Why Eating like a Caveman May be the Way of the Future

When it comes to our eating habits, it’s clear that we’re doing it wrong. We may be in the midst of health crisis, but there are few practical solutions for dealing with it.

Eating like a caveman may - or may not (cf. http://health.usnews.com/best-diet/best-overall-diets ) - be the way of the future. But if so, we must take care to ensure we don’t have morals to match. The Palaeolithic diet involved hunting, killing and eating sentient beings of other tribes, races and species. (cf. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jun/20/ice-age-cannibals-britain-earliest-settlers ). This is not, I hope, a lifestyle we want to emulate. Caveman life-expectancy was typically too short to permit assessment of the long-term health benefits and risks to consumers of such a diet. However, the consequences were clearly horrible for its victims. 

Today at least, the life-expectancy of vegetarians is higher than that of meat-eaters. 
The decline in violence, and expanding “circle of compassion” chronicled by Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels Of Our Nature”  (cf. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/22/better-angels-steven-pinker-review ) 
might have entailed heroic self-sacrifice on the part of moral agents. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to the case. Many millions of people in the world now enjoy cruelty-free vegan lifestyles. 
(cf. http://www.veganism.com) 

I agree with David.

Regardless of its benefits, this so-called caveman diet presents many ethical issues. Lately I read a lot of testimonials about the positive effects of this carnivorous diet. In some of those testimonials, I noticed one recurring argument against vegetarianism. They accuse vegetarians of hypocrisy - since anyway, the ecological footprint of human agriculture is anyway lethal to a number of lifeforms. So, they say, at least paleo-eaters do not fool anyone, including themselves, pretend to be angels

Even if it is true that our agricultural techniques represent indeed a threat to a number of organisms, the proponents of this paleo-diet fail to see the moral dimension behind their alimentary preferences.

Also to them - is not only a matter of heather food. I suppose, for example, that they would really not support cannibalism. But - what if it turned out that drinking human blood is indeed as beneficial as our close ancestors used to think (http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/europe-s-medicinal-cannibalism-the-healing-power-of-death-a-604548.html)? What if, for the sake of argument, toddler sausages provided amazing heath benefits? Would they eat that too?

We all abstain from killing and eating humans, and especially our close relatives - at least the large majority of us. Also those who enjoy non-human meat. So, the real question is - why making a human sandwich with your retarded sister’s flesh sounds so morally disturbing, even to most human carnivores? I believe that we have to dig deeper, and realize that the reasons behind our benevolence towards other lifeforms are very close to the reasons why we all abhor cannibalism. Something tells me that those reasons have much to do with kinship - with the feeling that, in a way or another, we all belong to the same family. Sentience and cognitive skills do not really matter, I think. Would they matter if they proposed you to eat a sedated, comatose relative?

Imitating a caveman does not sound to me as a very transhumanist lifestyle.

Indeed. Analogously, the case against (human) slavery isn’t weakened by the frailties, hypocrisies and occasional self-righteousness of early abolitionists. When exploring the effects of the abolition of human slavery, it would be disproportionate for historians to focus entirely on the health consequences of black emancipation for white slaveowners. Doubtless some ex-slaveowners could claim that aerobic exercise made them fitter, while others would say the need to do manual labour made their rheumatism worse. Maybe so; but this is rather missing the point

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