Why is cannibalism morally wrong

The latter is a massive win for cows. Cheek swab beats boltgun. For diners, too; once you factor in how much of your bill goes into breeding and sustaining livestock. With nothing more invasive than a cotton bud, anyone could eat as much beef as they like without harming a single cow. Koert Van Mensvoort, director of the Next Nature Network and fellow at the Eindhoven University of Technology, is the man behind what is probably the worst but in a good way cookbook you could ever hope to buy.

The In Vitro Meat Cookbook contains recipes for over 40 dishes — none of which you can actually make. Each entry is illustrated, with an accompanying list of ingredients all centred around lab-grown meat , a gleefully morbid description, and a five-star rating system of scientific feasibility. Five stars: Set the table! That sounded weird to me, like how people called the first cars horseless carriages.

So I decided to step into their space and explore the creative design: what could be on our plates in the future because of this new technology? The In Vitro Meat Cookbook is really a cookbook in name only. Only towards the very end do things start turning shades of Soylent Green. Would sir or madame care for a Celebrity Cube? Which would certainly change the atmosphere on The Mall. Celebrity Cubes might be feasible — if you can grow mutton, you can grow Miley — but even without a sacrificial lamb, any company hoping to sell lab-grown human flesh will, says Van Mensvoort, be selling to a market that is exclusive and esoteric in equal measure.

Maybe a very haute-cuisine restaurant will offer this once-in-a-lifetime, special experience for which you pay a lot of money.

The problems are much more social and cultural than technical or medical. But, providing the cell donor is informed and consenting, what is the problem? What is it about the image of a half-dozen friends, laughing and chatting in between mouthfuls of each other, that makes it so innately ghoulish?

Firstly, in extremis one may have no choice. For example, a group of people may be stranded without food on a desert island or on a boat in the middle of the ocean. It seems reasonable for one person to have to die in order to prevent everyone dying, if there is genuinely no alternative. This dilemma is, however, rarely encountered outside cartoons. The idea of a soul an individual consciousness existing separate from the body is contradicted by the totality of the evidence we possess about the nature of consciousness.

It is a remnant of pre-medieval superstition. Conscious organisms do not have souls. The third and most popular factor which decides whether a person is considered acceptable to be eaten is the species to which that person belongs. The concept of species is a means of categorising individual organisms according to their physical characteristics. It is only with the passing of generations that differences between related individuals become sufficiently large to justify the categorisation of those individuals into separate species.

Distinctions between species are matters of convenience. This becomes particularly obvious when considering the fossilised remains of long-dead organisms: the limited extant features of an individual specimen can often be accommodated within more than one species.

The definition of a species is made at the level of the group, not of the individual organism. Now, moral consideration applies to individuals as individuals, not to individuals as members of groups. If individual organisms are to be given or denied moral consideration according to the species to which they have been assigned, an absolute and eternal distinction between species is required.

But there is none; the concept of species is an artificial construct, a fluid and subjective system of categorisation. Difference in treatment based on difference in species cannot be justified. Fourthly, God gave man dominion over the beasts; this must be true because it says so in the Bible which must be true because it says so in the Bible.

If you find this rationale convincing, you must have an impressive collection of half-built timeshare properties. Here, we will focus on the negative health ramifications of cannibalism. In most civilizations, cannibalism is the last port of call, used only if the alternative is certain death. The same goes for the majority of the human body; the health implications are similar to that of eating any large omnivore. The Fore people of Papua New Guinea, until relatively recently, practiced transumption — eating deceased relatives.

Kuru is a unanimously fatal, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy; it is a prion-based disease similar to BSE bovine spongiform encephalopathy , which is also known as mad cow disease.

Prion diseases are associated with the accumulation of an abnormal glycoprotein known as prion protein PrP in the brain. PrP occurs naturally, particularly in the nervous system. Its functions in health are not yet fully understood.

The Fore people are the only population who have experienced a documented epidemic of kuru and, at its peak in the s, it was the leading cause of death in women among the Fore and their nearest neighbors. The first report of kuru to reach Western ears came from Australian administrators who were exploring the area:. The victim retires to her house. She is able to take a little nourishment but suffers from violent shivering. The next stage is that the victim lies down in the house and cannot take nourishment, and death eventually ensues.

At its peak, 2 percent of all deaths in the Fore villages were due to kuru. The disease predominantly struck down females and children; in fact, some villages became almost entirely devoid of women.

This gender difference in the disease appears to have occurred for a couple of reasons. Fore men believed that, during times of conflict, consuming human flesh weakened them, so women and children more commonly ate the deceased.

Also, it was predominantly the women and children who were responsible for cleaning the bodies, leaving them at an increased risk of infection via any open wounds. Kuru has a long incubation period where there are no symptoms.