Is it evil to kill (and eat the prey) to survive?
Before giving my answer, I need to describe the concept of evil I use.
In my opinion, Good and Evil are "deduced" concept from instincts, which were trained through millions years of evolution. All instincts point towards one goal: survival.
To illustrate the term "deduce", take love for instance. Most of us have experienced positive feeling from very basic stimulus:
- attachment: see parents, act to attract their attention and get your needs fulfilled (the relief of a hug after getting hurt, the happiness of being praised, the sense of safety after experiencing the scary outside, the impulse to shelter your children)
- sexual attraction: see a beautiful person of a specific gender and get aroused and stop at nothing to get their attention (the feeling that time is too short when interacting with them, the drunk addictive happiness to be with them, the willingness to agree to anything for their acknowledgement, the pleasure of physical touch)
- friendship: see helpful allies, you feel good and ready to help each other (the pleasing harmony of working and playing together)
Then one day, you use your pattern recognition on these collections of basic stimulus to grasp an unifying concept that encompass the stimulus with simplicity.
No matter how sacred you hold the concept of love, it didn't appear just for the sake of it but for the continuation of the species. Judging it with a purely rational view, you can see these interactions as transactions motivated by survival, so you can deny the existence of love. Thus, love doesn't "exist" as an objective concept but only as a subjective experience. Likewise, I believe that discussing Good and Evil in a purely objective rational frame is utterly pointless. Instead, it must be tackled through the lens of emotion and subjectivity.
Now, let me share my meaning of Good and Evil. Evolution trained us to become a social species over multiple generation. Good encompasses all the instincts that facilitates cooperation and multigenerational prosperity, while Evil represents everything detrimental to the survival of this cooperative way of living.
I define two types of Evil that threaten Good:
- primal evil
- deceitful evil
Primal evil is the way single-celled or individual organism live: by openly taking things from others. At one point, an organism realized that doing photosynthesis sucked and it was a lot more profitable and less work to just eat others. Likewise, a predator organism realized that it's even faster to eat the herbivore and some predator realized that it can be easier to steal the prey from their fellow species (like through territorial war?)
From a purely rational view, primal evil doesn't exist objectively. Plants are opportunistic lifeform who happenned to find nutrient on the ground, just like how herbivore happened to munch on leaves lying around. There is no rational basis to judge one being better/superior over the other.
Primal evil only takes meaning when grounded in the practicality of what is detrimental to YOUR survival.
It might be hard to imagine, but I bet that you would be upset if you saw a tiger ripping your child apart. And in practice, if you had to settle in a territory infested with predators, your instinct would scream at you to drive the predator away and make it safe, as it is an act that benefit not only you but also your species.
During our evolution, humanity played the role of prey on few occasions. Gigacats one shotted us and it was so bad that our eyes developped more cone cells to see yellow (tigers look flashy orange to us for that reason, other preys would see them in the same color as vegetation). The disgust and enmity towards predators is ingrained in our dna, so we can empathize with preys.
Think about your place in the current society. Corpo herbivore raise you like crop, extracting a bit of value from everyone. Then the State predator take a cut from everyone. I've never seen someone say "yeepee I offer my money to the ruling class who take public services hostage to buy their yacht. I love getting fucked from all sides!"
A rational standpoint doesn't imply any goal, so these predatory strategies can be judged as valuable for their effectiveness. It can only agree with instinctive disgust when you specifiy the need for multigenerational survival: yeah letting predators prey on you might be a bad idea
Is it evil to kill (and eat the prey) to survive?
So if you accept my previous explanation, it's simply:
- from the predator POV: not evil (not detrimental to their species)
- from the prey POV: evil (detrimental to their species)
- from human POV: depends on how much we identify in the prey
The more the prey's species exhibit similar traits to humans, the more evil it looks. For instance, if the prey species is sapient and can communicate with language.
If it's a vampire killing humans, then you're supposed to find it evil (unless you have 0 survival instinct)
If it's a wolf eating a wild sheep, it's neither evil nor good for humans. But I think more people lean towards judging it as evil. This use of instinct outside of its intended context would be a "goal misgeneralization" of instincts (like a lioness adopting a baby gazelle).
If a vampire offers a symbiotic relationship by sacrificing one child every year, this remains evil for wild humans because it's always the "second best option" compared to complete freedom from the vampire.
On the other hand, a domesticated breed of humans could lose the instinct to feel any issue with that. And because Good represents cooperation, if the domesticated humans benefit in prosperity and survival thanks to the vampire, it can be good. Just like how 90% of peasant world population tolerate being fucked by mafia politicians
In conclusion, the concept of evil is subjective and species-dependent so you can only get a boring answer
Eating is also just transformation. Instead of turning light into flesh, an animal turns flesh into- soil.
