JN: I’m Joseph Nelson. I’m a student at The George Washington University. This year, the George Washington University is partnering with National Aeronautics and Space Administration to offer a series of debate tournaments about astrobiology and encourage future leaders to engage with issues about what would happen should we discover extraterrestrial life as we continue to explore beyond earth’s surface. In accordance with these debates, we’re having a series of online debate competitions as well as two in-person debate competitions, one in Washington D.C. and one at the University of Washington. IN accordance with generating evidence and engaging scholars in the field, we’re hosting a series of expert interviews. This is one of those interviews.
Today, I’m fortune to be joined by Dr. Kelly Smith, who is a professor of Religion and Philosophy at Clemson University. Dr. Smith has done a significant amount of work and published papers regarding astrobiology and our ethical obligation should we discover it.
Now, before we get into specific questions, lets me frame what the topic is about so that both Dr. Smith and those listening and watching later will have an idea of what sort of issues we’ll be interrogating as debaters. This year, the topic resolution reads the following:
Resolved: An overriding ethical obligation to protect and preserve and preserve extraterrestrial microbial life and ecosystems should be incorporated into international law.
The importance of this statement is that it comes from Carl Sagan’s comment in his book The Cosmos from 1985. To give you a condensed version, Sagan argued should we discover life on, say, Mars, we would have to no longer—withdraw entirely and no longer explore the surface of the planet because Mars would, therefore, belong to, as he says, “the Martians.”
Dr. Smith has done a significant amount of work in this field. I would first like to open it up and hear what issues you think are being raised by our resolution.
Dr. Smith
Well, thanks for having me on here. This is a lot of fun. I really enjoy this kind of debate. I think essentially this is an instance of an applied ethics questions. It’s similar to sort of questions you would getting environmental ethics in terrestrial contexts. When you’re dealing astrobiology contexts, things get little bit more interesting, and they’re interestingly different. One interestingly different thing that sets this apart from terrestrial situations is that in terrestrial situations, if I’m arguing about whether or not I should preserve a snail darter in a river ecosystem, there are at least two different ways that I should argue we do that. One is that I argue the snail darter has some intrinsic moral value. But then the other way is a self-interest way, but an indirect self interest way. Look, the snail darter is part of an ecosystem that ultimately I share, therefore messing with the snail darter is not smart, even if I do not care about the snail darter per se. When you get into astrobiology concepts, there is presumably no shared ecosystems. Whatever we do to Mars ecosystems is not going to have any direct impact on us. The argument to preserve them is ultimately whether or not they have value in of themselves.
JN
That is an interesting thought. So, you see a core question being raised by the topic as necessarily how, perhaps, self-centered or anthropocentric we are when approaching exploration of space.
DR. SMITH
Yeah, things can have moral value—things can have value for different reasons. A can opener has value to the extent that I need to open cans. So, you know, if someone says is a can opener valuable, I do a check to see if I need to open cans. But I need something very different for that if someone says, “Is your wife valuable.” My wife would be valuable, most people think, even if there is no use to which she could be put. She’s old and not what she used to be, and in a retirement home, and I could say, “Well society isn’t getting a whole lot out of my wife.” Presumably, that doesn’t mean society can just off her because she’s no longer useful whereas I can throw a can opener away, and people don’t think I did anything immoral.
JN
Within that dichotomy you’ve setup about whether extraterrestrial life has value in of itself and secondly whether or not we value its existence to our own survival—I’m going to ask you to explain your take on if you think extraterrestrial life has value and, secondly, I suppose you eluded to believing it could have value independent of us, but again hammering out whether or not you believe within that second framework, you think it has value to be preserved for humans.
DR. SMITH
Let me start being a little controversial in saying Sagan is a little crazy. I love Carl Sagan, and I think that he’s right about a lot of things, but in this particular case, I think his position about Mars is not only not the right one, but I think it’s immoral.
He’s not the most extreme, Chris McKay, who is NASA’s leading Mars expert, actually argues that only should we leave the Martians alone, but if they’re just barely hanging on by their extraterrestrial finger nails, then maybe we have an obligation to go make the planet better for them—which is even more absurd.
