Theomanic wrote:Robert: I think you are confusing two movies, and missing my point besides. The other movie you're remembering is Logan's Run. It hasn't anything to do with Soylent Green. As to the economics of this dubious old sci-fi movie, I don't believe they were killing people, they were simply collecting the dead (especially from things like suicide booths). I'm not an economics major, but I don't see why that wouldn't be cost effective, since you don't even need a farm or to feed your livestock or anything. Especially in the distopian future we are given to accept where there is a massive food shortage. Again, I could be mistaken. My point was that we may some day be in a food crisis also, and any waste at all would be unforgivable. So maybe then we would practice cannibalism.
I finished the essay yesterday and it was very excellent. It makes me wonder if everyone with wildly variant morals from the norm has brain damage.
Theomanic, maybe it was the "voluntary" euthanasia in Soylent Green that morphed in my memory into murder. I watched Soylent Green in my school hall on an old reel-to-reel projector in 1976, so it goes back a way. You commented
Maybe someday we'll have such a desperate need for food that Soylent Green really will be needed. Who can say about such things.
My point was that it is possible to avoid this dystopia through economic development. Soylent Green (compulsory "algae" biscuits which are made from dead people) is a bit too much like Zyklon B in its evil banality, but of course that happened at Auschwitz. The moral disruption caused by systemic cannibalism can only arise in situations of utter collapse or isolation, such as described on Easter Island by Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters, or as depicted by Rodin on The Gates of Hell. I would think a cannibal dystopia would be more like Mad Max, ie where law has broken down, rather than the Soylent model where law is used to eat people. I just think that while we have a regulated corporate society we can easily afford to grow more food (including large quantities of real algae for fertilizer and stockfeed). Your hypothetical desperation comes up against the fact that it is much better to feed algae to cows and sheep and eat them than to address the socio-political taboos that would arise from systemic efforts to eat people. The repugnance factor is in play here. After reading Pinker's essay I find myself thinking 'Argghh - anyone who can talk dispassionately about cannibalism must have brain damage'.
Part of the problem with the brain damage idea is that our emotional responses are wired by instinct but are often heavily sub-optimal. For example in health, economists talk about 'Disability Adjusted Life Years' (DALYs) as a guide to rationing funds, but encounter furious reactions from people who say 'what if it was your own mother seeking funds for this expensive operation?" This comes up in the balance between HIV prevention and care. Ordinary emotional morality is personal, while rational morality is impersonal and utilitarian. The trouble is we don't always know what is really rational.