Manifest Destiny
11-13-2007, 10:46 AM
In Defence of Cannibalism
Richard Routley
It is a commonplace of mainstream Western thought that cannibalism -- the eating of human flesh by humans, and, more generally, the feeding of animals on members of their own species -- is, at least in the human case, morally outrageous. This repugnancy thesis appears to be a legacy especially (but not only) of Christianity, probably derived from Jewish teaching, which went much further and excluded the eating of pig, for instance, as well as "long pig". It is a thesis reinforced by the substitution of Man for God of the "Enlightenment" and consequent elevation and separation of humans from other creatures. Now that all these positions have been substantially undermined, have for the most part been observed to rest on a tangle of false views and prejudices about the world, its origin, evolution and purposes, and about the creatures that inhabit it, their separateness, and their order (in an alleged chain of being) with humans at the apex, it is past time that major moral theses that these positions have sustained are re-examined and reassessed.
Up for re-examination are, in particular, all theses that depend essentially on the common but mistaken assumption that there is something morally very special or distinctive about simply being a human, that Homo sapiens as a species deserves special treatment. On the contrary, there is no morally relevant distinction between humans and all other creatures. Of course there are various morally relevant distinctions between things, but none concerns the biological species Homo sapiens. What holds rather is an annular model [1] which can be depicted schematically as follows:-Continued (http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:4Hoi_1YbHLoJ:www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/web/can/cannibalism.html+%22in+defence+of+cannibalism&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca)
Richard Routley
It is a commonplace of mainstream Western thought that cannibalism -- the eating of human flesh by humans, and, more generally, the feeding of animals on members of their own species -- is, at least in the human case, morally outrageous. This repugnancy thesis appears to be a legacy especially (but not only) of Christianity, probably derived from Jewish teaching, which went much further and excluded the eating of pig, for instance, as well as "long pig". It is a thesis reinforced by the substitution of Man for God of the "Enlightenment" and consequent elevation and separation of humans from other creatures. Now that all these positions have been substantially undermined, have for the most part been observed to rest on a tangle of false views and prejudices about the world, its origin, evolution and purposes, and about the creatures that inhabit it, their separateness, and their order (in an alleged chain of being) with humans at the apex, it is past time that major moral theses that these positions have sustained are re-examined and reassessed.
Up for re-examination are, in particular, all theses that depend essentially on the common but mistaken assumption that there is something morally very special or distinctive about simply being a human, that Homo sapiens as a species deserves special treatment. On the contrary, there is no morally relevant distinction between humans and all other creatures. Of course there are various morally relevant distinctions between things, but none concerns the biological species Homo sapiens. What holds rather is an annular model [1] which can be depicted schematically as follows:-Continued (http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:4Hoi_1YbHLoJ:www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/web/can/cannibalism.html+%22in+defence+of+cannibalism&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca)