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posted by martyb on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the Newest-Entrée-at-Milliways?-Long-Pig-Bacon? dept.

'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves

What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?"
- @RichardDawkins - 6:15 AM - 3 Mar 2018

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/969939225180364805
https://archive.fo/kSmgi

"Lab-grown 'clean' meat could be on sale by end of 2018, says producer"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/clean-meat-lab-grown-available-restaurants-2018-global-warming-greenhouse-emissions-a8236676.html

"'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves"
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/6/richard-dawkins-mulls-taboo-against-cannibalism-en/

and:

https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/corner/richard-dawkins-eating-human-meat-cannibalism-taboo/


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 10 2018, @06:36AM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday March 10 2018, @06:36AM (#650425) Journal

    The taboo against cannibalism is not just because of killing. I've once (very long ago) read the following observation:

      In the military, a soldier who kills many enemies is honoured as a good soldier. Should that same soldier start eating enemies that he killed, he would be condemned.

    In addition, note that eating humans that are already dead is taboo, too.

    Note also that the health risk is not directly relevant here: While it is true that eating human meat is a much higher health risk than other potential foods, we generally do not morally condemn people who eat stuff that is a health risk (otherwise in the modern world, we'd have to condemn the vast majority of people).

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @11:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @11:13AM (#651291)

    The key word here is "because". When you make a random choice without knowing if it will produce a favorable outcome in the future (e.g. keep you alive longer) you don't make it because of the outcome, but the outcome justifies the choice in retrospective. That's how evolution works. It is not that we condemn people for cannibalism because it is bad for people's health, but to the contrary people's health is a tad bit better because we chose to condemn cannibalism. Why exactly our ancestors chose that, we don't know, but it probably was some religious belief, perhaps belief in an carnal afterlife.