I don’t think eating human flesh is beyond the pale or abhorrent. Eating human flesh that was produced with, say, 10 hours of suffering seems basically morally equivalent to eating flesh from humans who consent and are treated well, plus buying clothes that took 10 hours of slave labor to produce. And doing these separately seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career. Current-me just wouldn’t do the first one because it’s disgusting and becomes more disgusting when associated with suffering.
It seems like there’s a taboo on eating human flesh, and also a harm, and the argument is conflating the disgust response from the taboo with the immorality of the harm. Disgust should not always be extended to general moral principles!
″...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.”
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the “positive” bin than the “negative” bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said “It’s annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and it’s easier for me, so I’ll just do that.”?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isn’t the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, it’s the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor
Is this true? I have heard the claim ‘there is more slavery going on than at any point in history’, but know very little about this and how it’s defined. I would guess it’s hard for me to avoid this if I’m going to a normal clothing store.
All my thought experiment is designed to do is to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. If we feel differently about the two that is likely to be due to various biases that are not morally relevant.
This might cause some people to rethink eating animals, as they wouldn’t eat the humans. If you would eat the humans however then this thought experiment is unlikely to have an affect on you—I wasn’t intending for this thought experiment to be relevant to everyone anyway.
I don’t think eating human flesh is beyond the pale or abhorrent. Eating human flesh that was produced with, say, 10 hours of suffering seems basically morally equivalent to eating flesh from humans who consent and are treated well, plus buying clothes that took 10 hours of slave labor to produce. And doing these separately seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career. Current-me just wouldn’t do the first one because it’s disgusting and becomes more disgusting when associated with suffering.
It seems like there’s a taboo on eating human flesh, and also a harm, and the argument is conflating the disgust response from the taboo with the immorality of the harm. Disgust should not always be extended to general moral principles!
″...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.”
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the “positive” bin than the “negative” bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said “It’s annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and it’s easier for me, so I’ll just do that.”?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isn’t the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, it’s the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Is this true? I have heard the claim ‘there is more slavery going on than at any point in history’, but know very little about this and how it’s defined. I would guess it’s hard for me to avoid this if I’m going to a normal clothing store.
All my thought experiment is designed to do is to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. If we feel differently about the two that is likely to be due to various biases that are not morally relevant.
This might cause some people to rethink eating animals, as they wouldn’t eat the humans. If you would eat the humans however then this thought experiment is unlikely to have an affect on you—I wasn’t intending for this thought experiment to be relevant to everyone anyway.
Yikes, not a good lead/look!