I didn't finish reading the entirety of the novel before class (It was sold out at the campus bookstore and I couldn't find it at Borders this weekend), which is why I didn't post until now. Sorry.
I feel like we hit upon a really interesting topic when we were talking about the morality of the stystem of predation on the alien planet. That being the importance of moral relativism; to what degree are we committing a cultural mistake in judging the alien culture by our own norms of predation (namely, that it's morally wrong/sinful to eat something that is sentient). I find a few flaws with this point of view. First of all, there's a certain disanalogy between the terran food structure and that on Rakhat. Namely: THE ONLY THING "SENTIENT" ON EARTH IS US! In saying that we oppose eating anything that can talk back to us, we're really just saying we oppose cannibalism, which holds true in any species. So extending our point of view to an alien society in which this sort of predation is the norm seems somewhat inappropriate.
Second, as we talked about, is the question of moral relativism. My first argument aside, what right should a group of human travellers have to impose their own system of values upon an alien world, which has developed culturally within its own closed system and has developed a cultural/social code which seems to function efficiently and to the (general) well-being of all. Cultural relativism is, of course, often a messy subject because there seem to exist some things which one culture (western culture, for example) cannot accept as a matter of differing opinion/worldview. Murder being one. And we define murder by the killing of another sentient being (that's homicide, in humanspeak, meaning killing of the same type of being, meaning killing of another human). However, clearly in this alien society, the label "homicide" wouldn't hold as accurate. So I feel like, on Rakhat, the distinction of "sentience" is a much more trivial one than it is for us. Another species is another species. Eating is eating.
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Actually, I'd disagree that opposition to cannibalism "holds true in any species". Besides plenty of cannibalism in the wild (rodents, cats, dogs, etc. - many species will eat their young if there aren't enough resources), there are/have been multiple human societies that engaged in cannibalism as part of their culture.
I do agree that it's not necessarily the place of aliens (aka humans) to interfere in a society that functions perfectly well as is. The passage where Emilio points out that our system, while not involving cannibalism or coercive breeding or any of those features of the Runa and Jana'ata relationship, does involve massive poverty and child death, was for me one of the most poignant in the novel.
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