Imposing Morality

Our entire class discussion basically revolved around the question of whether humans can, or should, impose their system of morality on another species. For that matter, can one society of humans impose its morals on another society of humans. We've seen it all through history...anyone heard of colonialism? (It seems like every book we read brings me back to colonialism. Maybe it's because I'm an SIS major. Or maybe it's because the West's first interactions with indigenous cultures are seen as the closest thing to an alien encounter for many people.) The colonial rulers sometimes allowed a semblance of the indigenous people's traditional ways to remain, as in the British practice of indirect rule where a traditional system of rule was left in place, but the colonists still dictated who was in power and the laws they implemented. Basically, a small piece of the traditional culture was preserved, but colonial ideas and rules still held the power. Despite this sticky history, the debate over whether it is appropriate to intervene on a moral basis is not cut-and-dry.

While many people agree that a society's culture is their own and generally shouldn't be intervened with, when practices exist that threaten a group's health and safety, the line becomes blurred. This is the case today with traditional practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM). We had a discussion about this very dilemma in my International Development class. Our determination was that the cultures practicing this should be informed as to the damage and possible complications that can result, but we cannot force them to change their ways. When it comes down to it, we decided that it is not right, or even possible in many cases, to force a society to change its way of life even if it includes very harmful practices. However, even when harmful practices aren't involved, the West often tries to intervene with what the non-Western countries are doing. Although this is more often in the form of economic or political actions rather than military ones. For a look at how economic sanctions can be a form of "moral colonialism" check out Tomas Larsson's article here.

Of course, involving a society that consists of another species entirely complicates the question further. As someone pointed out in class, the humans and the aliens in The Sparrow don't even have the same frame of reference; their worlds are completely different and developed in complete isolation and ignorance of each other. This means that they are unlikely to be able to understand where we are coming from in saying that it is wrong to eat Runa children, just as we wouldn't understand if they told us it was wrong for us to catch fish (or something like that). For this reason, I believe it is fairly inappropriate to try to dictate what they should or shouldn't be doing. It may seem cold-hearted to observe their society without doing anything to appease our morals, but we've all seen how well colonialism turned out. It's like Tim said in class, humans want to "love God's other children," but only once we've made them into something we can love.