On Alien Thought and Alienated Life
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There are certain moral truths we hold to be self-evident: that all human beings are created equal, that honesty is a virtue and hypocrisy a vice, that wanton cruelty is heinous. Such things, we think, are not simply true, but necessarily true. Try as we might, we cannot seem to imagine them being otherwise than they actually are, say, that honesty were a vice, hypocrisy a virtue, and wanton cruelty praiseworthy, no more than we can imagine that 2+2 were to equal 5. What is the nature of this self-evidence? Does our inability to imagine things being otherwise simply reflects a psychological limitation of the human mind? Could there be alien life-forms who held such unimaginable things as necessary truths, with the same force of conviction with which we hold our own? If there were, could we trade our own worldview for theirs and live the lives of aliens? And what would become of our lives if we did?
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