I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
Bestiality.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Human sacrifice
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape).
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.