A few months ago Drs. James S.J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan in The Space Review tried to summarize space ethics:
So what, then, do space ethicists actually do? At the highest level of generality, we are simply here to ask the ethical questions that, sooner or later, will need to be asked. And it is a feature of the practice of ethics, and not a bug, that it produces productive disagreements about the answers. But more specifically, there are five broad roles that characterize the vast majority of space ethics research. There are no doubt others that will emerge in the future, as space ethics is an evolving discipline. But the following list captures its “settled” roles and responsibilities.
1. Space ethics identifies principles for arriving at rational compromises between different stakeholders in space. …
Unfortunately, their brief review of Why space ethics seems woefully inadequate:
In a sense, this goes to the heart of the matter, and why space ethics matters: it helps us to identify and reconsider assumptions that space advocates as well as space skeptics often fail to realize that they are making. In some cases, these assumptions turn out to be entirely reasonable. In others, they turn out to be highly questionable. If you are expecting space ethics to tell you that space exploration is the greatest thing ever, and that we should plunge ahead at all deliberate speed, then you may be in for a disappointment. You are also in for a disappointment if you are expecting space ethics to validate calls to renounce space exploration and to accept our terrestrial horizons.
I tend to be a bit of a pragmatic barbarian when it comes to philosophy. I wanted to see them motivate (space) ethics as a What goes around comes around deal. Not the sometimes-poetic Karma! approach, but the hard-nosed You screwed over that guy two months ago, so now we’re screwing you over now.
They didn’t go there.
Consequently, it all seems a bit airy and academic, and not imbued with urgency.
