I’m extremely tolerant. I think they should be totally free to believe whatever they want. The vast majority of people of all stripes have beliefs that I consider absurd. The only time those beliefs matter is when they come in conflict with others that don’t share those beliefs. And in that case, it matters very much whether we’re talking fiction vs. reality. Giving in to those that claim emotional harm from things disconnected from reality harms everyone. Hence why the Celestis response is on point.
As noted here several times, the Navajo Nation did not voice known objections to the Apollo program, nor to the scientific component of this mission. ISTM that there’s actually a symmetry between what they’re objecting to and what the folks paying to send cremains to the moon are doing. Why are they paying for this? One can speculate on a bunch of possible reasons – maybe so that their loved ones can be accorded a level of reverence unavailable to almost anyone else, or more likely, so that they can gaze up at the moon knowing that some portion of the beloved is somewhere up there. IMHO this places the “lunar memorial” on the same footing as the Navajo objection to it in that both are irrational and emotional. This doesn’t give us a slam-dunk answer but it does illustrate that Celestis isn’t clearly in the right.
In that situation the two interests aren’t equivalent. There are very important scientific benefits to telescopes and other scientific instrumentation on Mauna Kea. That doesn’t justify rampant desecration of religiously important properties, but I don’t believe that’s what was happening here.
First, as a Jew I’m upset the Piss Christ, Drawing of Mohammed, Beef Patty rocket has nothing on it to offend me. I feel forgotten and slighted.
Second, I feel the proper response to the Navajo is a polite but very firm ‘you do not own the moon’
The asymmetry is that one group is saying “you shouldn’t do this”, and the other is saying “we want to do this”. That it relates to human remains is irrelevant, IMO. If one group wanted to leave a steaming wet turd on the moon specifically to offend the Navajo nation, I’d still favor their rights. Because people should not be restricted in their actions unless you can demonstrate an actual harm to others. Just as I support the right to make Piss Christ and all the rest over people’s “right” to not be offended.
How about we put cheese on the beef patty?
Thank you.
So I successfully offended the Jewish community by not including anything to offend them. You’re welcome.
"If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday — dubbed Peregrine Mission One — will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. But Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said that allowing the remains to touch down there would be an affront to many indigenous cultures, which revere the moon.
“The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren said in a Thursday statement. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”"
That certainly begs the question: What other objects in space hold a sacred place in Navajo cosmology?
That’s a very strange way to judge the equivalence of competing objectives. It has absolutely nothing to do with “you shouldn’t do this” versus “we want to do this”. Our entire system of law is based on a vast compendium of “you shouldn’t do this” prohibitions. We have to judge which one is right on reasoned, rational grounds. In this case, the rationale of both sides is irrational emotional bullshit, but at least the Navajo Nation can cite longstanding tradition in support of their case. The argument would be entirely different if they were trying to block science missions.
You seem to have an unreasonably narrow definition of what constitutes “actual harm”.
Yes, and (almost) every one of those came about because there was demonstrable harm to someone. Infinitely more things are possible than are restricted, and I should have the right to do any of those things unless they harm someone.
I don’t consider this inequivalence strange at all. Consider:
- Everything is banned unless proven to be a benefit
- Everything is legal unless proven to be harmful
The first one describes an authoritarian hellscape. The second, a normal healthy society. Obviously, I favor the second.
It’s pretty much the same one that is the law of the land in the US. No quantity of offense exceeds a single person’s right to free expression. And the right to free expression is really just the right to bodily autonomy.
I think we need to hear from Hank Hill on the subject.
That sounds very logical, but in the messy world we humans inhabit it’s rarely that simple. If it were, we wouldn’t be having endless debates – often deeply divisive ones – about what laws we should or shouldn’t have. The problem is that “harm” is often difficult to define, and often encompasses emotional as well as physical harm and considerations of alleged societal harm. Most fundamentally, that laws that we enact to govern us are almost always a balance between competing interests: your desire to do something, versus my desire to be protected from its consequences.
Not to get into politics here, but just to give some examples, the balance between your perceived right to own guns and my interest in being protected against gun violence, or a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy versus … well, I’m not sure what, but I guess some people’s moral conviction about protecting a fetus. Those are a few currently contentious examples but they’re not rare; indeed, such a balance of interests really applies to virtually all laws and all juridprudence.
The point here being that a maxim like “everything is legal unless proven to be harmful” is so impractically simplistic that it’s applicability to the real world is close to zero. If its converse is an authoritarian hellscape, the maxim as stated is an unworkable libertarian pipe dream.
Given that real-world legal judgments almost always represent a considered balance of different interests, the criterion that I raised earlier about which interests are objectively more important can be crucial in making the right judgment. So on the matter of telescopes and important other scientific instrumentation on Mauna Kea, the concerns of native Hawaiians should be considered and the site treated respectfully, but ultimately I can see the wisdon in letting the science go ahead.
