The problem must be that there are more paedophiles around than cannibalists...
Anyway, heating dead bodies doesn't harm them..
boomerang wrote:Yep. Me not so much. I don't really have it in my heart to defend cannibalism though.
But my arguements are the same as his:
They are certainly similar. And they are just as weak as
agrote's arguments. But do you know
why they are weak? Can you explain why cannibalism is indefensible?
If I found body parts laying around somewhere it would be my duty to inform the police, as many people have pointed out. It would be my duty even if I wanted to eat what I found instead. Some crime or accident has happened.
If I find someone giving away human flesh on the internet clearly part of their thrill is in the giving away, otherwise they would keep it secret for their own use and pleasure. The simple fact that they have made it available for others to use tells us that their pay-off is in the sharing itself. And, since the pay-off is the sharing they will commit whatever deeds required in order to get their pay-off, so by participating I become a partner in their crime.
boomerang wrote:If I found body parts laying around somewhere it would be my duty to inform the police, as many people have pointed out. It would be my duty even if I wanted to eat what I found instead. Some crime or accident has happened.
Agrote specifically limited his focus to the
moral aspects of child pornography, not the
legal aspects, so it's no answer to his argument to say that it's illegal. You can't trump the argument that cannibalism is wrong by saying that it's illegal: that only raises the question "why should it be illegal?"
boomerang wrote:If I find someone giving away human flesh on the internet clearly part of their thrill is in the giving away, otherwise they would keep it secret for their own use and pleasure. The simple fact that they have made it available for others to use tells us that their pay-off is in the sharing itself.
I think that is, in essence, correct. We can presume that those who would give away human flesh on the internet must be getting some sort of benefit from the act of sharing.
boomerang wrote:And, since the pay-off is the sharing they will commit whatever deeds required in order to get their pay-off, so by participating I become a partner in their crime.
That is a pretty big stretch. I sincerely doubt that most of those sharing human flesh are also human butchers as well, or prepared to participate in human butchery, just as I doubt that most people who share drugs are also drug producers. Granted, anyone who shares human flesh is engaged in a criminal activity, but that doesn't mean they are involved in the
same criminal activity as those who procured the flesh in the first place.
Although I do probably have a legal duty to report evidence discovered that is part of a crime or an accident I believe that I also have a moral duty to do so. It's part of the social contract.
And I don't think it's a stretch to think that the person offering flesh has caused the flesh to become available. Body parts are carefully regulated and tracked, if someone is offering them up on craigslist I think it's logical to assume that they have killed someone and that for them the "thrill" isn't just in the killing but in the sharing.
The sharing allows them to exhibit their power over others, to others.
boomerang wrote:Although I do probably have a legal duty to report evidence discovered that is part of a crime or an accident I believe that I also have a moral duty to do so. It's part of the social contract.
If you believe in a Lockean sort of social contract, then that may be the source of one of your problems with
agrote's argument, since
agrote is a consequentialist.
boomerang wrote:And I don't think it's a stretch to think that the person offering flesh has caused the flesh to become available. Body parts are carefully regulated and tracked, if someone is offering them up on craigslist I think it's logical to assume that they have killed someone and that for them the "thrill" isn't just in the killing but in the sharing.
The sharing allows them to exhibit their power over others, to others.
I'm not sure how you could arrive at that conclusion. But even if you're correct, that would just mean that, in this particular respect, the cannibal situation you're describing isn't the same as the child porn situation
agrote is describing.
After a few days of speculation on the origin of the social taboo against cannibalism among European cultures, but not necessarily in the cultures of more congenial climates, this is what i have come up with.
Humans began in tropical and subtropical climates. It appears that they may have migrated away from the Rift Valley of East Africa in response to drought conditions, and this took them to southwest Asia, and perhaps eventually to south and southeast Asia.
These regions are still areas in which a clever hominid could find food in just about any season of the year, and would only need shelter to get out of the hot sunlight, or the rain. However, in certain seasons of the year, the competition for food resources could have been fierce, and the carrying capacity of the environment relatively low, especially if they were living in forested environments (in which most of the nutrients are in the trees, there is little--relatively speaking--grass and undergrowth, and only small populations of grazing or browsing animals are supported).
Enter the ice ages. What would later (and in historical times) be vast forests across central Eurasia, could not support widespread forests in the periglacial conditions near the ice cap, which covered up to a quarter of the northern hemisphere, and profoundly influenced local weather conditions for most of the year. Trees were stunted if they appeared at all on the periglacial steppes or the tundra. Trees would only have survived with any hardihood in shelter niches of south facing slopes, or the gallery forests on the banks of rivers which had already cut deep valley through the terrain. The rest of what would be those vast forests thousands of years ago were instead, in the ice ages, vast grassy steppes. In a steppe environment, most of the nutrients remain in the soil--very little is used to produce the grasses, which nevertheless could have in some species reached heights of ten to fifteen feet. Even in areas of poor soil, substantial growths of grasses were possible. Forests take years to reach maturity, and take large amounts of the available soil nutrients. Grasses can reach full maturity in a few weeks, and if they are cropped to the ground by grazing animals, or burned away in brush fires, can rebound within that same short period of a few weeks. In modern times, farmers in temperate zones routinely harvest hay for livestock feed three or four times a year.
