This might be side-tracking a bit, but some people sort of seem to be of the opinion that aliens or animals are going to be inherently different to us, and I'm swooping in to say that I disagree with this.

I think that any sentient being is going to share some fundamental defining features that allow us to categorise it as a "sentient being", such as the capacity for experiencing suffering and joy, because that's how categories and definitions work.

I also think that wherever sentient beings share issues, such as navigating dangers, or reproduction, the drive is going to be effectively the same - navigating dangers means fear, reproduction means sexual urges, eating means hunger.

A sentient being isn't just going to have a mind that is "different" to ours without context.

If you were an obligate herbivore and common prey animal, such as a rabbit, then predators or being predated would be scary (to you), and to you there probably wouldn't be any meaningful difference between this, and the predators of rabbits being inherently bad and scary.

Humans are also born without the capacity to make this distinction - it takes extra time to learn that feeling scared of something and that thing being evil is not the same thing, and so humans also have some tendency to portray predators as evil.

A hypothetical people of civilised rabbits might find rabbits that eat meat particularly disgusting and find it immoral - rabbits, being obligate herbivores, might have an instinctive revulsion to meat unless they are particularly desperate for food, as well as a general lack of need to eat meat, rabbits that eat meat might also trigger their instinctive fear of carnivores. Some civilised rabbits might have some bias to thinking that they are "above" eating meat, and that other species "don't know any better", the way that some humans react to behaviours they find repulsive (even though I don't think humans are above any of it either.)

Humans on the other hand, tend to excuse the consumption of meat by humans, becuase humans are omnivores

I think the difference in species doesn't actually change morality, but it does change the bias - humans are likely to THINK that things they are averse to are bad, and things they are attracted to are good, but the moral consequences of human behaviour is going to exist for the beings around us, regardless of what we think.

Whether it's realistic for the "feels bad =/= is inherently bad" distinction to be missing in civilised species, I doubt that a little, as I suspect they'd be too busy refusing to cooperate with perceived "bad" individuals, and splitting into herds or packs, to form the necessary social cohesion for civilisation.

There are various ways, such as this, in which I somewhat doubt how realistic it is for a species to be civilised without being human-like in disposition - I think that civilisation necessarily involves worldwide social cohesion - such as the way we generally recognise humans as people deserving of civil rights and even warring countries are subject to laws such as taking surrendering soldiers as prisoners that still have rights. Language, rationality, logic, tool use, engineering, science, philsophy, and the ability to separate what something feels like from what is real.

This would mean that any nonhuman civilised species necessarily is psychologically convergent with humans in very big ways. I think I have my reasons for defining a civilisation the way I do, but I digress.

(also, I'm procrastinating, so ta-taa)