It will be interesting to see how these thoughts play out in the future, specifically the idea of how we treat dolphins. The line between "person" and "animal" doesn't seem to be as clearly defined as we had initially thought.
This article reminded me of when I was in elementary school and tried arguing that fire met the characteristics of having life.
I think this kind of discussion is a prerequisite to joining any large scale interplanetary cultures that may or may not exist. Perhaps that's only scifi, but we as a species need to become comfortable at accepting and working with different sizes and shapes of intelligence before that even makes sense. We have a long ways to go; we've only relatively recently accepted that other kinds of humans count as full people - and that isn't even a globally accepted concept yet. :/
I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing, specifically how insane it is that people so widely believe that humans are some sort of apex of evolution and even don't recognize that we are just animals with tons of limitations and animal traits.
It's entirely and easily conceivable that there could be another species that looks at us and wonders whether we are intelligent or persons according to their standards of intelligence and personhood. After all, manipulating our environment might not be proof enough; it could be argued that we still do it as an automatic response, simply working together as a species to propagate the species and still ultimately motivated in all our actions by innate, animalistic desires. It can easily be argued that the only fundamental difference between humans and other animals is simply the complexity of our interactions with our environment. Even the things we hold up as proof of transcendence from the animal world are likely just adaptations, eg, what we consider an impulse to develop ethical systems is just an adaptation of the brain to keep individuals working in the interest of the species.
Furthermore, imagine these hypothetical creatures had a better understanding of what we consider "souls," death and even pain. They could theoretically see no ethical issue with causing humans pain, suffering and death since, from their perspective, we don't really understand what's happening and our reactions are just automatic self-preservation.
I think the intelligence part of the discussion is science fiction.
Intelligence only lets us know whether or not we can do things, not whether we should do things when it comes to matters of morality. Intelligence tells us how to capture the dolphin and keep it captive not whether what we are doing is right. Intelligence tells us how to exploit other people not whether it is right.
I think you are spot on that accepting other life on this planet is a prerequisite to accepting life on other planets (I think this is illustrated beautifully in District 9, BTW), but intelligence has got nothing to do with it. It takes a great amount of intelligence to mobilize a genocide effort but you would need to ignore some of our universally accepted morals.
For a person or species that possesses great intelligence but little wisdom, empathy, and other attributes that enables us to do what is "right" self-preservation and exploitation is likely the default.
Excellent comment. We are most likely dolphins compared to some other species.
But I don't think the scale is smooth. There are sharp divisions: the use of tools, the understanding of death, the use of language, the use of language to describe abstract concepts, the use of oral history, the use of written history, the creation of artificial intelligence aides, etc.
I absolutely agree that having a bigger picture than just "people are special" is a prerequisite for first contact, I just also think that going to the other extreme, that all intelligences are mostly the same, is probably much worse than just having a human-bias. Instead we'll need a graduated system with different privileges and rights depending on where species appear on the scale. Such a graduated system will be the basis to determine whether or not we're being treated fairly by E.T., if/when they ever show up.
I have always found this subtopic to be interesting. My perhaps optimistic musing has been that a species sufficiently advanced to compare to humans as humans compare to dolphins would also have some way of measuring/estimating/scoring the level of consciousness (for want of a better term) of a lower species, which seems close to your thinking.
The interesting thing is that traditionally such distinctions have been religious, not scientific. That is, it was religion that eventually persuaded western civilization that all humans deserve to be treated equally, not some sort of logical or ethical argument.
If true, that leads me to think that we'll need some sort of version 2.0 of some of the major religions that deal with varying levels of sentience. This will probably happen after contact and not before, so it should be a very traumatic event for everybody concerned.
This article reminded me of when I was in elementary school and tried arguing that fire met the characteristics of having life.