The Awaken spell makes it pretty clear animals are not considered "sentient" in 3.5 D&D. I believe the rules use "sentient" in terms of ability to reason, a pretty common misuse. In any case, if we accept farm animals as labour and food is not evil (which, I believe, is the common D&D assumption), then their use as sacrifices seems equally acceptable.
I don't know about that. Magical rituals could be said to violate the natural order of things. I don't know that everyone would agree that animal slaughter (for mundane purposes) and animal sacrifice (for magical purposes) are morally equivalent.
I do agree that whoever wrote this was probably not thinking about its implications for the treatment of animals.
Awaken notes that the creature gains "humanlike sentience", which to my mind does not preclude sentience that is not like human sentience. Animals are pretty clearly sentient being regardless of these semantics.
Within your campaign, however, the animals having souls casts this into an even greyer area. If a carnivorous animal is not evil, how is a carnivorous human rendered evil? Here, the addition of souls to animals would seem to reduce the differentiation between animal and human.
SRD said:
Even deadly vipers and tigers that eat people are neutral because they lack the capacity for morally right or wrong behavior.
It does. The animal is not evil because it is not intelligent enough make informed moral choices, and because it actually needs to eat other animals in order to survive, and because it eats only what it needs. Conversely, a humanoid is adapted to eat a plant-based diet, and does not require animal flesh to survive, and farming is different from hunting in that it generally produces more food than needed and co-opts the animal's entire life towards that purpose, and humans are intelligent enough to recognize these issues and make decisions based on them. Cut and dry, all issues solved? No.
So it's OK to kill animals for my own survival, but not to aid in the survival of others? Is the farmer evil for feeding his children, who cannot fend for themselves? What about his aged and disabled parents, who would starve without the meat he produces? It's OK to kill it as long as I raise it? Does that apply to children as well as farm animals?
This is an ends justifying the means argument. I see no reason why the farmer could not accomplish the same goals by raising plants. And indeed, he and his beneficiaries might be better suited by plants. In D&D, cutting down a tree or harvesting a plant are not evil (unless they are sentient), though druids probably still don't like the subversion of natural order.
It all seems very grey, and rendered more so by applying souls to the animals. It's pretty grey in our 21st century world already.
It is. In D&D, the implications of different food production strategies and their health effects are not clear. In the real world, they are clearer, but nuanced. Our ability to produce food in excess of what we need, changes in the food we produce, and increased recognition of the health effects of diet make our choices very different from those made by people only a few generations ago.
I think you vary from the perception of druids by the rules. Their respect for nature extends, by default, to survival of the fittest, and consumption of other life to survive.
"Survival of the fittest" is a Darwinian concept that our D&D characters don't likely understand in full. However, violence is part of nature. Druids do tend to have carnivorous animal companions. To me, good druids are clearly vegetarians, evil druids are clearly rapacious predators, and the rest are ambiguous. Again, I could imagine a neutral druid hunting an animal to fill a need, but I cannot imagine that a nature-worshipper would condone farms or farmed animals, let alone animal sacrifice for deistic magic. I always felt that the druid class and surrounding parts of the D&D canon were intended to evoke elements of the real-world hippie culture that advocated vegetarianism and environmentalism around when D&D was created, but that's just me speculating. They're nothing like real druids after all.
Where is the differentiation? Is it OK to eat insects? What about crustaceans or mussels?
In D&D, it's sentience. I define that as any character that has values for all three mental ability scores, with exclusions for undead and creatures made of the stuff of other planes. Insects and crustaceans in D&D are non-sentient vermin. Should these characters be pescetarians instead? Perhaps. To me, these creatures should really have an intelligence score of 1. A crab or a bug is not exactly smart, but it is not "mindless".
What about plants? My old psych prof pointed out that even plants have behaviours - turn a plant away from the light and watch which way it grows. In D&D we have spells to allow speaking with plants - would that lead Druids to demand equal rights for carrots?
D&D to me implies a form of animism, that some kind of living spirit imbues creatures and plants and even objects (Stone Tell is a spell as well). To me, those spirits are so vague that it is not clear that eating a carrot causes any entity any harm. (Whereas eating a pig or a rabbit clearly does). And, of course, there's sheer necessity. We need to eat to live, but we don't need to eat animals. Us living is natural enough. Since druids do not all starve, I assume they have concluded that eating plants is okay and does not cause harm or violate nature.
Of course, killing an intelligent plant creature is clearly evil. The rules make a clear distinction between that and a regular plant.
Of course, we also have Create Food spells - that can mitigate the need to consume other life forms (assuming clerics high enough level to create food are in sufficient abundance to feed everyone, perhaps supplementing renewable food sources like milk - where do unfertilized eggs fall in the spectrum?).
Idunno.
Of course, it's much easier to be able to prescribe specific issues as "good" and "evil", but even killing orcs is accepted by most Good societies in D&D. I also note that Paladins kill a lot of creatures in a typical D&D campaign, don't they?
Yes. In a way, this contradiction is built into D&D. It rigidly defines good and evil and proscribes that the players should generally lean towards good, but the game strongly implies a great deal of violence, like the fiction it emulates. Many DMs (and producers of non-D&D fiction) gloss over the violent aspect and don't ask the hard questions that one asks on page 34 of an ENW thread on death, magic, and ethics.
I can go two ways with this. One, the paladin should take BoED vow feats and be a pacifist and a vegetarian and only kill things like nonintelligent foes and evil subtype outsiders. Two, the paladin is a massive hypocrite and that hypocrisy is ingrained in the concept. After all, what is a "holy warrior"? If '"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others', then how can a paladin, banned from evil acts, build a career around combat prowess?
So would slaughtering an animal - yet there is no shortage of meat at the grocery store. Frankly, I think magic in any form would give most people pause. It's also easy to describe the Fireball you cast to burn those Ogres - I suspect the actual smell of their burning flesh may not be overly palatable. Meanwhile, pretty much all of us have an idea what goes into a hot dog, but they still sell a lot of them.
So you're suggesting that in a D&D world, inhabitants would habituate to the unpleasant implications of magic? Perhaps. However, I think resurrections are uncommon enough and repugnant enough that accepting their implications is not the same as these other examples.
The problem with a lot of these rules is that, if the issue rarely arises, their impact is pretty limited.
I used to kill more PCs than I do now. I also used to have more sessions than I do now. If you're suggesting that my musings on resurrection morality would be more meaningful if I put them into practice by running more sessions and killing more PCs, I agree.
However, they still have impact. Simply knowing that they exist impacts decisions. For one thing, it makes the players a lot more careful to avoid death in the first place!
But you are imposing your morality on the question. Substitute "paladin" for "assassin", and the same opportunities would exist, wouldn't they? The only question is whether that Paladin would find this morally ambiguous (you know, as compared to dining on his steak dinner before going out to slaughter orcs and goblins because they threaten the farmers that have expanded into their territory).
I generally play very loose with alignments. My assassins are not necessarily evil, and my divine warrior types are not necessarily good with a code. I've banned paladins as such. But would a strongly good aligned character accept a resurrection under my system? Probably not, unless the sacrifice was willing. I've added a provision that the soul being raised knows both the identity of the caster and the identity of the creature being sacrificed, and thus can make a fairly informed decision.
