore’s Ethics.

I think that the argument in Moore’s Ethics is widely unappreciated, and the few times I have tried to bring it up, I have been met with an utter lack of recognition. In Moore’s patient if not pedantic style, he takes up the idea of maximizing pleasure as the good (one could argue that Moore takes on a vulgar version, but Moore’s critique could be refined in parallel with a refined utilitarianism), and achieves a reductio ad absurdum by showing that a being without any sense of pleasure (though such a being might still be a rational being) is effectively sidelined in utilitarianism. Perhaps someday I will write out this idea in the detail it deserves, but at present I will simply leave it at that.

One more note on Müller’s approach to Kantian ethics: Kant uses the idea of any rational being or any intelligent being, and we understand from Kant that an intelligent being is capable of moral action, being able to align its will with the moral law. However, if one wants to split hairs with Kant, we might make a detailed inquiry into exactly how intelligent a being must be in order to qualify as being competent for moral action. Human beings vary in their degree of intelligence; some clearly are incapable of moral action, and yet we continue to regard them as human beings, and indeed as moral beings. Sometimes we even restrain them in order to prevent them from causing harm to themselves or others. From a naturalistic standpoint, the continuum of human intelligence is part of a larger continuum of intelligence that is pervasive in the biosphere. In my 2019 Milan talk I posited the idea of average mammalian intelligence (what I called the peer class of mammalian intelligence), and, when we invoke the familiar idea that some other intelligent being advanced millions of years beyond us in development, we may not seem so advanced beyond average mammalian intelligence when judged by a rational being many millions of years in advance of ourselves. So what is the intelligence cut off for being considered a rational being? Müller’s approach implies that we extend it downward; it is easy to imagine an argument for moving it upward, in which case it may or may not include human beings.

I also happened upon a rather different way to approach this, though not coming from a Kantian perspective. Since I have recently been reading in the philosophy of technology and engineering, I found the paper “From Moral Agents to Moral Factors: The Structural Ethics Approach” by Philip Brey (included in The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts, edited by Peter Kroes and Peter-Paul Verbeek). Brey explains structural ethics in this way:

“Structural ethics focuses on ethical aspects of social and material networks and arrangements, and their components, which include humans, animals, artifacts, natural objects, and complex structures composed of such entities, like organizations. In structural ethics, components of networks that have moral implications are called moral factors. Artifact ethics is the study of individual artifacts within structural ethics.”

This strikes me as an idea with a lot of potential. Even if we reserve a certain ultimacy of moral agency to human beings (or all rational beings, or all intelligent beings), these moral agents are embedded within a structure that includes other morally relevant factors. One can readily see the applicability to the ethics of technology and engineering, since we create technological artifacts for the purpose of interacting with them in a common structure. However, nature is a structure within which human beings are embedded (and, indeed, in which our technology is embedded), so that human beings and non-human beings alike are moral factors with a single ethical structure.

I could certainly make use of this latter perspective, but it doesn’t help me to assimilate the Kantian conception of imperatives to an ethic for space exploration framed in terms of imperatives. Maybe I will ultimately abandon the effort to make my space exploration ethic Kant-friendly, and go back to trying to formulate it in terms of a virtue ethic, but I will still keep playing with the Kantian context because this is so familiar in moral philosophy. In appealing to Kant, one appeals to a built-in philosophical constituency.