Robot rights

[Rynn]

I think we're defining 'morality' differently. In my experience, people tend to speak of 'morality' in terms of the idea that there are objectively true ideas of 'right' and 'wrong' - like there is a giant invisible scoreboard in the sky that says (for example) that genocide is objectively 'wrong'. However, I would argue that there is no such thing as 'right' or 'wrong' in any objective sense in this context. Killing millions or billions of people may be something we find distasteful in the extreme, but the universe doesn't 'care' in any objective sense, nor do their deaths 'matter'. The Earth will still turn, the Sun will still burn, and the universe won't care.

We definitely agree in spirit if not in letter. What you're describing here I'd call "absolute morality", the idea that morals are some sort of external phenomenon to humanity (often touted as being universal or spiritual truths). I don't see any evidence that that exists. But it could be argued that objective morals exist given that innate tendency for specific social behaviours is an observed biological trait. Of course this in no way means they are "correct" or anything of the sort.

Going back to the issue of morality as social control mechanism - by deeply conditioning people from an early age to react emotionally to some things as 'right' or 'wrong' without really thinking about it (a common way that morality works in my experience), it is possible to get them to engage in socially desired behaviors without constant reinforcement - so a sort of 'autopilot' social control mechanism that can be made to operate regardless of any objective/experimental information for or against what it advocates or what future generations might think about the same subject.

Anyway.

Terragen understanding of developmental psychology and sociology is a lot more advanced than ours. It's possible they might be able to deeply ingrain moral systems in a society to subtly exist over long periods of time. This would be very important for generation ships IMO. Aside from overlooking the economic and ecological aspects of such a craft I think people often overlook the social engineering challenges. If your aim is for the craft to survive intact to the destination system then you have to consider what sort of culture and social institutions would be likely to last and keep the inhabitants alive. Exactly what that would be I don't know, but I suspect it would be very different to the assumptions of the stereotypical libertarian space cadet. You really don't want a system where it's possible to wake up and find someone now has a monopoly on the oxygen supply! Or that a revolution has punched a hole in the hull and there's not enough people alive to sustain the ark.

It might be interesting to try to 'design' other systems of 'morality' that different races and clades might use in the setting. And give thought to how they all get along in the whole structure of Terragen civ. For that matter, we shouldn't assume that the various human civs in the setting share our ideas of morality, either in whole or in part.

That would be interesting. A start would be to choose alien axioms and work outwards from there. For example: for a clade that has no concept of individuality and thus things like "I think therefore I am" make no sense.