Part of what bothers me about the idea of eating an elf or Wookie is that they don’t feel like prey—they feel like peers. When I see a fox, e.g., it doesn’t make me hungry—the fox doesn’t seem like it’s below me on the food chain. When I see a rabbit or a pigeon, it does make me hungry—I can imagine what it would be like to hunt, clean, roast, and gnaw on it.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill 5 foxes to save one elf or human or Wookie.
I would not, however, hunt a rabbit or a fox for sport; that seems unnecessarily cruel.
One way of accounting for all these moral intuitions is that rabbits, foxes, and Wookies are all sentient; one should not cause pain to sentient creatures for amusement. Foxes and Wookies are ecological peers; one should not eat ecological peers. Wookies are people; one should not trade off the lives of people against roughly comparable numbers of lives of non-people.
Part of what bothers me about the idea of eating an elf or Wookie is that they don’t feel like prey—they feel like peers. When I see a fox, e.g., it doesn’t make me hungry—the fox doesn’t seem like it’s below me on the food chain. When I see a rabbit or a pigeon, it does make me hungry—I can imagine what it would be like to hunt, clean, roast, and gnaw on it.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill 5 foxes to save one elf or human or Wookie.
I would not, however, hunt a rabbit or a fox for sport; that seems unnecessarily cruel.
One way of accounting for all these moral intuitions is that rabbits, foxes, and Wookies are all sentient; one should not cause pain to sentient creatures for amusement. Foxes and Wookies are ecological peers; one should not eat ecological peers. Wookies are people; one should not trade off the lives of people against roughly comparable numbers of lives of non-people.