Desire, Duty, and Discrimination
Evie Kendal
Abstract
Abstract “Desire, Duty, and Discrimination: Is There an Ethical Way to Select Humans for Noah’s Ark?” discusses ethical issues related to reproduction in space. Confined on Earth, humanity is vulnerable to extinction-level disasters such as catastrophic climate change or asteroid impact hazards. One method of preserving the species from these threats is to establish off-world settlements on other planets. This project will inevitably entail selecting members of the species (and potentially human embryos) from a broad range of candidates, necessitating the development of appropriate selection criteria. This chapter considers relevant ethical issues as they apply to this extreme “Noah’s Ark” example, considering the benefits of preserving diversity in the human population, including for different abilities, sexual orientations, and concepts of family, before interrogating whether there is a coherent method of imposing a duty to procreate in the face of species extinction and if so, how far this duty extends.