Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

What do I win?

We're doing this slaughterhouse style, Cap'n. So we create farms for the express purpose of turning people into food. Nobody else is at risk.

 

Couple problems:

 

1) Try finding women willing to carry the baby. ( I sure the fuck wouldn't..)

 

2) Try finding women willing to give up their baby.
 

 

 

I don't think you'd even find people willing to do the 'dirty work'.  We view children as the future of our species. That is why we value them.  People are very overprotective of children.

 

   Have you ever tried rancid meat ??  

this isn't the argument you want, not being philosophical, but from a purely pragmatic point of view, you're not going to sell people as the hot new culinary thing.  It will not be the "blackened red fish" of the 'oughties. There are numerous reasons for this.

 

1) People suck.

 

I know.  It's often said and rarely needs justification--on the whole, you'd think people sucking would be a great reason for herding them up and at least using them for protein. But no, it actually tends to make them messily inedible.  Consider your long-term drug-user, alcoholic, sex addict, and the plethora of organ disorders and VD's and oh, the cancer from the smokers.  The long-term usage of various prescription drugs, from Viagra to steroids and and all the other chemical funnybusiness people shovel into their faces, veins, and environment.  For this reason, I doubt peoplemeat (Peef! It's what's for dinner!) will even taste good.  And what with obesity being a major health concern, I don't think it'll be what health-conscious people are interested in eating at all.  I know, it'll be all marbled like Kobe.  And those muscles will be tender--so little used.  Like slurping back oysters.  But it'll taste like the shit they ate their whole lives, and the hormones and...seriously, I think it'll smell when cooking like slightly off-pork.

 

2) Humans are allegedly sentient, and may protest.  I suppose this corners on special pleading, but I think a fair case can be made for the less-than-subtle difference in intellect and situational awareness of humans versus other meatpuppets.  I take note that bison, chickens, and even your Alaskan salmon, have never bothered to operate a daily press, but in all human markets, there is in fact a local  news organ that chimes in about all manner of outrages.  I see very sternly worded letters to the editor in regards to the whole peef enterprise. Widows and orphans will be mentioned. The victims, I mean, um, livestock, themselves, might even raise a clamor.  Humans are social but not exactly herd-beasts. They often show a facility for combat if provoked.  It is believed their evolution had something to do with hunting.  Therefore, finding people to deal with the, um, people, may be a definite issue.

 

3) Claiming your herd will be frighteningly chancy, legally speaking.  The reason for this is so many people are literally working for the "company store."  Credit card companies. Mortgages.  Your average American Peef-source is a sink of debt to some corporation or other. He's owned already.  You can hardly claim any business in carving him up and selling his various cuts (loins, breast, and the ever popular peef-tripes--which require a long rinse and even make atheists pray)  if someone else has his.her contract. Unless you raised your peef and hand fed him or her, and housed the little meaty critter, you've not at all earned any right to sell any bit of him or her. Parents may potentially have a right on their children--and to quite an advanced age what with education costs and all, but you'd never find a a great "peef on the hoof" pool.

 

Unless you're Visa or Mastercharge. Then it's possible.

 

4) Soylent green.  I, an atheist for many years,still hold a fond feeling for Cecil B DeMille's Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, because it was a sumptuously made film. I review the odd film, and I give the Ten Commandments high marks for visuals, acting and story. You may have noted it is habitually viewed on Easter Eves in many television markets by one or another of the major networks.  It both tells the Exodus story whilst prefiguring Christianity, and is layered and complex and yet--it falls back on the sumptuous, being DeMille.  Because of  The Ten Commandments, movies like the Planet of the Apes, but especially Soylent Green were brought into being--why?  Because Heston was a marketable movie lead, but a nutter in his choice of scripts, but lets disregard that.  Soylent Green was people, yo?

 

We already have memes in the population that eating peef is a bad sign. Bros don't let bros eat peef. It would be readily seen as a sign of Donner, party of Six billion . Apocalypso music would play. Because literally "Dawg eat Dawg" would be a sign of utter chaos, many people, culturally, would do like Nancy Reagan, and just say "No".

