Abstract
The search for biosignatures and for life itself draws upon a strong background intuition that life matters in a deep way. Not just human life or sentient life, but life as such. Accordingly, biocontamination is a matter which concerns ethics as well as the protection of opportunities for science. However, this idea that life has value is a difficult intuition to tease out and understand, and even harder to justify. It is difficult to make sense of in the light of “the parallel case,” i.e., our largely instrumental treatment of microbial life here on Earth. In what follows, some tentative moves will be made in order to help us to understand the widespread intuition about life’s importance. These moves will then help us to understand what is problematic about crashing tardigrades onto the lunar surface, and our ethical responsibilities in relation to any microbial life found in situ elsewhere in the Solar System. The approach does not call upon rights theory, or focus upon individual microbes as the bearers of such rights. Attention is shaped by a more aggregate focus, and the concept of intrinsic value is qualified in order to draw out the relational dimensions of human valuing, and the pragmatic dimensions of an inclusion of the standing of microbial life within a social ethic.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy |
| Editors | Octavio Alfonso Chon Torres, Ted Peters, Joseph Seckbach, Richard Gordon |
| Publisher | WILEY-BLACKWELL |
| Pages | 113-134 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781119711186 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781119711162 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Oct 2021 |
Keywords
- Ethics
- Tardigrades
- microbial life
- planetary protection