Abstract

Trophy hunting is probably bad. Timothy Hsiao (2020), however, thinks that it isn’t bad. This is because he thinks that animals lack moral status. Other philosophers have tried to argue against the theoretical grounds upon which Hsiao denies moral status to animals. I suggest that Hsiao’s arguments for trophy hunting should be rejected simply because they have extremely unintuitive implications. They imply that it would be fine to play ‘panda-ball,’ a variation of baseball where players use panda cubs as bases and balls, or even to blow up planets full of panda cubs just for the fun of it. As I suggest, these implications alone give us sufficient grounds to reject Hsiao’s arguments.