What would Kant say are our duties towards aliens? Are we morally obligated, for example, to search for and make contact with extraterrestrial life if we can?
These are just some of the questions put to philosophy graduate student Noel Dominguez in the Fall 2015 issue of Colloquy, the magazine of The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. In addressing these questions, Dominguez turns not just to the work of Kant but to the Kantian inspired work of Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Christine Korsgaard on the duties of humans toward non-human animals. As Dominguez notes, the Kantian requirement that we respect the rights of other forms of life to thrive "already exists in our interactions with other animals, [so] it is not implausible to think that we stand in a similar relation to forms of life we have not yet encountered."
You can read the whole of the interview here.