So, the periglacial steppes supported huge populations of grazing animals. They also supported animals of a much larger size than the species cousins which survive today--the aurochs ("giant" cattle), the megaceros (literally, "big horns," it was a giant deer species with antlers spanning 12 feet and weighing in excess of a hundred pounds), the wooly rhinoceros. The grasslands could support huge populations of grazing animals, and any humans who would have left southern regions for the ice age steppes (perhaps due to population pressures, or simply in response to what would have been, comparatively, incredibly rich hunting) would have been well rewarded.
Living in the cold climate required a range of sophisticated adaptations to provide shelter, clothing and fire, which would not have been needed in warmer climates. But with careful management, humans could be better fed than they probably ever had been (absent agriculture) in subtropical climates. This required that they hunt and gather, and store large quantities of food for the unforgiving winters--but the evidence is not only that they did this, but that they were so remarkably successful that they were able to devote a great deal of time to other tasks, and produced works of art and highly ornamented artifacts.
But there is a time in the life of any hunter-gatherer which is always a stark threat, and that is late winter. When stored fats and grains and vegetable products start to run low, and stored meat is all that is available, people can suffer what is known as protein starvation. In that rich environment, even moderately successful hunters could have stored far more meat than they could have eaten in the course of a winter. But when meat is all there is available to eat, people can actually very slowly starve from the lack of fat, and the nutrients in grains and vegetables and fruits. Scurvy is an obvious example of this.
Hunting animals in late winter is no answers, since they will have used up their stored fats in the course of the winter, and the livers and bone marrow have become depleted of the nutrients from grazing and browsing which are otherwise to be found in those sources.
As one looks around, the only animals left with any fat on them, the only animals with any prospect of nutritious livers and bone marrow are going to be other humans. If someone is ill, or badly injured, the temptation to finish them off, and eat them, might have been strong.
But those societies were only possible with a highly developed cooperative social organization. With that organization, a family or clan could be rich in terms of their culture. Without it, they were likely doomed. Groups which indulged in cannibalism among their own population likely would have broken down quickly in terms of social organization and probably would not survived. Attempting to raid one's neighbors in order to eat them would likely not have been a wise idea--you would be matched technologically, and you would probably have used more energy in the effort than you were able to harvest.
I am, therefore, speculating that among the people of Eurasia who lived through (and thrived during) the ice ages, cannibalism became a taboo because it would have sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, have threatened the social organization which took them from the knife edge of survival to relative wealth.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Quote:But even if you're correct, that would just mean that, in this particular respect, the cannibal situation you're describing isn't the same as the child porn situation agrote is describing
I do think it's the same.
He innocently stumbles across some child pornography that is being offered for free to whoever wants to use it.
I innocently stumble across some human flesh that is being offered for free to whoever wants to use it.
Both the porn and the flesh had to be "created" by someone willing to abuse a child or abuse a body to get the flesh.
The creator gets his/her jollies by sharing their creation, otherwise they'd just keep it to themselves rather than risk exposure.
I really don't get how it's different.
Insteresting, Setanta! That sounds like a perfectly logical reason for cannibalism to become taboo. Your knowledge of history never fails to astound me.
Now you've really got me thinking about taboo, Setanta, and how certain things are so ingrained in culture.
Lash brought up incest. It was probably pretty obvious to people how inbreeding screwed up your gene pool and didn't increase your wealth or circumstances so that one is pretty easy to understand.
In the wild, killing one's offspring is not so unusual.
We know among animals that homosexuality and bisexuality are not unheard of.
But are there pedophiles in the aminal world other than humans? Would a tiger try to mate with a cub that incapable of becoming pregnant?
Do animals other than humans have sex for fun?
Bella Dea wrote:Ok, so maybe I'm weird but I don't really see an issue with it. Personally, I'd never do it. But for someone who is an athiest and doesn't believe in souls, why not? The flesh is just like any other animals flesh at that point.
I'm an atheist, but I still believe that we as a society should have definite values in order to uphold ourselves. Societal values are separate from religious values. Being an atheist does not mean you have no values.
Have you heard of self-cannibalism?
boomerang wrote:I do think it's the same.
He innocently stumbles across some child pornography that is being offered for free to whoever wants to use it.
I innocently stumble across some human flesh that is being offered for free to whoever wants to use it.
