Imagine for a moment a starship without warp drive. It would have to be fairly large to support a crew of even 100. Even so, the 100 bedrooms would be small compared the the storage needed for food, water and equipment/materials for constructing homes on whatever different star system their multi-generational journey takes them. And that’s the problem, 100 people is the carrying capacity of the ship and it is a hard limit. These bedrooms are not luxurious, they are the bare minimum for human comfort and any increase in the ship’s crew will make it unethical to squeeze that many people together. Furthermore, life support systems will become overloaded if the population aboard the ship even reaches 101.
However, morally we are unable to limit the number of children. This is because it falls under the categorical imperative I described in part 2; it is something we can not do simply because we morally can not do it. Declaring something a categorical imperative is easy, explaining how it is a categorical imperative and how it is relevant is the next task.
We see how Kant’s law is relevant by applying the following test: try to make the rules that the starship’s crew has to follow to universal rules for all of humanity. That is to say imagine the whole Earth as a starship with a certain carrying capacity. We are free to educate; to give incentives to lower the number of children people choose to have less, but we can not force this rule upon all of humanity since it is impracticable to do so.
But this is not the end. No, we are in conflict with our space-faring goal of reaching the next star system on a multi-generational ship (the hypothetical imperative) should we conform to the categorical imperative. If our ship has a maximum load of 100 people then we are forced to meet this requirement just like we are forced to do homework if we want a degree.
To solve this conflict we must combine both the hypothetical imperative and the categorical imperative. That means our if-then statement become if we want to build a multi-generational starship then we must design it with a caring capacity that can expand. That way we can address both of the musts in the form of the hypothetical imperative and the categorical imperative.
Photo by Abriael
