Gary D O'Brien

Directed panspermia is the deliberate seeding of lifeless planets with microbes, in the hopes that, over evolutionary timescales, they will give rise to a complex self-sustaining biosphere on the target planet. Due to the immense distances and timescales involved, human beings are unlikely ever to see the fruits of their labours. Such missions must therefore be justified by appeal to values independent of human wellbeing. In this article, I investigate the values that a directed panspermia mission might promote. Paying special attention to the outcome in which sentient animals evolve, I argue that we have strong reasons to believe the value of a mission would be negative. Research on wild animal suffering has shown that there is a huge amount of suffering among wild animals on Earth. I argue that there are structural features of evolution by natural selection which explain the prevalence of suffering on Earth and make it predictable that suffering would prevail on the target planet too. Finally, using insights from procreative ethics I argue on non-consequentialist grounds that creators have duties to their sentient creations which cannot be met in directed panspermia missions.

The relation between self-ownership and world-ownership poses a dilemma for Libertarians. Either self-ownership entails rights over worldly resources or it doesn’t. If it does, then self-ownership is not absolute. It can be overridden by others’ rights to resources, and Libertarian theory requires “drastic revision”. If it doesn’t, then the self-ownership rights of those without property are merely formal, and the position “loses its allure” (Cohen, 1995 p.13-15).
I will argue that a ‘Sufficientarian-Libertarianism’ based on a principle of embodied self-ownership can dissolve this dilemma, delivering both autonomy and absolute self-ownership. I begin by examining Daniel Russell’s theory of embodied self-ownership and the reasons it gives us to reject both far-right and left Libertarianism. I’ll argue that he doesn’t pursue the consequences of his theory far enough, and that embodied self-ownership places restrictions on the acquisition of natural resources and makes ownership rights in them conditional.

The degree of suffering in the natural world is immense. Theories on intervention range from a complete ‘hands-off’ approach up to the total rewriting of the vertebrate genome. Most anti-interventionist arguments have been weak. In this paper I will assess the strongest anti-interventionist position, that of Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011). They claim that wild animals form communities which should be treated as sovereign because their existing structure, however harsh it may seem to us, is necessary for the flourishing of their members. I will argue that in fact most such communities fail to provide the conditions necessary for individual flourishing, and that many animal species are behaviourally plastic enough to flourish in a variety of physical and social environments. However I will agree with Donaldson and Kymlicka on the importance of animal flourishing, community and individual rights, and will propose a framework for intervention which will respect these values.

In Just Fodder, Milburn argues for a relational account of our duties to animals. Following Clare Palmer, he argues that, though all animals have negative rights that we have a duty not to violate, we only gain positive obligations towards animals in the contexts of our relationships with them, which can be personal or political. He argues that human beings have collective positive duties towards domesticated animals, in virtue of the kind of relationship between us established by domestication. However, when it comes to wild animals, he argues that we have no such morally relevant relationships, and so we have only negative duties towards them. I argue that throughout history and even prehistory human beings have morally entangled themselves with wild animals sufficiently that we may in fact have collective positive duties towards many, if not all, wild animals.

In chapter 3 of Wild Animal Ethics Johannsen argues for a collective obligation based on beneficence to intervene in nature in order to reduce the suffering of wild animals. In the same chapter he claims that the non-identity problem is merely a "theoretical puzzle" (p.32) which doesn't affect our reasons for intervention. In this paper I argue that the non-identity problem affects both the strength and the nature of our reasons to intervene. By intervening in nature on a large scale we change which animals come into existence. In doing so, we enable harmful animals to inflict harms on other animals, and we put other animals in harm's way. The harms that these animals will inflict and endure are foreseeable. Furthermore, since nonhuman animals aren't moral agents, harmful animals cannot be morally responsible for their harmful actions. I argue therefore that by causing animals to exist, knowing that they will inflict and suffer harms, we become morally responsible for those harms. By engaging in identity-affecting actions then we take on secondary moral duties towards the animals we have thereby caused to exist, and these secondary moral duties may be extremely demanding, even more so than the initial costs of intervention. Finally, these duties are duties of justice rather than duties of beneficence, and as such are more stringent than purely beneficence-based moral reasons. Furthermore, this conclusion flows naturally from several plausible principles which Johannsen explicitly endorses.