(February 16, 2015 at 2:09 pm)Chad32 Wrote: I think we tend to treat beings better when we don't consider them food.Banning Human meat helps keep people from killing other Humans to eat them.
...
I think this is as close to a moral reason to not eat dead people as you are likely to find.
(I state "moral reason" to distinguish it from the practical reasons mentioned before about diseases. Of course, the practical reasons are enough to stop smart people from doing it, at least most of the time, but it does not address the issue asked by the OP.)
Even so, this is what might be called a "practical moral reason," and not a reason to object to cannibalism per se. Certainly, it is a good reason to make it illegal, because however much it might seem otherwise at times, the law needs to be concerned with practicalities. If it were acceptable to be eating people, then people would be murdered in order to be eaten, and eating them would, in fact, help hide the evidence that the person had been murdered. So cannibalism is something that is good to have prohibited, even if it isn't wrong in itself.
Of course, there might be specific instances of it being wrong, without it necessarily being always wrong, as suggested by robvalue's post above (#7). After all, if the body is the possession of someone else (e.g., next of kin? the medical school to which it is donated?), then you don't have a right to do anything with it, which would include not having the right to eat it. That would be wrong in the same way it would be wrong for me to eat your food at your picnic to which I was not invited. It is yours, not mine, and so I have no right to it.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