The bottom like is it’s not question about whether or not entities like Martians have value. It’s very easy to say they’re valuable. The question is HOW MUCH value do they have relative to what. A lot of times in an ethical debate, and I’m just warning teams, you’re almost certainly going to see other teams making these arguments where they say something is valuable blah, blah, blah, and you should immediately ask them, “Ok, why is it valuable, and how valuable is it?” If you ask me, should I destroy Martian microbes because I just like to see them burn, no, that would be a bad thing. But that’s not going to be the kind of question we’re asking. The kind of question we’re going to be asking is that there’s some utility that human beings can get from using Mars, say, terraforming or something like that, and then the question is, “Should we pursue the human utility or should we leave Mars alone to the microbes?” Now you’ve got two competing interests. Someone telling me microbes are valuable, I can say “You’re right”, but they’re not that valuable, and there’s a real opportunity cost to human beings foregoing the entire use of an entire planet for billions of years. That is a massive cost.
And although I think microbes have value—particularly intrustrumental value—scientifically, there would be massive value should we be able to study them. Even if they have value in of themselves, they don’t have enough to balance out the human interests from exploiting Mars.
JN
That dovetails right into the next core topic question. It’s obvious you can say anything has value, but this resolution is unique in that it uses the term “overriding ethical obligation.” So, setting up the framework of juxtaposing the opportunity costs of putting this extraterrestrial life in danger isn’t necessarily about terraforming, though it could be, but the question at hand is do you think the overriding ethical obligation regardless of what we would be doing to obstruct their lives otherwise means that we should incorporate some form of norms into international law. I want you to focus on this overriding question.
DR. SMITH
Well, I’m a philosopher, and this is what we do, but the term “overriding” is a little bit vague. It’s better than just asking if they have value. Presumably, overriding is meant to be that they really have value. They have value that overrides something, although if you’re going to interpret it as strongly as possible, value that overrides all other considerations, I think that is clearly false. If you’re thinking value that is clearly sufficient to override human instrumental interests, like the fact that we would like to do things with Mars is irrelevant, then presumably that’s the type of thing you’re getting at.
First of all, I don’t think they anything like that level of value. I think it’s immoral to argue. This is just my personal view—
JN
Great. That’s what we want to hear from experts like yourself. Can you expand on that?
DR. SMITH
Look at it this way—human beings have undeniable, very high moral value. There are very few people that argue that. Martian microbes might have value of some sort description. So when you’re putting them on the scales, you’ve got something clearly weighty on this side, and not just a single individual, but you’ve got potentially millions and perhaps billions of human beings from exploiting Mars, and on this side you have an arguable weight of some kind, but it might not even be enough to outweigh a single human being. So it seems to me this is a case where pretty quickly if you’re forced to make a zero sum choice, humans should win.
That being said, I don’t want people thinking I’m in favor of paving the planet just to make parking lots for our space vehicles. If there are ways to preserve the Martian microbes and still get human utility, clearly we should pursue those. And we should be careful about what kinds of human interests we pursue. Human beings are really good at pursuing stupid, short term interests. But those are different questions. Those are not questions of if our interests override, those are questions of whose interests to consider. That’s a policy kind of question.
So should this be enshrined in the law? It depends a lot on how the laws should be written. In general, my opinion is no, that would be a bad idea.
JN
Its interesting that the question of value of Martian life, for you, is inextricably tied to the opportunity costs that humans could otherwise get. And, don’t let me put words in your mouth, but you believe that incorporating said norms into international law could jeopardize the absolute value of exploring to humans?
DR. SMITH
At least to the extent that international law matters.
JN
Yeah, that’s another question.
DR. SMITH
We can put anything we want into international law. Like we have the space treaty
JN
Oh, yeah, from 1967.
DR. SMITH
If the Chinese decide its not in their national interest to follow the space treaty, they will not follow it. This is another debate that has nothing to do with ethics, but you could take the view that it makes people happy to put stuff into international law, go ahead and do that, but it’s going to be a much more difficult thing to actually enforce that. If the Chinese do something we Mars we don’t actually like, it’s going to be difficult to stop them from say, strip mining Mars. But again, that’s getting into the policy arena.
JN
Which is going to be relevant to these debates. For a bit of context, a lot of these debaters, while we debate ethical issues very often, we’re also in a style of debate called “policy debate”, so ethical issues very much influence policy, but to shy away from discussing the policy implications from international because this will be exclusively an ethical debate will likely not be how we see these things play out.
DR. SMITH
If I could follow up on that, I’m an ethicist. I’ve had a lot of experience coaching ethics bowl team, which debate more or less, entirely ethics. I would encourage teams to be a little bit careful. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with considering empirical, legal, and policy questions, but those types of questions and ethical questions are fundamentally different.
