The Ethics of Uplift: Engineering Consent in Imaginary Worlds
Science fiction has long explored what it means to engineer other beings toward greater complexity. The ethics are harder than the stories usually admit — and more relevant than ever.
The Uplift Tradition
In science fiction, "uplift" refers to the genetic engineering of non-human animals to human-level intelligence. David Brin's Uplift series (beginning with Sundiver, 1980) is the most systematic exploration of this idea — in his universe, every sapient species was uplifted by a patron species, creating a vast hierarchy of obligation and debt.
The ethical questions are real: consent, identity, the creation of beings who didn't ask to exist in their new form. But Brin's framing assumes that uplift is a gift — that greater intelligence is unambiguously better. This assumption deserves scrutiny.
What Consent Means for Non-Existent Beings
The deepest problem with uplift ethics is that the being who would need to consent doesn't exist yet. The pre-uplift animal cannot consent to becoming something different; the post-uplift being, if it could be asked, might be grateful or might feel that something was taken from it.
This is not a hypothetical problem. The CRISPR debate — particularly the controversy around He Jiankui's 2018 gene-edited babies — is exactly this question applied to humans. The children who were edited cannot consent. The adults they will become will have to live with choices made before they existed. A 2020 report by the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing concluded that heritable human genome editing should not proceed until safety and efficacy standards are met — but notably did not conclude it should never proceed.
The Ravnica Thought Experiment
Certain worldbuilding traditions in fantasy and science fiction — particularly in games — have explored what happens when the "natural" baseline has already been destroyed. In a world where the environment has been irreversibly altered, the choice isn't between natural and modified — it's between modified and dead.
This feels increasingly relevant. We don't live in a pristine world. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2022) makes clear that we are already committed to significant ecological change. The question isn't whether to intervene in nature — we've been intervening for ten thousand years. The question is how to intervene wisely.
The Consent Problem Revisited
What makes uplift ethics genuinely hard is that it requires us to make decisions on behalf of beings who cannot yet speak for themselves — and whose interests may be radically different from what we imagine. This is the same problem we face with future generations in climate policy, with animals in factory farming, and with AI systems that might have interests we don't recognize.
The philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued (Superintelligence, 2014) that we should be very careful about creating minds more capable than our own, because we can't reliably predict their values. But the same argument applies in reverse: we should be careful about preventing the emergence of minds that might have interests worth considering.
There's no clean answer here. But the question is worth sitting with.