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, declarepsychologists 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.”
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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.’” – READ MORE