Ethical questions are about how the world should be, and you can take a position about how the world should be, and admit that the world is not like that, and that’s not inconsistent. I might say people should not kill each other for their tennis shoes and then immediately say it happens all the time, and I haven’t contradicted myself. There’s something called the naturalistic fallacy, and in a lot of debates, people that aren’t familiar with talking will commit over and over again. They’ll say something like “We can’t enforce international law prohibiting the destruction of Martian microbes”, therefore, it’s ok. That doesn’t follow. It can still be a bad thing to do, even if we can’t enforce it.
JN
As debaters, we often come from marrying those two. You’ve identifying a problem of ethics in your example, those murdering others for their shoes, and of course we can say that shouldn’t happen but it does. We’re often interested in pursuing the policies to alleviate the former problem.
IN the context of the NASA debates, the devil is going to be in the details in any form of legislation that you say for international law, but we’re curious at seeing is there even a question to be had or a conclusive idea to be had, rather, about incorporating international law to give us an ethical obligation in the first place. Rather than argue that, perhaps, in the abstract it’s important to value life but then getting back to as you said previously in our discussion, that is going to be inextricably tied to the cost of development to the Martian and the human life.
DR. SMITH
I would say it doesn’t have to be. To give you a slightly different case, and I mean this is very unlikely to happen at this point, let’s say we found sentient life on Mars. Life capable of feeling joy and pain, bunny rabbits on Mars is the equivalent. That would be a very different question. I couldn’t say “Well, who really cares about Martian life.” If Martian life were rational, and we could have a conversation with Martian life about the nature of ethics. At that point, I would say clearly, the rights of those beings should be enshrined in some kind of legal context. I would argue from an ethical point of view, if you can debate ethics, you’re in the club. If you’re sentient, then you have some real claim to being associated with being in the club, I’m just skeptical about microbes. They’re scientifically valuable, and I’m a biologist too, so I think that’s really awesome, but I just don’t think they have a whole lot of ethical value. Certainly not if we’re being consistent. I mean every time you clean your bathroom, you’re killing billions of microbes, and most people don’t think you’ve committed mass murder or anything like that.
JN
That actually gets at the core of another portion of something we’ve identified as relevant within this topic space. Assuming the microbial life does have moral standing, what are your views we ought to assess a potential conflict between that extraterrestrial life and the human needs. Of course, this isn’t an extraterrestrial question, this happens between cultures all the time.
DR. SMITH
Right
JN
What is your take on how this should play out on the surface of Mars.
DR. SMITH
I want to be clear. I actually do think microbes would have some kind of intrinsic moral value, I just don’t think it’s a whole lot. So there’s an argument to be made that someone should not be allowed to fly a spaceship to Mars with a flamethrower and kill Martian microbes for the hell of it. That clearly should not happen.
How exactly you make the decision, the more specific you get, the harder it is to answer that question. It’s fairly easy to say, in general, human beings should win. It’s a little bit more difficult to give midlevel principles. You may something like the utility that’s going to be gained by human civilization far exceeds the utility that’s going to be gained by microbes unless human beings should win. But if you’re really talking about very specific cases, you get bogged down in detail.
If I have an engineering project where I want to have a strip mine right here, and we project a 60 percent chance that it’s going to have this impact on the local population of microbes, we may not know if that specific projection is correct, we may not know if that’s the only population of that kind of microbe. We don’t know if there’s maybe some clever way that we can remediate things to the Martian microbes. What you end up with is an endless technical debate that ultimately comes up with a number of projections that may or may not be right. That becomes much more difficult to say. Presumably international law is not going to operate at that level of specificity.
The most I think you can get from international law is that essentially you have to do an environmental impact study. You have to actually experts make these kinds of assessments and then there’s some sort of overriding principle that says whenever possible, you should try to mitigate the damage to Martian microbes.
I should say there’s another important caveat here too. I think there’s a difference between Martian microbes and an entire specifies of Martian microbes. So, if you’re going to do something that is actually going to exterminate a specific of microbes, then I think the stakes are higher. The amount of good that you have to show to warrant that is higher. Even if you can preserve it genetically, even if that’s the case, if you’re going to destroy the entire natural population of a specifies on earth or on Mars, and the bar should be set higher for something like that.
I don’t think it’s infeasible. If we really had the technology to terraform Mars, let’s just be science fictiony, we have some crazy technology that allows us to terraform Mars in 100 years, and humans can setup shop there. If we have something that valuable, I would argue it’s probably worthwhile even if it kills off all the Martian microbes, I would say you probably don’t want to do it until you’ve studied them very carefully and taken samples, and maybe you could start a microbe zoo. There’s a protected dome area where you have the protected habitat. But in general, the path there is so immoral, it would be immoral not to pursue it.
