If you were to consume the lower part of a centaur whilst keeping the torso portion alive.. have you succeeded in moral subterfuge?

There’s a little known moral principle called, lord knows why, herringbone. The principle says that when there are questions about fake hypothetical moral conundrums, you may respond as a zen master, should you wish. Thus, any sort of nonsense can pose as pure wisdom.

My wisdom, of course, is pure as a baby’s nappies. After use. And I say there is no subterfuge. It is clear that you are both a cannibal and a humanitarian. Go figure!

Yes, it’s still wrong. It is still a whole animal so it doesn’t matter what it is. Humans are animals…....

If it’s a cougar doing the killing there is no moral subterfuge, just more meat on the hoof. lol

A centaur is not a divisible unit. If you divide it you do not have a horse and a human. You’ve got a dead centaur in two pieces. It isn’t part human, part horse, it’s all centaur. You just ate part of a centaur and left the rest.

Frankly, if you want to act all high and mighty about it you ought to at least use the whole buffalo.

@fundevogel Where are the Centaurs vital organs? Can it not survive as just a torso? (provided you have an excellent centaur surgeon on standby)

If it does survive as just a torso you have a live Centaur missing a piece.

And if humans can be considered animals the same as a Centaur.. doesn’t that make bacon off-limits? Hmm… Centaur bacon. Delicious.

@digitalimpression Cut any animal in half and good luck keeping it alive.

“And if humans can be considered animals the same as a Centaur.. doesn’t that make bacon off-limits? Hmm… Centaur bacon. Delicious.”

Only if you’re a vegetarian. The fact that humans and centaurs are animals really doesn’t have any effect on whether or not they eat bacon. Though bacon comes exclusively from pigs so I don’t see centaur bacon happening.

Now I am pushing my glasses up.

@fundevogel Actually, turkey bacon is quite popular these days.

Also, the worm would have something to say about being cut in half as it tends to flourish when be-bodied. The cockroach would also throw in its two cents boasting about how it can live for quite some time with no head.

All that aside, assume that the Centaur survives the operation.

@digitalimpression “Actually, turkey bacon is quite popular these days.”

That’s a misnomer.

“Also, the worm would have something to say about being cut in half as it tends to flourish when be-bodied. The cockroach would also throw in its two cents boasting about how it can live for quite some time with no head.

All that aside, assume that the Centaur survives the operation.”

…because a centaur has so much in common with worms and cockroaches physiologically?

Find me an animal in the the same phylum as centaurs (chordata) and we’ll talk.

“That’s a misnomer.”
That’s a misnomer.

“Find me an animal…”
Ixion and Nephele would be ashamed of me if I even dared to attempt such a thing.

It is a mistake to think that morality only applies to humans. What morality applies to is persons. Whether something is human or not is a fairly easy question to answer, but whether something is a person—even when that thing is definitively human— is not an easy question at all. This is why one of the questions of ethics is “what makes something a person?” Various answers have been given—sentience and sapience being the most popular—but the debate rages on.

One possible way of approaching the matter is to ask what yourself what you would want to know about an alien life form when trying to figure out whether or not it was a moral agent or deserved moral consideration. Would you want to know if it could think? If it could talk? If it could suffer? Figuring out the answers to these questions helps us figure out answers to questions like the one asked in the OP.

For my own part, it seems to me that a centaur would certainly be a person. It fits every reasonable criterion I can think of, let alone the ones I find most relevant. Thus I would suggest that eating its lower half only would be no different than eating only the lower half of a human (or of any other person).

Where is the torso of a centaur? The man-like portion of a Centaur joins the horse-like part where the neck of a horse would be. The torso of a Centaur may well extend towards the center of the bottom four extremities.

A Satyr, on the other hand, has the upper body and torso of a man, and the legs and genitalia of a goat. But he is all Satyr, so you can’t dissect him either.

@SavoirFaire You are right, of course, but suppose you were in a Donner Party situation. Would the centaur get eaten first? Or would you still draw straws?

@zenvelo Is it wrong that I want a pile of bacon made from Centaur and Satyr?

