We already have a thing called "bioethics" that is all about the ethical treatment of biological systems, particularly sentients. This includes population ethics, procreative ethics, interventionist and environmental policy making, test subject ethics, etc. Many scientific institutions have ethical boards that decide whether or not an experiment ought to be carried out.

What I am interested in is the extent to which inquiry (of all kinds) should be constrained.

The way I see it, we have the potential to accomplish a lot of things. We can get to Mars. We can create automatic coffee dispensers. We can think about the divine. We can explore the deep ocean. We can do a lot.

But there are other things we can do, which seem to have an ethical side. We can potentially minimize predation in the wild. We can eliminate world hunger. We can cure cancer. We can develop synthetic meat so we don't have to eat other animals anymore for our satisfaction. There a lot of things that we can do that have this altruistic, ethical aspect to them.

I want to know if you think there is any justification for pursuing the non-ethical routes of inquiry before or instead of the ethical-minded routes.

Sure, we can think about how lit it would be if we could go the Moon again. Or how cool it would be if we found a new dinosaur skeleton. But what does this do for the our ethical values? What does moon dust actually do to help a starving African child? Surely the child couldn't care less about some dust from some rock in space, because they're starving. Surely the antelope couldn't care less about the new dinosaur skeleton, as it's about to become a skeleton itself. None of this matters to them.

And to say that these routes of inquiry matter to us implicitly means that the suffering of other people doesn't matter; i.e. that we place more value on space dust than we do on someone's suffering.

This is precisely why I think non-ethically-minded routes of inquiry are in existence simply due to their entertainment value, and that the ethical decision would be to limit our endeavors in these avenues. We should focus the majority, if not all, of our inquiry into solving problems and setting welfare to a certain level of acceptability.