JN
Interestingly, the question of 100 years, gets at another angle to consider. What are your views on the moral standing of future generations, and how that would relate to the topic. We’ll say if there is an obligation to future generations, how do we assess the importance of such an obligation to determine whether it’s overriding or not?
DR. SMITH
That’s a really tricky one. It’s tricky in economics just like in ethics. My personal view, which is a little quirky for an ethicist, I would take the same position as an economist would. The problem there is that the further into the future you extrapolate, the less certain you are about the outcome. People might say should we od things now to cut down on the amount of carbon emissions. We have good grounds to think that we’re putting way too much carbon into the atmosphere, and that’s causing global warming, and there are good reasons why global warming will cause certain kids of problems. I personally think that’s a serious concern.
On the other hand, it’s a difficult problem to ask how much we should spend. Is it worth spending 5 trillion dollars to do that in the next ten years? Because there’s an opportunity cost to doing that. You’re spending an enormous amount of money that could have been spent to cure other ills, save a lot of human beings from pain and suffering, there’s a real cost there. And the less confident you are of your projections, the less it seems morally ok to do that. Global warming is a case where we have more and more evidence that this is going to be a problem in the short term.
I mean 100 years is crazy fast to consider a terraforming project. The most optimistic I’ve seen are 10,000 years. You’re talking about that kind of timeline. Let’s suppose someone says it’s going to take 10,000 years to terraform Mars. My first question is how do you know that. That’s 10,000 years with current technology. I guarantee you there will be developments in the next 10,000 years that will radically revise that estimate downwards. So in the final consideration, will that take 10,000 years, 1,000 years, 100 years, I don’t know. I don’t even know how to put a number on the uncertainty there.
So if someone says I’m doing something now that will help beings now and is going to have an impact on human beings 10,000 years down the road. The issue is not does it help 10,000 years down the road, the issue is the claim that I don’t believe it’s going to hurt them. I’m enough of a technological optimist to say, gosh, you know 10,000 years ago, human beings were really pretty sad technologically. So another 10,000 years, people may think it’s humorous that we took so much time worrying about some of these issues, because you know, of course, the Heisenberg Compensator handles all that stuff 1,000 years ago.
JN
Which brings me to another interesting consideration. Nick Bostrom has a philosophy, and I say this for everyone else rather than you, I know you’re very well acquainted with it, that reducing existential risk at really any means necessary is an a priori issue because we, therefore, have valued 10^54 of potential future lives that could exist. In the context of this resolution, that could be large advances in science that make exploit or be at the cost of microbial life. Where do you come down on the impact calculus that Bostrom has laid out and how do you think it relates to the resolution in terms of your conclusion about whether you think this is a calculus we should adopt or something that we should consider irrelevant?
DR. SMITH
There are a couple of things to say about that. Any existential threat to human beings is something that we would be morally compelled to do basically anything we can to possibly avoid. There are at least two ways to avoid that. There’s a moral argument. The moral steer of truly important moral beings as far as we know, currently encompasses human beings. Maybe you could have an argument about dolphins and some primates and maybe certain type of birds. It’s a fairly small club. So to allow that to go extinct is to essentially to allow the moral community to die. There’s a good moral argument to be made there.
There’s also an evolution argument. There has to be some conversation of what’s practically possible just from a psychology of the being, whether it’s human beings or extraterrestrial, my guess would be that no evolved species with intellect is going to be able to allow itself extinct. Whether it’s moral or not, it’s just not going to be in the cards. So a lot depends on what use we’re going to make of Mars. To some extent, we haven’t really talked about that. Right now we don’t really have the technology to terraform or reasonable time limits, we could probably mine it. We could certainly do a lot of science on Mars. And some science is going to be destructive.
To introduce some probes onto Mars, probes are contaminated with terrestrial bacteria. So there’s already some discussion going on to what extent we should be doing that kind of stuff. If there’s if there’s something we can gather that is sufficiently important from Mars, I think it becomes morally permissible to do it.