@digitalimpression Tough one. I think partiality can be justified based on the nature of one’s relationship with another moral person. An obvious case: if I had to pick between saving my brother or saving a complete stranger, it seems I both would and should save my brother. Similarly, I might owe more to members of my species than to members of other species when considered abstractly.

If the centaur was my friend and the other humans were strangers, though, I think the situation might be different. I owe more to my friends than to strangers due to the nature of our relationship, just like I owe more to family than strangers, and so I think I would then push for drawing straws.

So I’d say there is a hierarchy of family > friends > acquaintances > strangers > aliens that holds abstractly, but that the hierarchy could be altered based on facts about actual interpersonal relationships.

This is, broadly speaking, a rather Aristotelian or Hellenistic way of thinking about ethics.

@digitalimpression I love bacon. I like eating turkey “bacon”, but it is not bacon. You cannot get bacon from a satyr or a centaur. Rather, you need to catch Demeter and Persephone in their manifestations as pigs, and you’ll have all the bacon you’ll ever need.

That makes me wonder about the anatomy of the centaur. I mean, all the guts in a horse body are in one place, and same for the human. But a centaur essentially has two places to put a stomach, and I do believe, two hearts. Everything that can be found in the torso and stomach is doubled in a centaur, but how does that work out with it? They obviously don’t have everything doubled, so I wonder what goes where. They probably have longer intestines, wherever the stomach is, since the ass is really far away. (when considering the human part) Unless it’s more like horse anatomy, and the human part would be like the horse’s neck?
Lol imagine a centaur like thing, but with a cow bottom instead of a horse. That would be cool. They do have bariaurs in Dungeons&Dragons, which are like centaurs, but with the lower bodies of rams. Or really big goats, I forgot.

Well, anyways, a centaur is a different race of being, to my understanding, so killing it in any way is killing a centaur. Then again, they’re always described as part man, part horse. That’s probably just because that’s what it looks like, but apart from that, it comes from its own race. I think Greek mythology has something about their origins, but I don’t remember. Like, if you kill a minotaur, you killing a man or a bull? Again, I don’t think that what they look like can be traced back to what they look like. So either way, you’re killing whatever it is. You’re killing a centaur or a minotaur. We never really think that about a minotaur though, since it’s usually more monster than anything else.
But what if you had a minotaur with a horse bottom, what the hell would you be killing then? (or rather, what would most likely kill you.) Whatever that thing is, which boils down to murder, or at least, self defense. No matter what it is, or how you kill it, or what ’‘part you’re keeping alive’’ or…whatever. I don’t think you can get real technical or scientific about it, unless centaurs are badass enough to be able to survive after having its bottom part munched up.

Although according to Xena Warrior Princess, human beings and centaurs are sexually compatible. It would appear that it’s best to move to a city like Troy if you’re into that, since people there are more accepting of this kind of thing. This makes me ask myself so many question that seem related with the subjects here, about morality and shit. Well, it was on cable TV, so don’t lookit me for anyone who thinks that’s disgusting and offensive. XD
But it’s just weird. In your context, it could be seen as bestiality, since the the centaur has a horse part. But if centaurs are their own being who just happen to have parts of other beings but have no biological link to humans and horses…erm…but in Xena, if a human and a centaur are compatible, then there must be some link. Or maybe when you don’t understand something in Xena, a wizard did it.

Even though that show never actually has any sorcerers or wizards…psionics, soothsayers, shamans, yeah…but no wizards. I love Matt Groening, but sometimes he really fucks up.

Well, maybe there is a link, maybe there isn’t, but you’d still be killing a centaur, and you probably couldn’t attain moral subterfuge, since that set of morals usually contains a whole encompassing of murder sucks, rather than what you kill. I mean at least for things that talk, anyways.

Either way, it wouldn’t even be cannibalism. For cannibalism to be defined, one being has to eat its own race. A human eats a human, dog eating a dog, a centaur eating a centaur, Xena eating Gabrielle. (hee hee haha, oh my) But some dude chowing down on centaur is just fucked the hell up, man.