 

So, for financial reasons, I think it would go horribly wrong if any concern took that on as their enterprise. Although wars are started, certainly, and people die. The step to eating the brave is an anthropomorphic magical-thinking transfiguration in the general thought-pool away. Eat a soldier, make their death your caloric epic win!  But on the whole, not a saleable notion at all.

Baloney! ( Would be one of the sausages you could make from "Long Pork" )

I don't think I'm making any assumptions, really... well, except in that my argument isn't that explicit.

Humans have the innate capacity to intuit. Easily far greater than any food animal now raised. I doubt it would take long for even a totally ignorant population to figure out what's what. Especially with direct contact with their herders.

Where do you get the idea slaughter herds are pacified with drugs? Both cows and pigs are placid enough for raising and don't need pacification until and unless they panic on the in-ramp of the slaughterhouse. If we needed to pacify herds of humans to get them into a similar placid state, we're adding a layer of expense that bolsters my economic argument against humans as munchies.

Clearly, then , you also have evidence we can look at that suggests that bovines and pigs are incompetent when it comes to understanding their surroundings, communicating to each other, and judging what kind of future lies ahead for them?

Why yesh Yesh I do. Right behind me on my bookshelf... but apparently not yet on-line anywhere. My googling is being clogged up by ads for memory and intellect enhancement woo ads

 

I didn't want to cross the streams here, but:

What makes you think humans have that instinct? Wiping out other's children has been done (and I think in some places in the world, still being done). It's not really a stretch to think we could have a culture that bred and ate other humans based on the fact we have cultures willing to eliminate whole opposing tribes.

Something tells me they won't be looking for volunteers in this Godless commie hell-hole. 

Firstly, let me say, Kevin you sick fuck. And no, I don't mean that as a tongue-in-cheek compliment, I mean it as it is. What a revolting suggestion. Not funny, not clever, just perverse and revolting.

 

Secondly, you want an argument?

How about special pleading?

People would not want to eat other people, as they would find the practice revolting, perverse, and not pragmatic or clever or anything like that. Just sick.

It is a scientific fact that people have emotions, as you well know, and those emotions include revulssion and disgust at sick and perverse practices, and so they would plead for a special exception to be made on behalf of other humans. So special pleading would be a reason why it would be economically unviable to try and market human-meat.

 

If you had society in which there was no sense of identification with humans outside your immidiate social sphere, then by all means, they could knock themselves out, but thankfully the global community as a whole is not such a society, and so your point is moot. Your hypothetical society in which it would be globally accepted to eat people would require that the entire slate of human morality was wiped clean, and then we could start rebuilding it from scratch, and you know that's never gonna happen, because humans learn their moral from their predecessors, so there is no reset-button, it's all a further developement of what has come before.

 

Oh, and again, not funny! Just fucking perverse.

Is moral outrage at a hypothetical only hypothetically moral outrage?

 

But it's a great exercise. I mean, the point is to get back to the "it's immoral" stance without the special pleading.How do you defend a position you actually hold without the very idea used to get to that stance in the first place?

There's no suggestion here that cannibalism is morally defensible. Using the word "moot" hits the nail on the head, this is like a moot court. There is no practical use for the arguments, just a practical use for the exercise.

If this is heading in the direction I think it's headed, and the big moral of the story is going to be that we shouldn't kill animals, then I'll say this: Whoever takes away my beef had better be willing to provide the loads of heme iron that I require (and that's only found in meat as far as I know, so good luck with that) or else be willing to pay the hospital/ambulance bills when I faint because of anemia.

Also provide me with a portable heater or personal transportation so that I don't have to wear my down coat and ugg boots in order to walk several miles when the temps are subzero in the winter.

Also find a new place of employment for me that doesn't entail keeping track of caged mice and occasionally killing them in the pursuit of knowledge.

Or if that's too much to ask, then just throw me in the slaughterhouse I guess..

But seriously, in the spirit of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we're simply making use of available resources when using animals and other natural resources. I don't see any huge aversion to killing humans for food, but I also don't see an overwhelming need for such action. Also, the issues that we run into with such action are of the legal sort... how do we determine who goes to the slaughterhouse and who doesn't? We are essentially saying that some humans are worth more than others; some deserve to have rights and some don't. How do we justify that?