And I would say this much, one existential risk that I think humans fundamentally underestimate is the likelihood that we’ll have another dinosaur killer kind of impact. Right? It’s happened before. They only happen, as far as we can tell, only every 75 to 100 million years. So to the average human being, that’s an infinite time period. But it’s not an infinite time period. It could very well happen tomorrow, and we haven’t really done a lot to prevent it. One argument that people may, and in fact, I’ve made it myself in print, is that it is worth a lot to establish a second base for humankind. So suppose someone was to say we want to establish a base on Mars that is large enough that should something disastrous happen to earth, this base is capable of repopulating the planet and/or maybe assisting the survivors who have been blasted back to the Stone Age. They can show up and say “Hey, here’s all this cool technology that we saved for you”, that is worth almost an incalculable amount. Certainly it’s worth a lot of Martian microbes. You can then argue about how much it’s worth in present day human beings.
In the paper I published, I had a calculation that said setting up a lifeboat like that would cost maybe $4-5 trillion, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty cheap. Most humans would probably balk at that, and I doubt it would pass a referendum, but if it did actually save the human race, that would be cheap.
JN
I smile because it’s interesting to hear you discuss the prospect of asteroid extinction because my senior year of high school in debate, so coming up on four years ago, my partner and I ran an affirmative that was littered with Matheny, Bostrom, and Verschurr evidence discussing you know that we’re undervaluing the threat of asteroid extinction, this is an a priori issue. That’s very funny to hear you discuss that and its value to Mars.
One other wrapping up question about the discussion we’re having here of interest is: you touched on, perhaps, a paralysis that happens if we were to too strongly adopt measures about not being able to even send probes to other planets. Do you think that’s a serious risk if we adopted international norms?
DR. SMITH
Oh, yeah, without any doubt. I’ll give you a really good example of this. The place that a lot of people think we’re most likely to find complex ecosystems is one of the moons of Jupiter, Europa. It looks like Europa’s got actual oceans of liquid water, and for biochemical reasons, liquid water make things a lot easier for life. For a long time, people sort of lamented that it looked like the oceans were buried under a couple of kilometers of ice, so getting to them was going to be pretty tricky, but the Hubble Space Telescope just last year confirmed that Europa is venting water vapor into space. So if it’s venting water vapor, that means that you should be able to send a probe down whatever fissure or hydrothermal crack or whatever it is that is venting. You cannot make a completely sterile terrestrial probe. If the question is going to be do you send a probe, maybe as sterile as you can get it, but it’s probably got a couple of microbes on it, do you send that to a European ocean where the conditions are at all favorable, it’s going to do really well, and you’ll never be able to “put the toothpaste back in the tube” as my dad said. That’s a really interesting question.
The flipside, do you just leave Europa alone and not even investigate it? Or maybe in 1,000 years we’ll have the technology to investigate it without penetrating the ocean. That’s a complicated question because nobody would like the scenario where we send a probe down, find out there’s a really complex ecosystem only to watch it die because we entered these terrestrial microbes.
On the other hand, I think most people would be very impatient with the idea that we don’t have the technology now or in the foreseeable future so even though there is a potential world of life there and all kinds of cool science, we’re just going to sit by and wait. That’s not just a selfish kind of thing. Scientific discoveries benefit millions and billions of people. The cure for cancer might be discovered in some sort of extraterrestrial organism. We don’t know! And so it’s always very difficult to know how careful you should be and how much you should leave for future generations to investigate.
I’ll give you this example because it’s an interesting one. Most people have heard of the Terracotta Army in China. That’s actually one of the largest archeological sites in the world, and what the Chinese did is they’re excavating it in stages. So they’ve excavated 10 or 15 percent of the site, and they’re leaving the coolest bits of the site alone. The argument is in 50 years they’ll have better technology, and in 50 years from that, even better technology. But sooner or later, and that argument can be made at any point in time. But sooner or later you have to say that the technology is good enough, or that I don’t have the patience to wait any longer. We’re going to explore the ocean or we’re going to open up that tomb. Maybe later on we regret it, but hindsight is always 20/20.
JN
So you laid out both sides of the argument really well in terms of we could wait for better technology but at the same time that could leave us waiting forever. Which side do you come down on?
DR. SMITH
My general tendency is that when the stakes are potentially quite high, I think we should explore. I think we should spend a considerable time and energy trying to figure out a way to do that with the least possible impact on the European community. Maybe there is a way to completely sterilize a space probe. Maybe there’s a way even if it’s not sterilized to limit the contamination. Maybe there’s some ways do some experimentation without sending in a probe. Those are all arguments that we should invest a lot of time, energy, and resources into. But Ultimately, bottom line, if you’ve minimized the risk as much as you can and someone were to say, “Do we go or do we not go investigate the European oceans?”, I would say, “Go.” It’s very important to humanity that we go. Once we’re as careful as we can be, we go.
