[Buddha-l] Re: "Nature" and eating meat

[Stefan Detrez]

> > Even IF they were concerned with legal matters, they would still
> > take that chance to keep alive. Maybe that's a good reason why self
> > defence with lethal results for the assaulter are not punished according
> > to standards for judging 'killers'.
> > If you're on a life boat and it's overloaded and you push someone off,
> > nobody will press charges for having succesfully saved your life and
> > that of others. That would be quite contradictory. You might choose to
> > sacrifice yourself. Would that be illegal suicide?
>
> I agree with all this, but I was just wondering about the legal treament
> it would get from a moral point of view of those who weren't in the
> Andes or on the lifeboat. In both cases people are in risk of dying. One
> eats someone's liver and survives. Another one receives someone's
> transplanted liver and survives. You can be sure that in case a surgeon
> would use an organ of someone who recently died in a hospital to save
> the life of a patient without the permission of the deceased (written
> declaration) or of the family, that he will be prosecuted. I don't
> remember anything of the sort happening after the Andes disaster. Is it
> perhaps because the story is more dramatic, or the situation more
> urgent? Morally, it looks likes a very similar case to me.

Cases of Westerners eating human flesh are scarce as far as I know.
Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer, 'the human cannibal' can serve as a bad example
of someone eating humans against their will. That is morally not
justifiable and neither amoral.
And then there's the artist who asked permission to eat a volunteer
after his death (which he did).
Curiously enough, the artist was convicted of something, I don't know
what. But here the issue should have been that one should have the
right to be eaten, not so much that eating someone is illegal. I think
for that matter legal matters and moral matters are not always that
closely connected as one tends to think. Laws are for keeping social
order, morals are for personal order.
It would be a question of taste whether eating human flesh is moral or
immoral. And, as you probably know, taste are not good moral pointers.
To make the discussion peppered, I think that counts also for
bestiality (provided the animal does not suffer. Whether you suffer
from being penetrated by an animal more 'royally' endowed than you can
take is your own business).

> > Maybe it's not necessary (yet sometimes beneficial in moderate
> > quantities) , but I wouldn't want to be the one to go and convert meat
> > eating Tibetans or blood drinking Masai to eat strictly vegetarian. Doe
> > jij dat maar :)
>
> And end up with my bloody cloths being exposed in a Mission Museum? (Ken
> jij het Missiemuseum in Tegelen, bij Venlo?). Not being a vegetarian or
> a much of a bodhisattva myself I think we ought to let Richard and other
> vegetarians on Buddha-L deal with it. We could send them over there on
> an expedition with pinto beans, tofu and soya sauce.

I wonder what die hard vegetarians have to say about that. Now, to be
fair, one can criticize the way animal suffer in presumably a majority
of slaughterhouses in the West. But to universalize this critique and,
especially, to try and change peoples who've been living off of meat
consumption for centuries might be one bus stop too far.
Unfortunately, I never saw those bloody clothes, but it's a comic to
imagine what happens to such 'revolutionaries'.
And that's where I, together with you, look forward to see what
Richard and other veggies reply to that. :)

Cheers,

Stefan