Since cannibalism is found throughout the animal kingdom and therefore is something natural, perhaps it is time for humans to rethink the “ultimate taboo” against eating human flesh, Newsweek proposes in an article Wednesday.
There is nothing necessarily unethical or unreasonable about eating human flesh, declare psychologists Jared Piazza and Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University, but careful reasoning over the merits of cannibalism is often “overridden by our feelings of repulsion and disgust.”
While not going so far as to recommend cannibalism, saying “there is no need to overcome our repulsion for the foreseeable future,” the two authors suggest that humans could master their aversion for human flesh if they needed to.
“Many people develop disgust for all kinds of meat, while morticians and surgeons quickly adapt to the initially difficult experience of handling dead bodies,” they note. “Our ongoing research with butchers in England suggests that they easily adapt to working with animal parts that the average consumer finds quite disgusting.”
Moreover, the psychological revulsion experienced over the prospect of consuming human flesh is not the product of reason and may even contradict reason, they argue in Wednesday’s article, which originally appeared last week in The Conversation.
“Survivors of the famous 1972 Andes plane crash waited until near starvation before succumbing to reason and eating those who had already died,” they propose.
All sorts of animals eat members of their own species, from spadefoot tadpoles and Australian redback spiders to gulls and pelicans, they state.
And cannibalism can even be found among mammals, they add, such as with many rodents as well as bears, lions, and chimpanzees.
Yet humans seem entrenched in their conviction that anthropophagy is simply wrong, no matter how many conditions are placed on hypothetical scenarios.
Human revulsion toward cannibalism stems from our tendency to associate “personhood and flesh,” the authors propose, even when the flesh in question is no longer living.
Even if we can bring ourselves to deem cannibalism morally acceptable, they contend, “we can’t silence our thoughts about the person it came from” and so our “bias” against eating human flesh persists.
“The way we interact with animals shapes the way we categorize them. Research shows that the more we think of animals as having human properties—that is, as being ‘like us”’—the more we tend to think they’re gross to eat,” they note.
While noting in passing that “philosophers have argued that burying the dead could be wasteful in the context of the fight against world hunger,” the authors ultimately do not propose breaking this taboo “for now,” saying that “we’re as happy as you are to continue accepting the ‘wisdom of repugnance.’”
via Breitbart
Artie
Get real.
Rebecca
William Bradford of the Mayflower commented on cannibalism after learning about the cannibalistic Indians living around where the Pilgrims landed. One of the things he noted was the peculiar sudden death of certain Indians who were known cannibals. It seems eating other people sets you apart in life and in the throws of death… And why is it some intellectuals appear to be so stupid when commenting on a subject like cannibalism? It must be a lack of a moral compass, a conscience, which causes them to appear so stupid.
A T Khan
God has blessed the Earth with uncountable resources all centering around Humans. All variety of Animal & Vegetarian food is there for men to eat & satisfy their hunger.
Anyone who propounds the unfounded theory that there is a Global Food Crisis is driven by some selfish ulterior motive. It is given that there definitely is a problem with “distribution & access” to adequate amount & variety of food. Economic hegemony & xenophobia leading to price escalation causes severe obstacles to ready access to food : in other words famines & malnutrition.
With spectacular abundance of food albeit enforced inadequacies in its distribution on Earth this “so-called intellectual” discourse on the merits of Cannibalism coupled with abortive attempts to make a “repugnant, unnatural, abhorrent taboo thing into an attractive, acceptable & habitual behaviour ” is nothing short of cabalistic Luciferianism.
Any average, normal, sane human with a taste for Human flesh is mentally deranged by any civilizational yardstick of measurement, period. This yardstick separates & sets apart Man from Animal. The proponents are active euthanasists with the Free Masonic Cabalist nightmares of building an exclusive Earth for the Chosen Superior Race & People. May they rot in purgatory both cognitive & physical.