In the case of the Navajo Nation objection to sending cremains to the moon, there’s no correspondingly objective rationale for overruling them – both sides are valuing nothing more than abstract emotions. But let me ask you this. If it just so happened that the moon had been a revered sacred object throughout 2000 years of Christianity, rather than a belief of the Navajo Nation, do you think we’d be landing and crashing objects into it and leaving astronaut poop on it?
FWIW, the launch was a success.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/08/world/ula-vulcan-centaur-rocket-peregrine-launch-scn/index.html
If you believe someday there will be enough people on the Moon for environmental spoilage to be a problem, doesn’t it make sense to get ahead of the problem before it’s a problem? Or is it that this will be far enough in the future that the problem doesn’t affect anyone we care about?
As a concrete exampe, we used to think there was no real harm in detonating atomic bombs in the atmosphere, so it was fine to do that as much as we wanted. Turns out that this rendered it impossible to manufacture steel free of nuclear contamination, so for decades afterward, you could only get low-background steel from salvaging pre-WW2 battleships.
This concept applies to many situation where there’s real harm that’s not immediately apparent, so I think we need a better framework than certain people saying “eh, seems fine to me, I should get to do what I want, let the future worry about the future”.
One shudders to imagine what that hysteria that might look like, but I supposed the techno-libertarian attitude would be the same. It’s just another opinion to ignore in the name of them doing whatever seems fun or lucrative.
But trouble in space means the Navajo (well, those of them who care) can breath easy, for now:
I don’t see any great value to dumping human remains on the Moon. I don’t think it will be prevented if anyone is going to spend the money on such a mission, which might have an otherwise valuable function.
At the moment I’m more concerned about the plans to dump human remains on Mars in the near future which is the inevitable result of people reaching the surface of Mars in the near future.
No need to ask “if”…Because this actually happened.
Ask Galileo.
For hundreds of years, the moon was part of the sacred cosmology of the Church. (believing that the,earth was the center of the universe.)
Galileo only looked at it, and was jailed. Imagine if, instead of inventing the telescope, Galileo had somehow invented a spaceship. He would not have been allowed to land on the moon.
Even if he named the spaceship after a Greek god?
Galileo didn’t get jailed for looking at the Moon through a telescope. He got jailed for being a giant grade A dick. He asked the Pope for permission to write a book about heliocentrism, and the Pope gave him permission. But instead, he then went and wrote a book about the Pope being an idiot.
Did the Pope overreact? Yeah, probably. But it wasn’t the heliocentrism that he was overreacting to.
Yes, consequences. Which in almost all cases is some kind of harm. Physical harm, economic harm, reputational harm, etc. But there has to be some actual thing that happened to a person.
That’s not remotely true. The western legal tradition is massively biased in that direction, in virtually every respect. You said it yourself: laws are prohibitions on things, not allowances. If there is no law, then the thing is legal. And laws aren’t made unless some kind of harm is identified.
Yes, there is some fuzziness on exactly what constitutes a harm, and so we have some laws about harm-adjacent things like drug use. But that does not mean we are in some broad middle ground between the two extremes I laid out. It’s arguing about millimeters on one end of a football field.
You’re engaging in a selection bias here: the only time cases even make it to the legal system is if someone can show they’ve been harmed. That’s just the basic principle of legal standing. So yes, there’s a balance of interests among the cases where a party has standing. That is a tiny, infinitesimal subset of all possible cases. Just try to imagine a world where standing wasn’t a thing! Where anyone, anywhere, could argue that you shouldn’t do something, and that each time the court would have to consider the balance of interests. It wouldn’t even be a dystopia; it’s just a nonsense, impossible, Kafkaesque situation.
What’s extra funny in this particular case is that it’s not just that the Navajo can’t show that they’ve been harmed in a meaningful way. They can’t even show that the event even happened (I mean, assuming the landed succeeded, which it isn’t going to). If it was physical harm, that would be easy to show, or pollution can be measured, and so on. Even direct emotional abuse can at least be shown to have taken place. But here, it isn’t like the company carved a giant Pepsi logo into the moon. The remains are completely undetectable from Earth. The Navajo do not “feel a disturbance in the Force” as soon as the remains touch the surface.
What, you mean like immersing a figurine of Jesus Christ in a vat of urine, offending billions of Christians in the process?
Of course that’s allowed. Did we consider the balance of interests in allowing it? No; it’s obvious freedom of expression, and the only legitimate controversy is whether it should have been funded with tax dollars. Absolutely zero consideration was given to the amount of offense taken.
Again, imagine what a hellscape we’d live in if that weren’t the case. If any artwork could only be produced if, weighed against the potential objections of the entire rest of humanity, it came out as a net positive. Absurd.