If the buyer knows it's human flesh I highly doubt they would eat it, first and foremost it's a natural revulsion of humans to eat our own, actually we are not known to eat our own, except under special circumstances, as we as a species generally (there are always exceptions to these rules which I shall cite in a bit) are disgusted by the idea of eating human flesh. More so because we have empathy, as such the idea of slaughtering people for food when other sources of food are readily available, and to a degree we have seen that even starvation won't over come this desire to not eat our own species, is against our natural outlook of ourselves.

Now humans eating human flesh throught history are usually isolated cases, starvation or religious ritual, and usually they are eating the flesh of a deceased and in small amounts never the whole human for ritual purposes. As well even in the case of starvation people will rather die than eat human flesh. Those that eat human flesh during starvation tend to not either identify those they ate or even discuss the entire matter at all.

So in my conclusion we as a species won't consume human flesh in the same manner as we eat other animals because of main reason that we as a species tend to find it as an aberration, even those that have consumed flesh for ritual purposes, the society they lived in didn't allow them to consume flesh for the purpose of food as they found it as an aberration as well.  Now you can call this special pleading (which it isn't) or basically show me how humans could consume human flesh in masses and actually know about it without it being viewed as an aberration, without having empathy towards other humans that are being slaughtered, and how to get babies without the parents actually know what is going on, and how a society would allow any company or organization to take a child away from it's parents for the sole purpose for it to be consumed.

No, beaten by two.  I said all of that stuff first.

How would you determine who should be eaten and who should do the eating? No matter how you decided, the person being eaten would have the same claim to the right to not be cannibalized as the people who were going to eat them. So the society would need to be extremely inegalitarian. And if anybody could be eaten then nobody would want to live in a society where they could be eaten. Everyone would just run away.

...I was more looking for moral objections rather than practical ones, but I suppose that's what I get for not being terribly specific.

Nik, I'm always sort-of poking around for the next big outrageous collective act of disgust. The thing we're doing today while hardly batting an eye that, a couple of centuries from now, people will look back on and say, "Holy shit. People were FUCKTARDS back then!"

Tonight, I'm just sort-of pondering whether or not our treatment of livestock might be it.

The question was not a suggestion; it was a question. Can you think of an excellent reason, beyond special pleading, that bovines (or any other piece of livestock) should be treated as little other than dinner? Now, granted, there are all sort of practical reasons for not eating people like we do cows - but beyond that, what justification do we have for breeding animals in captivity to dine on? We're omnivores, afterall, and can survive quite well on crops and farming (which yields, I believe, far more food per acre anyway).

Well, where I find myself agreeing with Singer is where it comes to role reversal / empathy. In general, this is how I judge my own actions for their rightness or wrongness (if I were that person, how would I like it if Kevin did 'X' to me, or treated me like 'Y'). This presents a real problem for me when it comes to certain animals outside our own species, however (like cows, for example). How would we like it if the role was reversed? If what you're suggesting is true, and the cows have such a 'sweet deal', would you be happy to corralled and eaten (but ensured that you'll get to pass on your genes)? I would suspect not (I certainly wouldn't).

It isn't. This is just something I'm thinking about, as a personal matter. I doubt I would give-up meat anyway (steak is too damn good. ), but I do simply wonder about whether it's a monstrous thing we're doing. If it's merely a matter of 'might makes right', and we have no qualms about killing cattle or lab mice or whatever other animal group we do this to, then we're operating on a moral level (as a society) equivalent to a small child.

I think that's problematic (if it's true; and I'm not saying it is, I'm just, well, pondering).

In ancient China there was a human meat available on markets. It was named 'bipedal wether'. Dunno how people got it, probably from executions and ritual suicides. I heard, that when officers (for example) didn't fulfil their duty, they had to commit a suicide as an act of honor. So I guess there was enough of human meat for markets.

Cannibals very well knew, that humans tastes like pork. And so they knew, that white men are stinky, while a meat of their fellow black tribesmen from a neighbouring tribe is much better.

