“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”

— Richard Feynman

Imagine a highly advanced, galaxy-wide civilization that has achieved remarkable scientific and technological progress, enabling it to flourish across the galaxy. To reach its present state, not only did its people have to overcome technical challenges but also significant moral and political ones.

Now, one of their spaceships stumbles upon a civilization that is primitive compared to their standards. Still, it sparks the interest of the people aboard the ship due to its rapid progress in the last few centuries (after hundreds of thousands of years of stagnation). Despite such progress, this civilization is in a fragile state. It faces various pressing problems that, if failed to get solved in time, can take its people back to the age of disenlightenment, or worse, cause their extinction. The two aliens aboard the top-class spaceship recognize the significance of what is at stake. They decide to help the people of Earth by imparting only one piece of knowledge from their rich trove of moral understanding.

The aliens are aware that all knowledge is conjectural. Despite their technological superiority, they recognize their inherent fallibility. Indeed, one could say their superiority is a consequence of this recognition of fallibilism: the correct stance of knowing that you could be mistaken and that there is something to be mistaken about.

The knowledge they impart to the earthlings is not of a moral foundation to reason from. The aliens know that those do not exist.

Morality is about solving moral problems. To solve such conflicts, people conjecture bold theories about what might improve things, and those conjectures could always get criticized. And that includes any starting point that people might have, for instance, maximizing the well-being of all conscious creatures; or that all men are created equal.

Protecting the means of improving their knowledge is more important than any particular piece of knowledge. So the critical advice imparted to the people of the primitive civilization was not moral knowledge per se but a logical moral implication of epistemology—knowledge about knowledge. It was this that the aliens communicated to them:

The alien civilization thrived on its ideas getting criticized. Traditions were maintained on Earth for eons by shielding their ideas from criticism. Recently, a rare new kind of tradition emerged, similar to the one of the alien civilization: a tradition of criticism. It didn’t take knowledge for granted. And it broke the chain of eons of stagnation, enabling the exponential progress that happened on Earth solely in the last few centuries. The protection of this tradition, above all else, was the message of the aliens.

This piece is largely inspired by the works of David Deutsch and Karl Popper. Errors are my own!

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