The less "like us" they are, they more justified we are in killing them. "Like us" is tied around shared culture and experience. If you asked me to choose betwe

The less "like us" they are, they more justified we are in killing them. "Like us" is tied around shared culture and experience. If you asked me to choose between saving the life of an elf and the life of a human being, I'd choose the human damn near every time (barring cases where the human deserves death regardless of the dilemma). "Shared experience" in this case is a basic history of doing stuff together, or in a sympathetically similar way. Dogs have been shaped to serve side-by-side with humans as companions, sharing in our experiences. So eating them is wrong. There are no humans that are less like us than than the animals we eat. Brain-dead humans are an example of just following taboo: We don't kill and eat other humans, because of the whole "we are more alike than we are different" thing, and incidentally extend the same courtesy to things that take complex explanations for not being us. If we ran into other conscious, sapient species, we'd probably be hesitant about killing them due to the shared experience of sentience making them a lot more like us than a cow. But on the other hand, killing an alien would be a hell of a lot more permissible than killing a human. And I apply the same kind of logic to people. My friends and family are significantly more valuable than random strangers. In a trolley scenario with one of my friends on one track and 3 strangers on another, I'd save my friend, every time, and I wouldn't trust anybody who would answer otherwise.