I generally disagree with "industrial farming" for many reasons. It's of course unethical, the amount of animals' suffering is tremendous. Livestock and poultry isn't as unconscious as it's thought. This is why people often don't want to eat horses.
Next, it's extremely uneffective. Not only that the feed is used in great amounts, a manure from it is thrown away as waste, which contaminates rivers afterwards. It's rather not used on fields, in a favor of chemical fertilizers (mined fosfates, etc). If this kind of farming would stop, there would be a great excess of food per capita. And of course, it's unhealthy. Meat is full of stress and artificial hormons, it's raised on antibiotics and the company director knows what else.
I don't say I have the balls to join a radical protest movement or become a vegetarian (not yet anyway), but if there would be a shutting down of these facilities, I wouldn't protest nor sabotage such process. It would be a small inconvenience, compared to the benefits.
Btw, eating of fish should be ethically acceptable for anyone, there's no need for veganism and such extremes. When Jesus and his disciples could eat fish, it's certainly not a sin or bad for karma. Industrial farming is.

For those who are disgusted by an idea of killing people for meat, let's say, that it's already worse. Millions of people dies in the world every year by slow and painful death, because they don't have the food they should have, because it's fed to animals or it rots in storage houses. Using a potential food for biofuels makes it even worse.

Nordmann, we live on the same planet with theists, and they're not leprous (except of fundies), we don't have to avoid a contact with them. You think it's the only philosophy forum I'm on?
Jesus, Issa, or whoever he was, someone like that probably existed, just as today we know Sathya Sai Baba or Shri Ramana Maharishi. People with great power of personality are usually historically noted, that's normal.
The legends about Jesus' miracles are greatly exaggerated, and other circumstances of his life are very unprecise (there's almost a half missing in Bible) but his revolutionary thoughts can't pop up as a gossip, just as you can't write a good book by brainstorming. For example, his preaching in Matt's evangelium has extraordinary emphasis on ethics, rationality, and justice, compared to common standards of that time and place. The fact, that theists and Pharizee-like fundamentalists later killed and enslaved masses in name of whatever they made of Jesus, just signifies that they weren't able to fake that genuine ethics, they just wanted power.
As for me and J's thoughts, it's not a faith, it's a partial agreement. For me, "Jesus" is whoever really said, wrote or did actions attributed to Jesus.

 

You call it reality? Don't try to scare me.

  If such a thing should be moral, it would have to decrease a pollution in the world, by decreasing  a number of people. This inevitably means, that it would be necessary actually to hunt people for meat, not to breed them. And just so it means, that these people would be hunted in highly developed, "civilized" areas of world. If you hunt down a whole family in let's say USA, there will be nobody to drive their car  or use a valuable electricity, water, food and so on. The effect will be notable. If you hunt down a family in Sudan, for example, they live from only a small bit of world resources, so you don't save much. But I think, that a succesful hunting action in a suburb and then selling a fresh meat to neighbours for their sunday barbecue wouldn't be the best way to convince the customers about ethics. The customers would imagine themselves in this fate, after all, it's only a difference of next doors. This just can't work, everyone would be afraid, barricaded, and then armed and organized against such business.

 I think that Social Contract can condemn cannibalism.  My suspicion is that any attempt to create an us/them (eaters/eaten) grouping can be reduced to some kind of discrimination, and that qualifies as immoral.

 

The outrage that pops up from time to time in this thread surprises me..  It seems to me that questions challenging cultural moral norms should be investigated thoroughly.  Cannibalism wouldn't be rejected on cultural outrage in a culture that participated in it.  There are cultures active even today that engage in the practice, not a single one of them filled with moral outrage.  And what about horrific disasters that leave people with no other options?

 

Alive  is a classic example, as is the The Donner Party.  It seems that people eat whatever they can to survive.

This isn't even an argument. It's an opinion.

 

It's curious to me: people will insist that there is no quandry with participating alongside the meat industry as consumers, yet can't actually come-up with any logical arguments to justify their behavior (you'll note that every single argument dealing with ethics in this thread so far for example, like every one I've ever seen in relation to this topic, is constructed of logical fallacies).

 

And enjoy this clip:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIufLRpJYnI

TwiZone and a bit from Naked Gun follows....total run time 1:21

Hahaha Brilliant