Imagine that the world you inhabit consists of essentially two broad categories of things – the group of others like yourself, which you belong to, and everything else in your environment. You have a keen awareness of yourself as a distinct member of that group, but your membership is the thing of most vital importance to you. The others are family, and though members are born and die, the family is the only permanent thing, as you navigate through the world together.
Your identity is never tied to one particular place. Your group moves over a large area spanning tens of kilometers every day, never stopping anywhere very long. You experience the place together, then you move on. What matters is the group, always. That is your identity. Where you go, you go together.
Your family has some 20 or 30 members, though it can sometimes be much more. You know every one of them by name, and you know that each of them has many times acted in your defense, in the same way that you’ve often acted in theirs, and will unreservedly do so again many times in the future. You experience love, and when one of you is hurt or in physical distress, you will often take desperate, even hopeless measures to try to protect them. Death of one of you brings intense grief, and this is particularly acute when it involves the loss of your child.
Other groups much like yours live nearby. While there is an unmistakable competition for resources, you’ve never really done battle with them in any serious way. They possess a language which is very similar to yours, and communication sometimes passes between you, though with some difficulty owing to a somewhat different dialect. You have no way to know that others of your kind, elsewhere in the world, use a language you would not recognize or understand.
Stories are recalled and passed on to others in the group. You have knowledge of certain practices, perhaps for obtaining a specific type of food, that are unique to your group, having been discovered somewhere in the past, and having to be taught to others when they are young. You’ve learned to expect a certain continuity in your environment, which has remained relatively unchanged throughout your group’s living memory.
Lately, however, something appears to be changing. Within the lifetime of the older members of your group, there is still memory of a time when the organisms you eat were much more plentiful. The reasons for this aren’t clear to you. As well, there are an increasing number of hazards present in your environment, which weren’t there before. They are nonliving things, whose purpose is not obvious, but in which you can get entangled, which can easily mean death. Others of these unfamiliar things are easily mistaken for food, but they can’t be digested and will make you sick when you eat them.
You probably don’t think in terms of possessing a sophisticated intelligence, but you do know that your group’s capabilities permit you to function at an advantage in your environment. You’re able to anticipate and plan in a way that other organisms can’t, and you can communicate strategies and tactics among your group, in ways that make it far easier to overcome the defenses put up by the prey species you use for food, or those who would otherwise prey on you. You’re able to understand the world around you, and to anticipate both its dangers and its opportunities. All things considered, life goes on for you and your family unit, much as it always has.
Now consider your world with the introduction of one more factor.
You share the world with others of a different kind – perhaps you have a term for the concept of an alien intelligence? These others don’t look like you, and though they primarily operate in a different environment, they frequently make incursions into yours, thus bringing you into contact. To the extent that the two of you would be able to learn of the other over time, you would discover that there are a number of similarities between you. Both have highly developed social structures and interpersonal bonds. Both possess a sense of self, an awareness of being unique individuals. Both have knowledge of what constitutes proper behaviour towards other members of the group. Which has superior cognitive abilities is a debatable, and probably immaterial point, as having sprung from a very different environment from yours, the requirements were quite different.
The key distinction, the differentiator that gives them every advantage over you, is that their ability to make tools and to manipulate features of their environment far surpasses yours.
It gives them the ability to construct vehicles and structures which can be inserted into your environment, and which you need to avoid. It gives them the ability to remove things from your environment which you need for your survival. And, most alarming of all, it gives them the ability to kill you.
And this, some of them often choose to do.
Consider yourself as a member of that group, clan or family, living in that world. What would you say is the proper moral position to be taken by those others, relative to you? Would you concede that a framework which favors “survival of the strongest” should apply? Would it make a difference that those others, themselves, have painstakingly and largely moved beyond such a primitive standard, after thousands of years of killing each other? That they’ve largely adopted much different standards for how they treat each other, though they have virtually none with regards to how they treat you? Would you be OK with that?
Or would you perhaps argue that their proper course of action is to push out their moral frontier to include you?
This is where we are today. Humankind faces an urgent moral question, intricately wrapped up with the environmental crisis which is our failing stewardship of the Earth’s oceans. We need to be able to see the world from the perspective of creatures so physiologically different from ourselves, yet in other ways so alike. Our learning to empathize will, in the end, be critical to our own chances for success, and even to the prospect of our own survival.
Please join the conversation, and let’s work together with people around the world to dramatically improve how our species treats others so richly deserving of better from us.