JN
Great. Is there any other piece of the resolution that I haven’t dissected or that we haven’t already previously discussed here?
DR. SMITH
I’m sure there are all kinds of things
JN
That you would like to voice now, I suppose.
DR. SMITH
I think I’ve covered the main bases that I wanted to cover. I just wanted to wish people luck in their debate. If anybody gets too frustrated, that’s the nature of ethics.
JN
I guess as a concluding remark, which side do you think has the upper hand?
DR. SMITH
I think the side arguing against any sort of legal protections are clearly correct. And you can quote me on that.
JN
Great. I appreciate your time. Thanks, Dr. Smith.
DR. SMITH
Thank you!
JN
We’ll all benefit quite a bit from your expertise. I’ll be sure to provide a link your way so you’re able to keep up not only with this interview but the others that are going on, and thanks so much for being a part of the NASA-GW collaboration.
DR. SMITH
Cool! Thanks. It was fun.
JN
Have a good evening!
***PART TWO BEGINS***
JN
I’m Joseph Nelson and I’m with NASA debates, a partnership where universities are working with NASA’s interviewing experts and encourage debate and
dialogue among future students leaders about issues, in this case, discover extraterrestrial life.
I’m joined again by Dr. Kelly Smith to unpack a few questions that we’d like to tease out from the previous interview. Dr. Kelly Smith made a number of great points and we want to provide some more context and the warrants behind a number of claims he made.
To reiterate the topic we’re discussing for the NASA debates is resolved: an overriding ethical obligation to protect and preserve extraterrestrial microbial life and ecosystems should be incorporated into international law.
Previously Dr. Smith, who is a professor of religion and philosophy at Clemson University, I believe you took the following positions during our talk:
If any of this is correct or I need to correct the above statements, let me know.
DR. SMITH
Well all I would say is that you know when you say “human interest” that that covers a lot territory so you could be talking about the interests of a particular human are you could be talking humanity’s collective interests and those can be very different things. Just because Bob wants to do something that involves destroying a bunch of microbes that doesn’t really give him license. But if the humankind was to do something that’s really essential that’s a very different thing.
JN
So is there a narrowing scope of human interest that you think would accurately situate and encompass human ethical obligation to extraterrestrial life ?
DR. SMITH
Well one complication we’re sort of dancing around right here is comparing across different levels. So you’ve got individual microbes you get individual human beings groups of microbes groups and of humans and you get microbial species and the human species so it’s a lot simpler at least at first approximation if you compare like levels. So if you’re asking me does a human being have the right, even individual human being, have the right to kill an individual microbe? No problem. Does a group of human beings have the right to kill off a group microbes but not the entire species maybe it depends on what the humans wanted to do and how representative they are of other interests. But at the other end of the scale, if humanity has interests in killing microbes for some sort of compelling reason then that’s where I think it’s perfectly justifiable. You can have a debate about what’s justifiable.
JN
Ok so that gets to the core one of the following points here: why does EML, taken as a planetary whole, have significantly greater moral standing? Why do you say that?
DR. SMITH
So why does a species of microbes have more moral standing than an individual or microbe? Well first thing to say about this is that’s a large question. That’s about meta ethics and about the nature of ethical value.
The second thing to say that I may have discussed in the previous interview is that when you talk about ethical standing there’s a real tendency to get two very different kinds of confused. There’s the instrumental value of something whether it’s microbes or anything else which is you know the extent to which we can put it to use for various purposes and then there’s what’s typically referred to as intrinsic value, the value that something has in and of itself independent of any uses to which it might be put.
So I take it what you’re asking in this question you’re really interested in intrinsic value.
So why does a species of microbes have intrinsic value? My personal view on this is that the intrinsic moral value is ultimately tied in some sense to complexity and u uniqueness. So an individual microbial species is going to be unique, presumably. It’s very unlikely there’s an identical species anywhere else in the universe. And the information that that contains I think has intrinsic moral value.
This is also part of the reason why individual microbes have much less because I can kill off a lot of microbes still preserve informational content and complexity that makes the microbial species valuable.
JN
So a bit of parsing of the previous question: why do you believe EML taken in isolation, has any moral standing whatsoever? Just the information point that you made or is it something else?
