Per author’s request, I am not discussing the allegory. My discussion of the hypothetical as presented does not imply endorsement of any kind of allegory. A corollary of this is that by proposing a solution I do not endorse any arguably analogous solution in the real world. Also I’m ignoring the whole mothership thing because that hasn’t been elaborated enough to discuss without importing lots of assumptions based on the analogy.
With that said...
One big question is what the net human utility from martian tickling is. If it’s net positive, we should definitely encourage more tickling. If not, things get hairier; we could look at total utility, but this rationale makes Martians a bit utility-monstrous, so it might be preferable to find or create an acceptable way for Martians to compensate humans for tickling privilege.
Our key concerns will be probably be utility and fairness, both for humans and for Martians. It’s pretty important to make sure Green Martians get a chance to practice. One option would be for all humans to agree to make themselves available for a certain number of Green tickling; a solution requiring less global coordination would be for humans to be able to pair with Green Martians under a binding contract that guarantees a certain amount of post-metamorphosis tickling in exchange for allowing the Green Martian to practice enough to metamorphose. This latter arrangement has advantages of also allowing slow-learning Green Martians to negotiate compensation deals with their human partners if that’s allowed, and the human and the Martian can decide what tickling techniques will be net wins.
But these are global changes. If the world doesn’t make sense, what’s a compassionate Green Martian to do? One option is to try to find humans willing to consider alternate tickling norms and reach agreements with them. If that doesn’t work, then if tickling is generally a net increase to human utility, I’d say it’s probably fine to go out and tickle the way Martians tend to, since humans implicitly expect this. Adopt the techniques iff you think doing so will be a net utility win. The ethics of spreading info on the techniques depends on your best estimate of the difficult empirical question of whether they’ll be used well or poorly.
EDIT: Elsewhere in the comments the hypothetical is modified to specify that explicitly-consensual tickling is ineffective. The best solution is then to leverage implicit consent as much as possible. If being in a particular place at a particular time, or wearing a marker, is sufficiently implicit, then the all-humans-make-themselves-available-for-tickling solution can work. The pairing solution can only work if there’s a way to pair without explicit tickling-consent: for instance, if blanket permission to tickle in the future doesn’t count as explicit consent for any particular tickling instance.
Also, some key issues not specified in the hypothetical: Do martians and humans differ in their (dis)utilities from tickling, and does each martian/human’s (dis)utility vary with time and mood? If so, we’d want to incentivise higher-utility ticklings by e.g. letting humans choose times not to be tickled or giving especially Green-averse humans a way to opt out of Green tickling and compensate the rest of humanity somehow. Do martians care who they tickle, and do humans care what martian tickles them beyond the color? If so, there’s a match component that we want some way to optimize for. Does marginal (dis)utility of tickling change, for either species, based on how many ticklings they’re involved in? If so, this is something to be strategic about; we could either choose a few volunteer humans to be green-tickled for a living, or try to ensure that green-tickling is as evenly spread as possible. Do martians have a desire to metamorphose independent of whether this will allow them to tickle more? If not, we need to ensure there’s some incentive in place for them to do so. I have intentionally refused to import answers to these questions from across the analogy.
Per author’s request, I am not discussing the allegory. My discussion of the hypothetical as presented does not imply endorsement of any kind of allegory. A corollary of this is that by proposing a solution I do not endorse any arguably analogous solution in the real world. Also I’m ignoring the whole mothership thing because that hasn’t been elaborated enough to discuss without importing lots of assumptions based on the analogy.
With that said...
One big question is what the net human utility from martian tickling is. If it’s net positive, we should definitely encourage more tickling. If not, things get hairier; we could look at total utility, but this rationale makes Martians a bit utility-monstrous, so it might be preferable to find or create an acceptable way for Martians to compensate humans for tickling privilege.
Our key concerns will be probably be utility and fairness, both for humans and for Martians. It’s pretty important to make sure Green Martians get a chance to practice. One option would be for all humans to agree to make themselves available for a certain number of Green tickling; a solution requiring less global coordination would be for humans to be able to pair with Green Martians under a binding contract that guarantees a certain amount of post-metamorphosis tickling in exchange for allowing the Green Martian to practice enough to metamorphose. This latter arrangement has advantages of also allowing slow-learning Green Martians to negotiate compensation deals with their human partners if that’s allowed, and the human and the Martian can decide what tickling techniques will be net wins.
But these are global changes. If the world doesn’t make sense, what’s a compassionate Green Martian to do? One option is to try to find humans willing to consider alternate tickling norms and reach agreements with them. If that doesn’t work, then if tickling is generally a net increase to human utility, I’d say it’s probably fine to go out and tickle the way Martians tend to, since humans implicitly expect this. Adopt the techniques iff you think doing so will be a net utility win. The ethics of spreading info on the techniques depends on your best estimate of the difficult empirical question of whether they’ll be used well or poorly.
EDIT: Elsewhere in the comments the hypothetical is modified to specify that explicitly-consensual tickling is ineffective. The best solution is then to leverage implicit consent as much as possible. If being in a particular place at a particular time, or wearing a marker, is sufficiently implicit, then the all-humans-make-themselves-available-for-tickling solution can work. The pairing solution can only work if there’s a way to pair without explicit tickling-consent: for instance, if blanket permission to tickle in the future doesn’t count as explicit consent for any particular tickling instance.
Also, some key issues not specified in the hypothetical: Do martians and humans differ in their (dis)utilities from tickling, and does each martian/human’s (dis)utility vary with time and mood? If so, we’d want to incentivise higher-utility ticklings by e.g. letting humans choose times not to be tickled or giving especially Green-averse humans a way to opt out of Green tickling and compensate the rest of humanity somehow. Do martians care who they tickle, and do humans care what martian tickles them beyond the color? If so, there’s a match component that we want some way to optimize for. Does marginal (dis)utility of tickling change, for either species, based on how many ticklings they’re involved in? If so, this is something to be strategic about; we could either choose a few volunteer humans to be green-tickled for a living, or try to ensure that green-tickling is as evenly spread as possible. Do martians have a desire to metamorphose independent of whether this will allow them to tickle more? If not, we need to ensure there’s some incentive in place for them to do so. I have intentionally refused to import answers to these questions from across the analogy.