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hairyfigment comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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Were the Babyeaters immoral before meeting humans?
If not, what would you like to call the thing we actually care about?
What they did was clearly wrong... but, at the same time, they did not know it, and that has relevance.
Consider; you are given a device with a single button. You push the button and a hamburger appears. This is repeatable; every time you push the button, a hamburger appears. To the best of your knowledge, this is the only effect of pushing the button. Pushing the button therefore does not make you an immoral person; pushing the button several times to produce enough hamburgers to feed the hungry would, in fact, be the action of a moral person.
The above paragraph holds even if the device also causes lightning to strike a different person in China every time you press the button. (Although, in this case, creating the device was presumably an immoral act).
So, back to the babyeaters; some of their actions were immoral, but they themselves were not immoral, due to their ignorance.
Clearly I should have asked about actions rather than people. But the Babyeaters were not ignorant that they were causing great pain and emotional distress. They may not have known how long it continued, but none of the human characters IIRC suggested this information might change their minds. Because those aliens had a genetic tendency towards non-human preferences, and the (working) society they built strongly reinforced this.