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[Muz]

There seems to be no problem with eating plants and stuff. But is it wrong to eat animals? Are fish and turtles OK? After all, they are living things too. What about deer and cows? What about cats and dogs? Could goblins be eaten?

Yeah, weird question for a DF forum, but I'm doing my ethics assignment on it

[Mohreb el Yasim]

i am in RL not eating other animals then fishies, but i don't think that eating animals is an ethical problem (tougth i don't think it is healthy to eat too much of them, and not energy efficient neither, but i don't eat for health reasons) animals too eat eachother and we won't say that a wolf is unethical. i think eating inteligent beengs is unethical, and killing animals withouth a purpuse (other then fun) is unethical. however in a game wher anything is virtual no ethical problem is involved to eat/kill anything if you don't take this habbit or this norm to RL.

[Deathworks]

Hello Muz!

The question as you have posted it is actually utterly meaningless.

Let me explain: You are asking whether a behavior is good or bad within an ethical context. At least that is what your question seems to imply. However, you are not providing information about what ethical context you are talking about.

"Good" and "Bad" as ethical qualities do not have an absolute existance, but are dependant on ethical standards which can and will differ from individual to individual and even more greatly between different cultures. The question of whether it is ehtical or not to eat a cow would probably be answered differently by atheists, Christians, and hindi, or look at the question of eating dogs in relation to Germans and Chinese (German media coverage of that issue was really embarassing).

Thus, if you want to put it into context with real-life ethics, you need to specify what ethics you are referring to.

If you wanted to place it within the context of the fictional ethics of the game, as far as I know, different civilizations have different ehtical values in the game, so again, you need to specify the context before your question can be answered.

Deathworks

[Muz]

Well, yeah, everything that could cause death or severe injury has to be examined for an ethical context to avoid moral blindness. I mean, I could say that it's fine to kill one dwarf to save 10 others. In fact, I didn't even think it was an unethical issue to eat fish until I started writing my paper.

But don't let the fact that it's 'not real' keep you from saying whether it's good or bad - plenty of really evil decisions have been made by powerful people using justifications like that. Though the thing about a wolf eating an animal not being unethical seems to be a good point..

[Viprince]

Try and think about it the elf way. Plants are equals and hostile inteligent beings are chow... It would be quite an interesting point of view although if your paper needs to be somewhat realistic cannibal elves may not really serve as a good example

[Proteus]

Well, in Dwarf Fortress it seems to be rather a question of necessity than of ethics, to slaughter cute kittens (to prevent the feared catsplosion)

[Zorgn]

I wonder whether your assignment will be graded differently if your views differ from the teacher...

IMO, do whatever you feel like doing and can get away with. There is no concrete good and bad, so it's up to you to set your own limitations if any. If your neighbor looks particularly tasty, go ahead, chow down. Just don't cry when their family shoots you for it.

[Skizelo]

I think it's fine to say "it's not real" because they objectively, provably don't feel anything. They're just basic pathfinding (really basic in case of turtles) and, apart from a randomly generated name, are truly generic. They don't even have a token [CAN FEEL PAIN] tag. You're just testing people's readiness to empathize and maybe something about the uncanny valley.

ALSO, if slaughtering one cow is immoral, deleting a region file is an atrocity, and that's a clearly untenable position. You will have to sort out Darfur before I start caring about those little cs.

[Tcei]

I seem to remember having read in the news somewhere that plants are capable of feeling pain, the example they gave was that a carrot will actualy flinch when cut and grass will actualy try to avoid being stepped on.. In terms of DF, it seem most all beast are veiwed as a food source, tho cats I can see as being more of a taboo type food, I dont think any dwarf would really starve to death (game mechanics aside) than eat fluffy.

 Similarly for cannibalism is viewed as an unthinkable act (according to the raws), so most would probably starve before eating another dwarf or sentient being. Looking at RL history we can see instances where cannibalism has happened in the "civilized" world. Most particularly from kthe stories of the survivors of ship wrecks. Groups of sailors stranded at sea with no food or water would sometimes draw straws to see who was killed so the others could survive. Were that game mechanics allowed it, this could be another possibliity for starving fortresses.

In the end I'd imagine the dwarven culture has a whole is going to have some general food ethics (eating plants, and beast is ok) while other food ethics are going to depend on the individual fortress (eating cats is ok/plump helmets are not), much like in rl

[Porpoisepower]

I recently stopped eating a couple of my favorite sea fairing animals, squid and octopuses.  I discovered they are entirely to cool to eat.  They have senses of humor and are potentially more intelligent.

[Wolfius]

Ethics are a hunam invention and as such entirly subjective to the personal views of the individual.

Not that arbitrary morality rules aren't useful, or a good thing to have ingrained in a society, you just have to understand that they're ultimately arbitrary, and should generally serve a purpose.

Cannibalism, for example - it's a great way to transfer disease, and there're a whole slew of prion illnesses that generally only occur in cultures where the eating of hunam brain material happens.

It's also somewhat unconductive to a stable society to crave the flesh of your co-workers. 

[grelphy]

True, but it could be argued (pretty effectively) that *not* eating the bodies of the naturally deceased is immoral--look at all those chemical resources (i.e., potential food) that you're just throwing away.

I can construct another argument that I'm sure everybody will disagree with but be unable to refute: the life of an adult is more valuable and should be preferentially saved over the life of a very young child. Here's why: from a societal standpoint, the adult is worth more, and from a personal standpoint the adult will be aware of losing more. The adult is contributing usefully to society now and has already been trained/raised from childhood. Raising the child to adulthood requires a lot of resources that could be saved if you select the adult over the child. Similarly, the child has no idea what its future will be like; the adult has a future and knows exactly what it will lose if it dies.

Most people, I would imagine, still value children more highly than adults. (I do, and I am fairly convinced of the correctness of this argument.) What this says about morals depends on your definition of "moral". If you claim that morals should arise (relatively) procedurally from logic, it follows almost directly from this that humans are then immoral; otherwise you must claim that morals are arbitrary, which will give you interesting consequences.

Bracing for shitstorm...

[Porpoisepower]

I thought canabilism is mostly an issue of ritual, or the results of starvation and fresh meet(corpses).  Not withstanding people with uber bizarre psychosis.

Diet can be a moral issue and not just an ethical one.

Some people think eating meet is immoral. 

I think eating meet is ethical, because if some flying speghetti monster swooped down from space or another dimmension to harvest us up for supper, I would find it fair.  I might be in a bunker somewhere wetting my self but I would not find being harvest against my personnel ethics.

[Porpoisepower]

Jonathan Swift has allready said it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

 

[Sunday]

It is objectively wrong to eat anything that has ever been alive.  This includes animals, plants, fungi, and both eukaryotic and prokaryotic bacteria.  Milk is acceptable, and honey would be - but only if it comes from a being that has expressed that the harvest is acceptable.  Thus we are limited to eating milk and cheese from human donors.