John asked:

Is eating people wrong? Why?

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This answer comes a bit late in the piece (it belongs to Answers 20), but I've had the benefit now of
reading what previous respondents have had to say, and my tuppence worth of wisdom may still not
be amiss in the context.

The question, in the end, has two dimensions to it:

1. People are organisms and thus distinguished from the 'dead matter universe' in certain ways.

2. People are self-conscious agents (in the old but by no means redundant terminology: people
possess a soul) and thus are distinguished from all other organisms in certain ways.

Re Point 1. The fact that such questions can arise in the first instance is plainly based on the fact that
every organism on this planet is food for some other organism. This is one feature by which the
organic realm is distinguished from the inorganic.

Viewed strictly from the 'food chain' point of view, humans are food for lions and sharks (not to
mention fleas, lice, bacteria and whatnot): well, why not for other humans? No logical argument is
capable of resolving this issue in a morally responsible way. I put it this way to make the elementary
point that notwithstanding Kant, the concept of a person (under this present Point 1) is not relevant in
the context: humans are mammals. To an outer space visitor, looking for sources of organic food of
the flesh variety, we would be as welcome as cows and sheep. Moreover there are human industries
today which operate on precisely the same assumption: that the concept of a person is a useless
addition to the concept of mammal. Research into artificial intelligence, cloning and a few others
could not exist unless there was a covert belief (even if it remains unacknowledged) that ultimately
the specific human-mammalian characteristics such as intelligence are portable, replaceable,
reproducible and mechanisable. Whether or not this belief rests on a fallacy is not, in present context,
an issue. The fact that such industries exist, consume billion-dollar funding grants and operate under
the aforenamed intellectual conditions, speaks for itself.

This leaves us with Point 2 needing to come to the rescue. Paradoxically, a good way to start would
be with the observation that none of the other organisms on earth have devised artificial means
designed to replace themselves!

This is not as frivolous an observation as it may sound, but I'll stick to the essentials of the dimension
which apply here. The concept of a person relies on a feature unique to humans in the organic realm,
often called a 'soul', but 'mind' or 'spirit' will do equally well. Crucial to the concept of person is a
recognition that the features identified by the term soul' point beyond an immediately comprehensible
factual domain, even beyond the capacity of humans to truly understand what they mean by such a
concept. This implies the possibility that the human animal is a participant, possibly the first
participant, in an evolutionary potential of the universe that is not governed by criteria of objectivity
such as we apply standardly to its study. In ages gone by humans have recognised this potential in
various ways by accepting the existence of a creative God, who is at the same time the owner' of our
soul and likely at some temporal juncture to reclaim' it and pipe it into his infinite habitat. That's not
such a stupid idea; and I have often wondered why and how we modern, well-educated and
scientifically alert denizens of the world want to reduce' this dynamic concept back to its
poverty-stricken materialistic sticks-and-stones model. However, be that as it may, the concept of a
person which derives from this ancient belief system does have the relevance that it is accompanied
by a notion of an individually responsible soulinhabiting an indifferently (chance) selected human
body, butand this is the crucial argumentsince that body now functions as the vessel for the
nurturing and development of that soul, it is a criminal act against God to kill that body. And eating
entails, necessarily, killing.

It should not be difficult, even for an atheist, to accept the embarrassed locution emergent property'
(what property?) as a scientific substitute for the concept of soul' or mind'. In any case, the concept of
emergent property' in itself implies uniqueness, it accepts by default that the result is an individual.
What is lacking, however, is a notion (as in soul') of the sanctityof that property, why indeed it should
be regarded as anything special at all.

So in our own dishevelled way, we cling to the ill-defined and untenable notion of a person', we seek
explanations in social, environmental and evolutionary conditions for a moral definition, but we make
no effort (scientifically) to retain the indispensable feature I have called sanctity'. I'm not advocating a
religious point of view here; in my book sanctity' is a humanconcept. But in saying humanI am
already making a distinction-of-uniqueness, I am already acknowledging that something is different, if
only I knew what it is!

What kind of conclusion can we reach from this? Firstly, that mind' or soul' are characteristics of
unknown constitution and unknown purpose. Secondly, that one effect of possession of these
characteristics is that their owner put questions abroad like, 'is it immoral to eat humans?' Thirdly, that
in thinking about these problems, we limit and circumscribe our research effort by the application of
inappropriate criteria (demanding that e.g. a soul be a thing with determinable thingness). And finally,
that we inveterately persist in repudiating the genuine value of non-scientific ideas devoted to such
research, while all the time most of us still feel' that the road to a real answer must lie in some such
direction, not in an exclusive reliance on reductive methodology.

Somewhere recently I came across a book on bioaesthetic' principle, where the term making special'
was put forward as an essential human characteristic in the transformation of banal objects and
activities, frequently in context of religious ceremonial. It is nothing other, as you'll recognise, as the
sanctity' I mentioned above. It is an inalienable prerogative of human to enact such transformations,
and we will continue to fail in our endeavours to understand what a human being is for as long as we
ignore the reality and indeed uniqueness of this faculty. For without it, when confronted with such an
easy question as our questioner put to us, we have no leg to stand on.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney