Would it be moral to send one?
There are at least two flawed assumptions in this piece.
8 thoughts on “Generation Ships”
Comments are closed.
Would it be moral to send one?
There are at least two flawed assumptions in this piece.
Comments are closed.
Just wow.
Really quite amazing how blithely otherwise educated people can wander completely past the entire concept of ‘Unknown unknowns’, and application of the precautionary principle to the action/choice “Do nothing.”
Hint to ethicist: We’re an astounding statistical outlier already.
Regardless, looking for funding for Kickstarter for “Perfectly safe housing.” Yes, it looks like a coffin with an IV drip, but there’s clearly a vast untapped market.
It came off as a weird defense of authoritarianism but without the courage to come out and say so.
One flaw is thinking we need generation ships to reach other stars (assuming no FTL) which can be done on the fringes as populations expand outward.
Life comes with bounds. We all have them and all have to figure out how to either live with them or get beyond them.
No child ever gets to decide the life it will be born into. The first generation are presumably volunteers? Where’s the ethical question? The futures comes without guarantees. Suppose the earth is wiped out and the only humans left alive were on a generation ship? How do those ethics work out now?
You know you’ve wandered into the moral outhouse when the government combines with academia to pay for studies of “Practical ethics”.
Those of us who worry that their doing so limits the children’s right to an open future should be even more worried by locking children in to a much greater extent than dreamt of by the Amish.
I might agree if “open future” wasn’t an obvious euphemism for “what the state wants you to believe.”
A pointless article, as he says: “Given that generation ships remain a long way off, it’s not a pressing concern” and we already live on the “biggest generation ship of them all – our planet”
Where were these ethics folks when the question was whether people should have children under the Obama Administration, subjecting them to all sorts of dangerous and unknowable threats and locked into a project of fundamental social transformation that can’t possibly have a good ending?
Ethics: a method of avoiding responsibility for any direct action by making a Utopian elitist argument and not acting at all. Best when discussing issues that are not yet possible.
I guess it was unethical for the first hominids to leave Africa,,,for proto-Americans to cross the land bridge to Alaska. For Columbus to sail west….for the pioneers to cross the Ohio, and Mississippi rivers….
What a scared and petty person.