RolfAndreassen comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong
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My values, transposed into the position of a vampire in Luminosiverse, yes. I would be a predator, choosing among prey of two species that are not my own. There isn't anything magical about humanity and there is real value in maintaining a whole species. Particularly something as awesome as wolves. More so in a universe in which the species has magical significance.
As I mentioned, I'd eat someone's pet cat instead. But if it came down to a pure choice between eating wolves to extinction or eating a human then vampire wedrifid would eat a human.
Ultimately, if you bite the bullet on "Shut up and Multiply" then it turns out that you have to Shut up and Divide as well. A single human just isn't worth six billion times as much as the wolf species. In Bella's case she isn't doing a whole species worth of damage in one feed (which is, of course, hard to imagine) so the multiplicative factor isn't quite so large. But even so, her choice isn't a good one. Particularly given the ridiculous number of alternatives she had available.
Bella also can't be expected to Shut up and Multiply. If she follows in the author's footsteps she does not even implement consequentialism. But Bella's reasons for behaving unethically are not important.
It may be worth pointing out that it is only the Scandinavian wolf population that is endangered, not the species as a whole; there's a lot of wolves in Russia. But still, given that the declared policy of the Norwegian state and, presumably, people (disregarding the dang farmers, who ought to get with the gains-from-specialisation program already and stop trying to farm in subarctic conditions) is that we want to preserve a wolf population, it's rather rude, as well as illegal, for a guest in the country to eat one. Not to mention unrealistic, in that finding a wolf anywhere near a fjord is really quite unlikely.
If it came to a choice between a wolf and a human, I would definitely eat the wolf; but that's not the choice Bella faces. Let her find a moose.
On another subject, I'm not quite sure about the ecological impact of 'vegetarian' vampires. They are clearly apex predators, and they are pure carnivores. There are not that many moose in any given area, much less killer whales; you would think they'd hunt out the local populations pretty quickly, and someone would notice. I suppose they can eat rabbits and lemmings, which nobody would miss, but if Bella can drain the blood of a killer whale in one sitting (!), how many rabbits does she need in a day? Something is weird about the energy flows in the Luminosiverse.
I apologize for the imaginary depredation of endangered species. I just googled "Norwegian wildlife" and picked something. It became a minor conversation topic later so I don't want to edit it out. In fairness, Bella has no reason to know the conservation status of the Scandinavian population of any megafauna, and Edward is trying desperately at that point to get her to eat and knows carnivores to be more appealing than herbivores, so in the (perhaps wildly unlikely) event that he smelled a wolf near a fjord, he would encourage her to eat it and she'd have no reason to reject it because it has few friends.
Good point.
It has vampires that look 'graceful' while at the same time accelerating at inhuman rates despite near-human mass. Vampires have vulnerabilities to other vampires and to wolves yet resistance to other physical attacks that is in no way proportionate with respect to physics. Yes, it's best just to consider the energy flows 'magic' and leave it that.