Who’s In, and Who’s Out?
As humanity stands on the edge of profound change, we must clearly affirm where we stand on human dignity—and who we believe is worthy of it.
Each of us—myself included—draws a line somewhere: a boundary between who belongs and who doesn’t. Who’s in, and who’s out?
It’s not just a social question—it’s moral, political, and spiritual too.
To us as social animals: Who will I treat with respect—and even associate with?
To our inner souls: Who has intrinsic worth, and who doesn’t?
To the policymaker: Who gets to participate as equals in public life—and share in public goods?
To followers of Christ: Whose feet am I willing to wash?
Every version of these questions asks us to take a position—on human dignity.
And in our daily lives, we all answer them through our choices, whether intentionally or not.
Humans have grappled with these questions for generations.
But these questions are especially urgent now—because of the sweeping transformations that may reshape the human race within our lifetimes.
We need to be concrete in our values before these changes come—so we’re not tempted to rationalize our way into betraying them when the stakes are at their peak and “winners” and “losers”emerge.
We need to take a position on human dignity—before AI, AGI, and humanoid robots are advanced enough to replace human bodies and even human connection at scale.
We need to take a position on the intrinsic value of life—before therapeutics emerge that could extend human lifespans by decades, or even indefinitely.
We need to take a position on our relationship with Earth—and its natural resources—before we expand to other worlds and risk exporting a disregard for life and dignity beyond this planet.
So who’s in—and who’s out?
Our family and friends?
People who annoy us? “Weirdos”?
People who can help us get “ahead”?
Those who went to a rival school—or cheer for a rival team?
What about people with questionable integrity?
Who’s in and who’s out?
Returning citizens?
Foreign nationals?
What if they are chronically sick—or infectious?
What if they’re uneducated?
Or homeless? Or poor?
Who’s in and who’s out?
What about children—and others who can’t advocate for themselves?
What about people with “disabilities”?
What if it’s a genetic condition—versus someone who drove drunk and ended up paralyzed?
Who’s in and who’s out?
What about people who voted for “the bad guys”?
What about criminals? What if they’ve repented?
What about people who have committed heinous crimes—like massive fraud or genocide?
What about someone we could exploit—if we wanted to?
What about someone we’re afraid of—for any of a thousand rational or irrational reasons?
Who’s in and who’s out?
Even if it costs us money, is in comfortable, or requires sacrifice?
Where do we draw the line?
Who do we treat with dignity and respect?
Who’s in—and who’s out?
How We Should Treat Aliens
Thinking about how to treat aliens, helps us think about how we treat each other.
How should I treat a glass of water? Here are a few gut reactions:
I should not shatter it senselessly on the floor. Effort and resources went into making the glass. Destroying it for no reason would be wasteful.
I should keep it clean and in good working order. That way, there’s no stress because it’s ready for use. There’s no need to inconvenience someone else with even a trivial amount of unnecessary suffering.
I should use it in a way that’s helpful. It would be exploitative, in a way, if I took a perfectly good glass and used it as a weapon. If it’s there, I might as well use it to quench thirst, or do something else positive with it. Even glasses are better used for noble purposes than ignoble ones.
If I’m thirsty, I should drink the water. After all, it’s here and it won’t be here for ever - life is short.
And finally, if someone else is thirsty, I should share what I have. After all, we’re all in this together, trying to survive in a lonely universe.
How should I treat an alien?
The thought experiment of the glass of water is interesting because I don’t know how the glass wants to be treated. I can’t communicate with the glass, so I don’t even know if it has preferences. It is after all, just a glass.
And because the glass doesn’t have any discernible preferences, all my suppositions on how to treat the glass are a reflection of my own intuitions about how other beings should be treated. The question is a revealing one, if one chooses to play along with the thought experiment, because I’m asking a question that’s usually reserved for sentient being about an inanimate object. I can more easily access my true, unbiased, preference because I’m thinking about how to treat a glass of water and not, say, my wife and children.
Helpfully, asking the question revealed some of my deep-seeded moral principles. Each of these intuitions are builds on one of the statements I made above:
Don’t be wasteful - energy, and resources are finite.
Be kind - other beings feel pain so it’s good not to inflict suffering unnecessarily.
Have good intentions - I have the chance to make the world better, using my talents for good purposes. The world can be cruel, so why not make it more tolerable for others.
Uncertainty matters - Sooner is better than later because we don’t know how much time we have left. If you have an opportunity, take it. The opportunity cost of time is high, and the future has a risk of not happening the way we want it to.
Cooperate if you can - we are all in this universe together, nobody can help us but each other. Life is precious, beautiful, and so rare in this universe, so we should try to keep it going even if it requires sacrifices.
Like a glass of water, if we were to come across an alien species, we would not know what their preferences were. But unlike a glass of water, the aliens might actually have preferences - presumably, the aliens wouldn’t be inanimate objects.
And let’s assume for a minute that we out to respect the moral preferences of aliens, though I acknowledge that whether or not to recognize the moral standing of aliens is a different question, which we may not answer affirmatively.
But let’s say we did.
How we should treat aliens (and how they might treat us)
What this thought experiment helps to reveal is that we have meta-constraints that shape our moral intuitions and in turn, affect our moral preferences.
It matters to our morality that resources and energy are finite. It matters to our morality that we feel mental and physical pain. It matters that the world is an imperfect, sometimes brutal, place. It matters that the future is uncertain. It matters that life is fragile and that for the entirety of our history we’ve never found it anywhere else. Our reality is shaped by these constraints and manifest in how we think about moral questions.
So, like many difficult questions I only have a probabilistic answer to the question of how we should treat aliens: I think it depends. If they face the same sorts of constraints we do, maybe we should treat them as we treat humans. If they face the same constraints we do - like finite resources, uncertainty, and the feeling of physical pain - maybe we could also expect them to treat us with a strangely familiar morality, that even feels human.
But what if? What if the aliens’ face no resource constraints? What if their life spans are nearly infinite? What if their predictive modeling of the future is nearly perfect? What if they know of life existing infinitely across the universe? If some of these “facts” we believe to be universal, are only earthly, it’s quite possible that the aliens’ moral framework is, pun intended, quite alien to our own.
Maybe we’ll encounter aliens 10,000 years or more from now, and maybe it’ll be next week. Who knows. I hope if you are a human from the far out future, relative to my existence in the 21st Century, I hope you find this primitive thought experiment helpful as you prepare to make first contact. More than anything, I’m trying to offer an approach to even contemplate the question of alien morality: one tack we can take is to look at the meta-constraints that affect us at the species and planetary level, and then see how the aliens’ constraints compare.
But for all us living now, in the year of our lord, two thousand twenty two, I think there’s still a takeaway. Thinking about how we should treat glasses of water and aliens provides a window into our own sense of right and wrong. Maybe we can use these same discerned principles to better understand other cultures and other periods of history. Do other cultures have different levels of scarcity or uncertainty, for example? Maybe that affects their culture’s moral attitudes, and we can use that insight to get along better.
If we’re lucky, doing this sort of comparative moral analysis will make the people and species we share this planet with feel a little less, well, alien, while we figure out who else is out there in the universe.
