I specify “non-emergency situations” because I don’t want to argue about plane crash survivors surviving on dead passengers because it’s all there is to eat. I’m talking about just talking about grilling up some human on the BBQ at home because it’s special dinner night.
But wait, obviously, what with cannibalism being sort of completely illegal (and many health risks associated with eaten some human parts), let’s add some ground rules:
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Any person who is sold for meat after death has agreed to it ahead of time while in sound mind, as an adult. They are not slaughtered or killed for their meat (I don’t want this to double as a “is suicide okay?” thread). Any in-tact organs that could be used to help people or kept in storage for such a purpose are taken for medical use and saving lives first.
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Some magical future machine can use its de-enbadenator ray to make the meat unable to give you any funky diseases or prions or anything (or if you don’t accept that, it goes through a semi-magic nearly perfect screening process so that no bad meat passes through).
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Human meat is clearly labelled and sold as such. Not even any potentially confusing euphemisms like “longpig” or “soylent green” allowed. It is prominently and obviously marketed as “human meat”. If you’re buying and making it, you know so. If we want to reintroduce magic, we can also say that there’s some way of letting would-be hapless potluck attendees that human meat is in a dish, but I don’t want to cover every conceivable avenue in these rules.
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Everyone who isn’t you has magically shifted mindset overnight so that you won’t be ostracized and labeled a sicko if you eat human meat (this is to remove the “it’s wrong because I’m afraid of what others will do to me” objection), but nobody will be particularly offended if you don’t either. They essentially completely apathetic about whether you eat it or not.
Are these rules impractical, and unlikely to produce meat in any quantity that a normal person will every get any? Yeah, but the point of the hypothetical was to eliminate the unsavory aspects of real world cannibalism in first world western civilization so we could focus on the morals of completely humane, non-free-agency infringing, non-disease ridden human meat.
I personally don’t see anything wrong with it. For the record, I also see nothing wrong with eating cat or dog or horse. As long as you’re not abducting people’s pets or forcing it on people who rather wouldn’t eat it, whatever. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just food. Whatever. I don’t foresee any slippery slope where suddenly people are murdering others because they absolutely NEED their next fix of human meat unless they were already dangerous unhinged psychos anyway. I don’t think it’s exactly common to go around abducting people’s pet pigs to eat them and pork is common.
I apologize that I can’t give a longer, more thorough, detailed analysis of the morality. To me it’s seriously just “… meh.” I predict that many (most) of you will probably disagree with me, but to any counterargument I dream up my response is mostly just “check the ground rules” or “meh, not really a big problem.”
I guess one objection I could address is what happens when a family wants a body for the funeral while the deceased wanted his body sold as meat, but I feel there’s already some conflict there when it comes to being an organ doner, or a med school cadaver – or when the deceased has specific burial wishes that conflict with the family’s. I don’t really see this as being too fundamentally different.
The only other objection I can really think of is a shortage of educational or research cadavers. I almost made the lack of impact on this supply a ground rule, but decided against it. Personally I don’t think that too many people that allow their bodies to be cadavers would suddenly be jumping at the chance to be sold as a delicacy instead. That said, this thread is more about whether there’s anything “magically” (for lack of a better word) wrong with it. Any pressing ethical reason why eating human is badbadbad regardless of how humane it is and such.
The astute among you will recall that I started this thread a long time ago. I swear on chocolate and baby kittens that I don’t have some obsession with trying human meat/being served as meat and your mother is definitely out on vacation for a year and not on the grill in my back yard right now.
