I’d eat a human… Weird thing to say that, but in some circumstances I believe it to be true. Peter Singer, a guy I am a big fan of, postulated the idea that animals are no different to people and people are no different to animals, we just happen to be smarter and more able to manipulate our circumstances. His proposal is, that from a moral perspective, the universe is indifferent to us just as it is to all other living organisms, nothing has a right for or against anything by natural means, other than what we can recognise as being built by us. The fact that we attribute to ourselves the right of domain over the other animals on this rock is a falsehood.

I take that to mean two things, an EITHER or an OR.

EITHER we are an animal and we protect the inalienable rights of humans, and because we are an animal then we recognise those rights in animals too. So we all become vegetarians immediately, let the livestock loose, and see what happens.

OR we eat each other when we need to, or for pleasure, since we are just another animal and what’s the difference?

The practical implications are of course a factor, it’s easy to hunt a bison because the bison does not hunt back, it’s easy to keep sheep because they can’t figure out how to escape, it’s easy to keep chickens because they don’t eat a lot and aren’t fussy. I suppose there is also the fact that if you eat your prize bull then his brother is unlikely to hold a grudge against you. The animals are just too dumb to figure out how to systematically use us for sustenance, but we were once food to them I suspect. Imagine if we go back a few hundred thousand years, before the events that brought forth the Holocene and wiped out fifty percent of the mammals, some of them dangerous, to when we coexisted without the advantage of a developed language, tools, or a complex brain, would we have been food to something?

I imagine keeping people for food purposes would present quite a few logistical problems, enclosures for humans are complex, hard to maintain, and the occupants often try to escape. People have a voice and a vocabulary you understand to attempt to persuade you why you should not eat them. In Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy the character Arthur Dent has serious difficulty getting his head around the fact hat the cow wants to be eaten, and it can say as much. He can’t eat a cow that wants to be eaten, but can eat one that likely doesn’t, paradox. I’ll speculate that it would be easier if the languages used were different and no understanding was present. I think we would all recognise the non linguistic communication of unwillingness, but we may recognise that same unwillingness in a cow and plough ahead anyways because we simply don’t care, so what difference again if it’s all just animals and we are one?

In history we have known of cannibals, it was a practiced on every continent and in every epoch, only becoming less common in the later centuries of the second millennium, and likely because of modern abundances of food combined with changing belief structures.

"Once upon a time there were cannibals, now there are no cannibals anymore" 
- Mark Knopfler, Cannibals

It is of course easier to care less for folks that are not part of your tribe and eat them first maybe. I think the histories of religions, monarchies, and colonialism provides something for this argument. People are often made second class by way of systematic ideologies, even if they have codified laws that make it look like they are protected by equal measure. I pay toward the protection of Prince William and his family against any harm that might come to them. I pay toward them having a permanent security force. I also pay toward you having a form of protection in the shape of a police force, but you have to summon them and they have to assess whether you are in enough danger to be addressed. They might be too busy to help, you might not be in enough peril yet, they are not detailed to you exclusively.

For rights we have made laws, and the law that applies to the Prince and his family is in words the same as the one that applies to you, but in practice it is a linguistic trick, hermeneutic. For the law that allows him to have a greater level of safety is mooted as in the interest of you and us, so in a technical sense you and I are being served by his protection (we call this the public good). It’s bullshit of course, but it is a prejudice that works for him yet looks justifiable in words at least, and we don’t get to argue. What we can say is that the law serves him as an individual better than it serves you, and that proves that there are different levels of people who are not equal.

So it would be easier to eat people that were not the same colour, or if you could refer to them in a way that your tribe understood them in that description to be ‘lesser’ than you in some way. This itself presents a problem if we have chosen to see people as animals, because to differentiate based on criteria, to enact a prejudice, is to identify the right of some of these animals to not be eaten, and that is not consistent enough to form a workable practice or theory that all can agree to.

If we could not breed people to be eaten because we could not breed people to have zero recognisable rights, then are there circumstances where we could say it becomes okay to eat people? What about if they have died by some means and were not ill, say like in an accident, would it be alright to eat the bits that remained intact? We can put the useful spare parts into other people that need them, the liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, the blood if viable, but the rest is just meat is it not? Is it not a waste to put that in a box and take up maybe an 8×6 plot of land with it? Can’t one of my cats have it at least?

This has been a speculative post on moral relativism for the purpose of thinking about a subject in a different way than our conditioning normally allows. I am not advocating anything, I do not eat people nor wish to start doing so. See the humour in it, tease out the threads, think about the ridiculousness of our structures and challenge them for the falsehoods they are, ask how we got to arranging the world as it is, and above all remember we are just talking here peeps… enjoy your lunch.

Paul S Wilson