DR. SMITH
Basically so it’s a much weaker claim for an individual microbe or small group of microbes, but there’s always the possibility that there’s some genetic variability microbial population of microbes and to the extent that’s the case then the group or individual has I just think we’re talking about, uhm, then that group or individual has some intrinsic moral value. When you’re talking about microbes, the individual value of a microbes or species or small group is very, very small. It might be telling if you’re asking me whether or not I should kill off a bunch of microbes is the only cost to me is delaying eating my peanut butter sandwich. At that point, I might say there’s enough intrinsic value to do that. It doesn’t take a lot, I think, to override the interests of small microbes.
JN
And you think that, it’s tough, because you don’t know what the value of an entire species of microbial life would be. But you think that perhaps human interests or human needs still override the value of an entire microbial species.
DR. SMITH
It certainly could. You have this debate on earth. People have debates all the time about the extinction of terrestrial species, and the level of human interests that need to be attained for getting rid of the snail darter, and it’s essentially the same kind of debate, except when it comes to extraterrestrial life systems, we don’t share any ecosystems. So the intrinsic argument is pretty much scientific. There’s a scientific argument that you shouldn’t destroy things you don’t understand, and I’m perfectly ok to go along with that. But if you’ve gleaned as much as you think you can from microbes, then at that point, I think it’s tough to make the case that individual microbes have much value.
JN
Ok, so, a pre requisite question is determining scientific value?
DR. SMITH
Well, there’s certainly empirical questions that would need to be answers in order to assess the instrumental answer. And on my view, the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value is not a hard and fast one. It’s not a bright line. But certainly, for example, it would be really critical to understand whether microbial life on mars represents a second genesis. Because if it does, then scientifically, it’s incredibly valuable, and we’d want to study it very carefully not only to understand the microbes themselves but also the principles that govern evolution and the origin of life. It may have a completely different hereditary system, and so it might take quite some time to figure out what genetic system its using, and how that affects its evolutionary dynamics. Those are empirical questions, but they have moral contexts.
JN
So in our previous call, one of the things we talked about in this exact space is the introduction of a probe that, let me give you a specific example, a hypothetical rather, and you tell me you believe one side whether that’s et life or human life takes precedent.
DR. SMITH
OK
JN
We introduced a probe that was going to have the potential to wipe out entire species on a planet. Do you think that that probe should be introduced for human exploration even if that is a possibility that the killing off a species of microbial life?
DR. SMITH
Well at the risk of sounding like a philosopher, I can’t really answer that question in a hard and fast way. Again, there are empirical questions here. One question would be to what extent do we need to the probe to find out more about microbial life. If it’s possible to find out more about microbial life without introducing the probe, then of course, we should investigate that first.
Another empirical question is what is the best estimate that introducing a single probe would really wreak havoc on the microbial ecosystem.
Human beings in general are very bad at dealing with low probability catastrophic events. It sounds good to say like, “You shouldn’t take the chance that this would wipe out a microbial species”, but if the chance is so infinitesimal that you can’t even estimate, then it’s hard to make that claim because if you really adopt that principle, all kinds of activities that humans engage in are going to be prohibited. So you need to be conservative and careful, but there’s risks in any human endeavor, particularly when you’re dealing with a completely unknown human species. If we’re going to investigate microbes at all, you’re going to take some risk of introducing contamination. The question becomes how much risk are we willing to introduce, what are the kinds of risk, what are the alternatives – and that’s largely an empirical debate.
JN
So had we taken every means necessary to scrub the probe and it’s the only way, but we know there’s the potential, then do you feel like you can make a moral judgment about this action?
DR. SMITH
Well, let’s stipulate a few things about your hypothetical. Let’s say that you have learned everything that you can learn about the microbes without introducing the possibility of contamination. And we believe that the amount of information that we can gather from the microbes is going to be significant. It’s a major scientific thing. Let’s suppose, too, that we’ve done everything that we reasonably can to minimize the risk of contamination, which would involve scrubbing the probe, but that may involve other things as well like sending the probe into an area that is isolated as it can be from other aspects of the ecosystems, so even if we screw up this area, it won’t spread planet wide. If that’s the situation, then I would say yes, we probably should go ahead and do that. And it may turn out very badly for the Martian of the microbes, but I think that’s at least partially balanced by the fact that human kind will benefit enormously, we expect, from the information that we glean. There are others things that we can do that I think I mentioned in the other interview. We could take samples and culture elsewhere, etc. etc.
JN
Great. With those stipulations in mind, that’s a great addition to how debaters will impact the topic.
Another area is, perhaps silly to ask, but we know debaters will question nearly every assumption in the debates. Why do you believe human beings have moral standing, even at all?
DR. SMITH
That’s a really large question.
JN
Right, right.