Both the porn and the flesh had to be "created" by someone willing to abuse a child or abuse a body to get the flesh.
The creator gets his/her jollies by sharing their creation, otherwise they'd just keep it to themselves rather than risk exposure.
I really don't get how it's different.
There's no reason to believe that the sharer and the producer are the same persons in either scenario. Given the differing mechanics of producing human flesh for consumption and producing child porn, it may be true that it is more likely that the producer of human flesh (i.e. the butcher) is the same person who then shares that flesh with others. In contrast, considering how easy it is to duplicate pornographic images, there's really no reason to think that the guy who is producing the porn (i.e. the person who actually takes the pornographic photos or videos of children) is the same person who then shares that porn with others.
Ultimately, however, that issue is irrelevant. Even if you're right that all producers are sharers, there's always the chance that, in a few cases, a sharer is not a producer (and on that point you agree).
Agrote was talking about
those cases, so you need to address the argument that he actually made.
boomerang wrote:Do animals other than humans have sex for fun?
It's well known that Bonobos do...
Yes, their society pretty much revolves around sex.
joefromchicago wrote:Ultimately, however, that issue is irrelevant. Even if you're right that all producers are sharers, there's always the chance that, in a few cases, a sharer is not a producer (and on that point you agree). Agrote was talking about those cases, so you need to address the argument that he actually made.
I should amend that:
agrote was primarily talking about
consumers of child porn, not producers or sharers, although he certainly mentioned them as well.
aperson wrote:Bella Dea wrote:Ok, so maybe I'm weird but I don't really see an issue with it. Personally, I'd never do it. But for someone who is an athiest and doesn't believe in souls, why not? The flesh is just like any other animals flesh at that point.
I'm an atheist, but I still believe that we as a society should have definite values in order to uphold ourselves. Societal values are separate from religious values. Being an atheist does not mean you have no values.
How does having values go along side with eating meat?
Dead body, already dead. What's the harm? If you didn't kill them. Say they died of natural causes. Why not eat the meat?
from the BBC : THIS DAY IN HISTORY 13 OCT 1972
anyone else remember this story ?
Quote:1972: Survivors found 10 weeks after plane crash
The Chilean Air force has found 14 survivors from a plane that crashed in the Argentine Andes over two months ago.
The first news that anyone had survived came when two of the passengers reached civilization yesterday after a 10 day trek to get help.
The two men, Roberto Canessa and Fernando Parrado then contacted the emergency services and directed them to the wreckage.
Six survivors have been flown out by helicopter to a field hospital in San Fernando.
The other eight are on the mountain receiving medical care until weather conditions allow them to be rescued.
The Fokker "Fairchild" vanished on its way from the Uruguayan capital Montevideo to Santiago in Chile on Friday 13 October.
Its passengers included the Christian Brothers, a catholic Uruguayan rugby team and their friends and relatives.
Team spirit
Despite suffering from cold and hunger, 19-year-old Roberto Canessa and 21-year-old Fernando Parrado insisted on helping the rescue effort.
The two men had trudged for 10 days in arctic conditions before finally coming across some herdsmen in the Andean foothills.
Mr Canessa, a second year medical student, explained that 25 of the 45 passengers survived the initial crash.
The pilot had to make an emergency landing in a snowy valley after the plane hit turbulent weather conditions.
A further eight people died when an avalanche hit the wreckage two weeks after the crash.
The men spoke of a deep team spirit and a determination not to give up.
Mr Parrado, a mechanical engineering student, described how he watched his mother and sister die.
"They remained there in the snow, but I knew I had to live. Before this I had lost a little faith. Now I have regained it, very deeply. God heard our prayers."
The survivors lived on chocolate bars, sweets and light food they found in luggage.
They melted snow for water and used the aircraft's seats to make bedding.
They huddled inside the aircraft and used whatever they could find to plug up holes in the fuselage to keep the cold out.
Roy Harley, an electronics student managed to get a transistor radio to work.
Mr Canessa said, "After some tinkering we managed to hear radio stations. On the eightth day we heard the sad news that our search had been abandoned."
He said they had tried in vain to attract the attention of rescue planes as they flew above the snow camouflaged wreckage.
Quote:Four days after the rescue, a Santiago paper alleged that the survivors became cannibals to ward off starvation.
The group confirmed that they ate human flesh at a press conference two days later.
All the survivors were aged between 19 and 26 except a 36 year old business man.
Roberto Canessa made an unsuccessful bid for the Uruguayan presidency in 1994.
The story of the ordeal was published in a book called "Alive!" by Piers Paul Read.
A film based on the book was released in 1993, starring Ethan Hawke.
Fourteen of the survivors retraced their fateful flight route on the 30th anniversary in 2002.
source - see for complete story :
ANDES PLANE CRASH SURVIVORS
