#71: What’s Morals? (PART 3)

【Meat-Eating Custom】
To see the moral boundary, we must determine whether or not It would be perfectly acceptable for me, you, our loved ones, and everyone else to be treated the same way.
 
As cited two posts ago, Callatian people customarily ate the bodies of their dead fathers. Just as we have for our own customs and norms, Callatian people also had a good reason to make it their custom. And that reason may perhaps be a spiritual one, that the surviving family members wishing for their father to live on within their own bodies.
 
So then, we ask the question: Is this Callatian custom morally wrong?
 
That’s equivalent to asking if It would be perfectly acceptable for me, you, our loved ones, and everyone else that our own bodies be eaten, after our death, by our surviving family members?
 
“No way!” some of us may be quick to reject this notion because, for us modern-day people, our custom of cremation/burial of the dead is the norm. That’s what’s familiar to us. Yet, when we take a moment and deliberately remove that ingrained bias, we can begin to see in our right mind and all fairness that It would be perfectly acceptable for me, you, our loved ones, and everyone else that our own bodies be eaten, after our death, by our surviving family members if they so choose without any pressure.”
 
And even if we hesitate to remove our bias, at the very least, we can surely see that this Callatian custom is not at all as Unambiguously morally wrong as slavery – which we covered in the last post. As such, it would be a huge stretch to call this Callatian custom morally wrong.
 
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Now then, let’s shift focus to our own eating custom and evaluate its morals just like we did with Callatians.
 
We recognize that the food and culinary cultures around the world are utterly vast, so let’s first take a look at a broad aspect which many of our cultures share – for example, our custom of eating meat. Picture all the appetizing dishes that we crave, like steak, grilled chicken, roasted pork, and cheeseburger. Wonderfully tasty, the meat dishes are centerpiece of our meals.
 
Yet, when we picture in our mind of these delights, we seldom think about the details of how they get to our dinner table. Rather, it’s probably more honest to admit that We don’t want to think about it.
 
So why do we choose to shut off our brain like that? To be blunt, it’s because those appetizing dishes get to our table by killing the animals.
 
When we grasp the sweeping tide of our evolutionary past, we see that mankind was born into the wilds some 5 million years ago. The rigor of the wilderness and the beauty of Mother Nature. They’re like two sides of the same coin, but the wilds present us with the sobering reality that the weak are victims of the strong. They force upon us the inescapable reality that every animal sustains oneself by taking another life, the grievous limitation of life itself.
 
So that’s where mankind set sail for our journey. From there, we gradually puzzled together a society and eventually a civilization. Nevertheless, we’re still trapped in this inescapable reality.
 
So then, we ask the question: Is our meat-eating custom morally wrong?

Read Next: What’s Morals? (4)【Truth About Our Kills】
Read Previous: What’s Morals? (2)【Moral Boundary】
 
Complete Series: What’s Morals? (1)～(8)
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Read Theme: Morality