If a person said “I’ll kill myself and you can eat me afterwards” and they were eaten, what would be wrong about eating them? We eat animals every day. Humans are animals. What’s ethically wrong with eating them?
Of course, if it turned into a capitalistic venture, that would be a completely different discussion: how would you know the human meat were sourced by voluntary deaths? Once there’s money involved, things get very tricky.
Every single disease that might be present in human meat is 100% capable of infecting humans, which is not at all the case for non-human meat.
Even if you properly cook the meat, things like prions can still remain.
I suspect that’s probably one of the reasons why the tabu against cannibalism is so widespread: from a health point of view human meat is a lot more likely to make you sick than non-human meat.
Prions can exist in any meat and are incredibly difficult to destroy.
The World Health Organization recommends any of the following three procedures for the sterilization of all heat-resistant surgical instruments to ensure that they are not contaminated with prions:
Immerse in 1N sodium hydroxide and place in a gravity-displacement autoclave at 121 °C for 30 minutes; clean; rinse in water; and then perform routine sterilization processes.
Immerse in 1N sodium hypochlorite (20,000 parts per million available chlorine) for 1 hour; transfer instruments to water; heat in a gravity-displacement autoclave at 121 °C for 1 hour; clean; and then perform routine sterilization processes.
Immerse in 1N sodium hydroxide or sodium hypochlorite (20,000 parts per million available chlorine) for 1 hour; remove and rinse in water, then transfer to an open pan and heat in a gravity-displacement (121 °C) or in a porous-load (134 °C) autoclave for 1 hour; clean; and then perform routine sterilization processes.
I think people are mainly driver by the tabu against eating human meat rather than any kind of proper thinking about it, but the tabu itself probably came to be because people kept getting sick when they ate human meat but not when they ate other meats.
You see a lot of that kind of thing in other tabus, for example the ones against incest (inbreeding tends to produce offspring with health problems) or handling feces (because the bacteria in feces tend to cause disease much more than the bacteria in things like dirt).
I’m not saying I would murder someone to try human, but I would go to the store to try longpork
If a person said “I’ll kill myself and you can eat me afterwards” and they were eaten, what would be wrong about eating them? We eat animals every day. Humans are animals. What’s ethically wrong with eating them?
Of course, if it turned into a capitalistic venture, that would be a completely different discussion: how would you know the human meat were sourced by voluntary deaths? Once there’s money involved, things get very tricky.
Every single disease that might be present in human meat is 100% capable of infecting humans, which is not at all the case for non-human meat.
Even if you properly cook the meat, things like prions can still remain.
I suspect that’s probably one of the reasons why the tabu against cannibalism is so widespread: from a health point of view human meat is a lot more likely to make you sick than non-human meat.
Prions can exist in any meat and are incredibly difficult to destroy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization
That’s a good argument. Many people seem to have a kneejerk response to eating human meat though, which I’m not sure comes from that knowledge.
I think people are mainly driver by the tabu against eating human meat rather than any kind of proper thinking about it, but the tabu itself probably came to be because people kept getting sick when they ate human meat but not when they ate other meats.
You see a lot of that kind of thing in other tabus, for example the ones against incest (inbreeding tends to produce offspring with health problems) or handling feces (because the bacteria in feces tend to cause disease much more than the bacteria in things like dirt).