Question Why is it more moral to eat a pig than it is to eat a retarded human with the intelligence of a pig? What can account for our revulsion at one and not the other aside from the fact that one would-be morsel looks like us and the other doesn't? Let us assume that the retarded human in question has no friends / family who would be traumatized by his being eaten.

Accepted:
April 8, 2009

Comments

I don't think we ought to eat the pig, if we have no more serious reason to do so than liking the taste of pork chops or bacon. I don't think it's necessary to use "retarded humans" as leverage to see that. Liking the taste of pork is just too trivial a reason for taking a life--even a pig's life.

That being said, there's no reason not to think it's more revolting and morally worse to eat a retarded human. It is more revolting because it's more revolting--that's an emotional-sensory reaction that doesn't operate by the rules of logic. Eating people is revolting in the way sex with animals is revolting. The roots of these reactions are obviously deep.

As to why it's morally worse to eat a retarded human, you might think of it this way. It's wrong in just the way it's wrong to eat a pig, but it's wrong in an additional way as well. So there are two layers to the wrongness, instead of just one. The additional layer has to do with an implicit agreement. Some day you might be that retarded human, or that could be your child or your mother. We would like to protect ourselves and our loved ones from this eventuality. If we had a chance to set up a rule against eating retarded people, we would do so. In fact, you might as well say that we have set up such a rule, if only implicitly. The rule is (simply) "no eating people".

If you dine on porkchops, you do what's morally wrong. But if you dine on humanchops, you do something doubly wrong. You take a life without a sufficiently serious reason, plus you violate an agreement that's implictly in place. (Plus, you give yourself an upset stomach, because it's revolting.)