DR. SMITH
Without getting into deep ethical theory, I think the simple answer to that is to say something like this: if anything has moral standing, it’s probably human beings. If you want to make that even a little more qualified, you could say if human beings are to believe that anything as moral standing, it’s other human beings. The only thing that I can think of off the top of my head that would be a better candidate for moral standing would be God, maybe if you believe in that, or the entire system of living things in the universe, and it taken as a whole. So it’s probably a pretty good assumption that human beings have moral standing.
The interesting questions then become A) What else has moral standing and the really difficult one we’re wrestling with here, is that when two entities have moral standing that conflict, how do you adjudicate?
And as I said before, I think that one common tendency in ethical debates is to try to have your cake and eat it too by being very vague. People will say, “Well, we should preserve the Martian microbes of course. . .”, well, no one is going to disagree with that. I’m not for killing microbes for no reason. But it’s not as though that answers any difficult questions. So in the hypothetical that you just gave, if someone comes up with a principle that we should preserve Martian microbes, that really doesn’t answer any questions unless its an absolute principle. As in, you cannot take any actions in any way that harm microbial life. I would argue that’s an absurd position from an ethical standpoint among other reasons.
JN
Ok, so, I like the framing if anything has moral value, it’s humans. Good way to think about it. Is there a condensed way—a few characteristics that you could outline that highlight the instrumental or intrinsic value of humans that wouldn’t get into the deep ethics but would allow us to get a high-level idea of the value of humans?
DR. SMITH
Well, everything I say at this point is going to be fairly controversial, particularly with other ethicists that have different thoughts about why humans have value. My personal view is that ultimately ethical value is tied, in some sense, to uniqueness and complexity. So human beings have ethical value in part because we’re social, cultural, rational beings. As such, we don’t mirror the near biological complexity but we also create cultural and scientific complexity. By virtue of that, we have a higher moral standing than creatures that don’t do that. Microbes, in some sense to me, are fairly easy case. Because they’re at the way other end of the continuum. The much more complicated case would be, you know, if you find an ecosystem on another planet that by terrestrial standards is fairly advanced, so, you know, they have fairly rich ecosystem in their predators and prey and multicellular organisms, and maybe even things that have some sort of basic social arrangement. Sponges, and weird thing…. At that point, it becomes much more difficult to apply the kind of criteria that I want to apply. I would say in principle it’s still doable.
JN
Perhaps, I think, we got at the core at what we need to consider before introducing some human aspects that could erase EML organisms. Is there any other value judgments that you would make about when humans override microbial life or aside from assuming aside from studying and minimizing our harm to microbial life—are there any other qualifiers that you’ve identified that would be essential to determining whether or not we could explore or perhaps harm microbial life?
DR. SMITH
The most obvious one is any other countervailing human interests. Given there are people who disagree with me and think that microbial life has intrinsic value and should be preserved, even if I think that claim is false, I think they, as human beings, have clear moral standing so, to the extent that I can, I shouldn’t just ride rough shot over their feelings. One way of putting it, let’s suppose we’ve put this to a vote. I would be very surprised at this. Let’s just suppose most human beings that that if we find microbial life on Mars, we should leave Mars completely alone. If that’s the case, it becomes a moral consideration. Well, ok, even if I think they are mistaken in that belief, if human kind really thinks this is a value, it becomes a value. Humans create value. I personally think that’s extremely unlikely to happen.
What you have, then, when you debate environmental ethics is that you have self selection. You have people that are more inclined to think that nonhuman entities have value. So the people that do environmental ethics tend to be people that believe that. People that don’t really think that microbes have any particular value, they don’t specialize in environmental ethics because they don’t think about that kind of thing. I’m sort of an odd person in that I do environmental ethics in part, but I’m sort of on the humanistic, pragmatic side of that discipline.
JN
That’s exactly why we really value your opinion for being a minority but not of course it’s not necessarily wrong, but because it’s a self-selecting field as you described.
I think that’s what we wanted to tease out from follow ups.
DR. SMITH
JN
Unless there’s anything that you would like to add, of course, at this time.
DR. SMITH
Can’t think of anything off the top of my ahead. I’m sure there’s lots of questions we haven’t explored, but we’ll leave that to the debaters.
JN
Thanks so much for taking the time! I really appreciate it, Dr. Smith.
DR. SMITH
JN
We’ll transcribe these, and I’ll be sure to get those to you, so you also have a transcription of our discussion.
DR. SMITH
Sounds great!
JN
Yup! Talk soon. Bye.