Moral Status and Moral Agency in Science Fiction

Kantian theories on moral status tightly weave together rationality, agency, dignity, and personhood. A common complaint about these theories set the bar for membership in the moral community too high: they leave out human zygotes, embryos, fetuses, young children, and anyone with diminished cognitive capacity. Furthermore, the Kantian tradition tends to equate non-persons with objects, placing all non-person living things outside the moral community. This entails that we have no direct moral obligations to non-persons and have no reason to directly consider the interests of non-persons in our moral deliberations.

Kantians do follow a typical pattern of argumentation in discussions of moral status. This pattern stipulates that in order for an entity E to be in the class ‘morally considerable being’ E must possess some property P. A great deal has been written trying to establish the proper account of P, including whether P is merely necessary or also sufficient for membership. A Kantian theory of moral status claims that agency is both necessary and sufficient for moral considerability. In other words, for a Kantian, the relationship between agency and moral status is such that possession or privation of agency determines moral status.

Literature, especially science fiction and fantasy literature, sometimes articulates an alternative to this Kantian view. The narratives I’m thinking about do more than challenge the idea that agency is the relevant property for moral status; they question the direction of the relationship between agency and moral status. Consider Orson Scott Card’s novel Speaker for the Dead. This novel is the sequel to the more well-known Ender’s Game. In that first novel, humanity wipes out the only other known intelligent life form, the Formics, due to a misunderstanding combined with an aggressive military policy. Set 3000 years after the first novel, Speaker for the Dead still has Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggins as the protagonist. Now referred to as Ender the Xenocide, he is still alive due to time dilation caused by traveling at near lightspeed. From time to time he appears as the Speaker for the Dead, an individual who tries to get the rest of humanity to mature in their relationships with others. The precipitating event of Speaker for the Dead is the discovery of another intelligent life form, the Pequeninos, on the planet Lusitania. The narrative centers on Ender’s attempts at making sense of how humans can coexist with the Pequeninos as well as each other.

Before you learn anything about the narrative, however, the opening epigraph presents the alternative way of conceptualizing the relationship between agency and moral status.

“Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence.

Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity, it means we have.”

—Demosthenes, Letter to the Framlings

The cryptic nature of the terminology is deciphered later in the novel. Referred to as the Nordic Order of Foreignness, it delineates a theory of moral status:

• Utlänning: otherlander, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country

• Framling: the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world

• Raman: the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species

• Varelse: true alien, no conversation is possible; they might be intelligent or self-aware, but we cannot know it

• Djur: the dire beast, that comes in the night with slavering jaws.

There is a great deal to unpack here. For my purpose, merely consider that the different places in the order are about belonging to a community. Sometimes this community is defined by location—city, country, or world. Sometimes this community is defined by species or the ability to communicate. From our neighbors to the utlänning through the raman, the individuals of these communities are morally considerable. The varelse and djur are outside the community because we cannot communicate with them or they pose an immediate and serious threat to our continued existence. But they are recognized as something other than mere thing. Already we see a critique of the Kantian view in having a pluralistic and scalar approach to moral status, and even the possibility that things outside the moral community are not mere things.

But it is the last line of the epigraph that presents the deepest challenge to the relationship between agency and moral status. The last line reads “When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity, it means we have.” In other words, the development of agency is not a threshold that once passed means the entity in question is part of the moral community. Agency is something that occurs when the entity in question is recognized, through an act of will, as morally considerable. The relationship between moral agency and moral status is thus reversed.

This view of the moral status-moral agency relationship, to me at least, is not a surprising element of stories as opposed to analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy is conceptual analysis, often adopting an essentialist view about the nature of concepts that begins with identifying individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for membership in a class (notwithstanding Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance) and utilizing arguments by definition to place entities within or beyond the category. Stories, however, include the bildungsroman narrative style. This is the educational story that tracks the moral and psychological development of characters. Thus, instead of an atemporal, static, logical-mathematical approach to understanding the place of things in the world, we get a narrative of change. These stories track transformations by providing a detailed account of movement over time. Part of this transformation is the move from one side of a threshold—a mere thing—to the other—a morally considerable being. But it also tracks the maturation of the subject even once it passes the first threshold. It charts the development from arational, self-absorbed, entities to—hopefully—a mature moral agent with reason and empathy. Speaker for the Dead suggests that humanity, both individually and as a whole, is still in the early stages of this maturation process. We can barely recognize other human beings who do not live in our neighborhood, who have different beliefs, different physical characteristics, speak different languages, or who have different interests as members of the moral community. We have barely reached the level where other human beings are raman, let alone utlänning

Speaker for the Dead and other narratives go beyond suggesting an interesting alternative to the Kantian view of the moral status-moral agency relationship. The mere suggestion that granting moral status is the mark of agency and not that agency is the mark of moral status also questions the assumed manner in which discussion of the grounds of moral status takes place. We should not be looking to see if entity E has property P. We should be looking inward, asking what it takes to be a moral agent, and what the conferrence of moral values on others tells us about ourselves, both individually and collectively. This view suggests that we should not be spending so much time articulating and scrutinizing theories moral status used too often to justify keeping others morally distant. Our moral lives may be better spent finding ways that bring others closer to us, thereby maturing and developing our exercise of moral agency regardless of the physical or psychological properties possessed in the entity that is valued.

James Okapal

James M. Okapal is Professor of Philosophy at Missouri Western State University. His research focuses on the intersection of ethics and literature with special interest in theories of moral status and friendship. He has presented and published over a dozen articles in this area focusing primarily on science fiction and fantasy. He is currently the editor for McFarland Publishing’s Ethics and Culture series, is co-Chair of the Philosophy and Culture Area at the Pop Culture Association National Conference, and is a member of the ethics committees of MOSAIC Health Care Systems and the Pop Culture Association.