On Universal Ethics
I just finished Coyote Horizon by Allen Steele. It is the fourth book directly in the Coyote series of space colonization novels (so it’s sci-fi). While in the rest of the series the author engages in the occasional philosophical musings, they are nonetheless quite a bit lighter in tone, despite the drama and tragedy that you can only assume would follow human colonists to another planet. In Coyote Horizon, however, Steele holds no punches and assails religious mythologies head on. What he uses is something intended to serve as the primary system of beliefs shared by all the starfaring races of the universe. The form of this system (referred to as a higher code of ethics called Sa’Tong) dispenses with the mysticism of religious trappings and instead boils down such dogma into logical constituent parts, of which there are five (each is called a Codicil).
Now, I am going to list the text of them here, and my intent is to solicit and offer commentary on what they represent. To help frame your thoughts, let me describe the context in which I present them.
Given that humans are not the only beings in the universe capable of interstellar travel; given that the evidence for a divine power/creator appears to preclude its existence; and given that this life is the only one any such being gets (that is, no reincarnation, and no afterlife); construct what will most likely pass as a universally agreeable system of beliefs to guide the behaviors of all such beings.
There is, of course, one more thing I have to mention. Since we have not yet discovered alien life forms, we can only speculate about what form they will take. It is quite conceivable that their level of sentience and awareness compared to ours is in the same proportion ours is to an ant or even a bacterium. If that were the case, communication between us and them would probably be impossible. Nevertheless, let’s assume for this article that all beings capable of interstellar travel have awareness and sentience that is roughly on par with our own, or at least compatible in some way.
The establishment of “intelligent” life across the universe would indicate that humans, while potentially unique as a species, are not unique in the intelligent life sense. Thus we can surmise that any spacefaring beings would have gone through stages of understanding not unlike our own. Emerging into early “consciousness” they would have struggled to make sense of the world around them. Their limited understanding at this point would force them to seek explanations to fill the gaps in their knowledge, and thus would be born their various religions. Simultaneous with emergence into consciousness is a continuing trend from earlier points of their evolution: cooperation and altruism, wherein the group is rewarded (success in evolution occurs by achieving greater reproductive success) for playing nicely together and creating win-win situations out of non-zero-sum situations. Religions would have served both to explain the universe and to reinforce the cooperative/altruistic behaviors that increased the species’s reproductive success. Unfortunately, those same religions can be usurped for militaristic purposes, especially in cases where the the game has become zero-sum (like when scarce resources mean that only some members of a species can eat), and when the dogma of such religions creates differing societal classes (the chosen/saved/enlightned, and everyone else). So this is the path down which evolutionary processes would have led the ancestors of pretty much any spacefaring species. Their religions would have asserted (since space is big, and it’s hard for two intelligent species to meet in the short term) that they were unique in the universe, that they were created as special creatures, and possibly that the universe was created just for them (such hubris!). And they would have been able to hold on to those beliefs indefinitely if they had never met any other spacefaring species. But a funny thing tends to happen as these species develop more sophisticated instruments for studying the cosmos: they begin to understand the limitations of their religions for explaining the universe, and this, coupled with first contact, might cause them to eventually abandon the mystical dogma in favor of something more logical. Since their religions have been teaching them certain kinds of lessons on cooperation, they are already equipped with instructions that are inherently compatible with those held by other species.
Thus the form of a universal system of beliefs (I hesitate to call it a religion since there are connotations to religion that are not appropriate or even necessarily communicable across species) might have the following characteristics.
1. Self-deification to establish the supreme importance and specialness of “sentient” life forms. This also distances a species from its reliance on an external supreme being.
2. Recognition of the deification of others; this requires some form of the Golden Rule, which has been emphasized as a characteristic of every human religion surviving today (it makes sense in the context outlined above).
3. Moral code that follows from understanding and accepting the first two characteristics. If there is no god and no afterlife, then how we treat one another becomes the most important consideration.
What other characteristics can you think of?
Steele, in Coyote Horizon (142), presents us with a set of five codicils, truths that speak to the best possible set of behaviors that mindful sentient beings can exercise in their dealings with one another, regardless of species.
1. You are God, for God is the creation of the self.
2. If you accept the first principle, you must also accept the fact that everyone else is God, and therefore must be treated as such, with the same amount of reverence and respect.
3. In order to obey the second codicil, you must never take any action that will harm others or yourself.
4. Likewise, your inaction must not lead to the harm of others or yourself.
5. Wrongful acts must be atoned with righteous acts of equal or greater proportion.
As you can see, these five principles can be distilled from just about every human religion, and it’s not too incredible to discover that omnipotent gods are unnecessary if the best possible set of behaviors can be so readily gleaned from them. What sort of civilization would we have if we could all embrace these tenets? What kinds of art, scholarship, prayers and rituals might support them? Are they even achievable?
