The Search for Extraterrestrial
Ethics
Most terrestrial religions provide ethical and moral guidance, and it is unlikely that a religion of an advanced planetary system will lack this feature. However, there are many different religious ethical systems on Earth. Moreover they gain their authority through revelations by different gods of what they have in mind for their own set of followers. Each generally wants exclusive adoration for itself and requires exaction of penalties for failure to do this. Many offer exclusive rights to their believers, usually at the expense of nonbelievers. Many advocate elimination of non-believers or guarantee their eternal damnation. Not surprisingly, the ethical codes of terrestrial religions are a source of conflict.
If Galactic civilizations are to achieve the long lifetimes needed for extraterrestrial communication, these threats to stability have to be overcome. If they are successful, they will have achieved system of ethics and morals in concordance with a unifying ecumenical spirituality.
The distinction between ethics and morals drawn here is that put forward by the Fowler brothers. They defined ethics as the theory of morals and morals as the practice of ethics. More specifically, in religion ethics is a set of commandments intended to apply to circumstances in general, whereas morals are the spirit in which these commandments are to be carried out in specific circumstances. Thus we view the eightfold way of Buddhism, the rules for the good and the evil man in the Bhagavad Gita, and the ten commandments in the Jewish and Christian religions as the codes that represent the ethics of those systems. Whereas the injunction to enter a state where there is no desire, or to perform fully the tasks of one’s caste, or to love one’s neighbor, these represent the approach to morals in each system.
Whether promulgated by a god or a profound human thinker, a system of ethics clearly is directed at life within the social environment of a civilization. On Earth they typically provide a set of guidelines that enables a society or religion to hold together and not be flung apart by quarrels or worse among its members. While superficially these codes appear to be maintaining the status quo, on a deeper level they represent a social elaboration of the ethic of survival. If a society is torn asunder by internal dissent, then the probability of the survival of the individuals in that society is reduced. The same applies to a civilization made up of individual societies when they have the capacity to destroy each other.
In this respect, a feature of our own evolution that may be present at in the history of an extra-terrestrial civilizations is our frequent recourse to violent wars, often with a religious justification but usually with the goal of gaining control of essential resources. It is likely that this tendency always emerges as the population of an intelligent species grows on planets where evolution involves a struggle for survival. Furthermore these wars are capable of spurring the advance of destructive technology to the point where it can threaten the existence of civilization itself, by such things as nuclear weapons, or biological and chemical agents.
Our hope, of course, is that we will make contact with a civilization that has evolved past this warring phase by developing an ethical system that enables peaceful integration of the different factions on its planet. The avoidance of self-destruction is the key to becoming an advanced planetary civilization.
So if we do receive communications from a planet with an advanced civilization, we would expect that a stable system of ethics has been developed governing the behavior of self-conscious agents towards each other. The necessary ethical system is likely to appear within their religion as a series of commandments or admonitions that provide for guidance of behavior within their social system or interplanetary network. Such a network might exist if the average lifetime of an advanced civilization is a million years or more. The content of their ethics would be of great interest to us. It would be more important perhaps than any of the scientific advances gained by such a civilization.
On Earth recognition of the need for a global system of ethics became widespread by the end of the Second World War, which saw the appalling destruction of cities, infrastructure, and the environment, depletion of resources, and killing of 62 million people (40 million civilians). Members of the newly formed United Nations acknowledged that disregard and contempt for human rights had led to these barbarous acts. It was also clear from demonstration of the use of nuclear weapons that human civilization might not survive future wars of this type.
A Universal Declaration of Human Rights was therefore prepared by representatives of different religious and philosophical beliefs from the countries that were members of the U.N. Agreed to in 1948 after nearly two years of debate, This Declaration was presented as a common ethical standard of achievement for all people and all nations on Earth. As such, the declaration gives some idea of the type of agreement we might hope to find in civilizations that have successfully avoided self-destruction by global warfare.
It is unlikely that an extraterrestrial civilization is so naiive as to think that the granting of rights is all that is needed to achieve internal peace and stability. Therefore they are likely to have a code of obligations that accompany the granting of rights.