I am still working on the introductory paragraph. Now it is high time I stated the question that I wish to answer with my essay.

The far-reaching guiding question of this essay is whether human beings should or should not kill animals for reasons of ecology, morality, ethics.

In order to make my sentences more vivid and clear, I want to specify nouns, verbs, adjectives in more detail. I use modifiers, i.e. mainly adverbs or adjectives. When we use two or more modifiers, we must be careful not to separate words that are not of equal weight. What does that mean? The comma separates lists of equal things - but how do we know they are equal? We can do the following replacement test. Replace the comma with ’and’ and check whether the meaning is still the same or whether the two words are really of the same grammatical rank.

The far-reaching and guiding question [wrong!] this essay hopes to answer is whether all human beings, irrespective of their religion, should or should not kill animals for reasons of morality and ethics and ecology.

‘far-reaching and guiding’
The ‘and’ does not connect two equal adjectives here: ‘guiding’ belongs to ‘question’. So there should not be a comma between them.

‘ecology and morality and ethics’
is a list of three equal items. The comma replaces ‘and’ here. So there should also be a comma between them if there is no ‘and’. The sense has not changed, so these commas are correct.