Celestial Ethics

Some superpowerful aliens arrive one day and offer to ship us off to their galaxy if we’d like. It’s really nice there, they assure us, and they have the photographs to prove it. Our standard of living will go up at least 20% and we can all live at the beach. But if we accept they will have to destroy planet earth (something about an intergalactic highway they’re building)–the choice is ours. We can take all the animals with us, if we prefer; transportation isn’t a problem. We decide to take them up on their offer. As we leave earth in their spacious space ship we watch as a planet-sized jet of flame incinerates earth behind us. The oceans instantly evaporate, the atmosphere blows away, all traces of life are destroyed; what remains is a smoking expanse of melted rubble. And it will stay like this for all eternity. Wouldn’t you feel bad about about this act of cosmic vandalism? Wouldn’t you feel you had done something wrong? Something of great value had been destroyed–something of beauty, interest, and fecundity (see my Climate Change entry). This shows that the earth is valuable for reasons that transcend its instrumental value to us.