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I am firmly for people being in as close to total control of their bodies, in life and manner of death, as feasible.
I disagree strongly. I understand perfectly well what it means to be killed and eaten, and have no desire to undergo that fate. So do most people. But if someone, however rare, is otherwise a sane and functioning member of society and harbors a desire to be cannibalized, then I support their right to do as they will with the most inalienable of properties, themselves.
I'm an advocate for the availability of MAID (though implementation details can vary) and I see nothing wrong with the occasional art piece where someone lets others dine on bits of themselves while alive (memory brings up someone using the fat removed during liposuction to fry food). Where's the stretch when I already consider those acceptable? Personally, if I was dead beyond hope of recovery (and wasn't set for cryogenic preservation), I couldn't care less what's done with my corpse.
A fair point, but I'm a stickler for principle here. I'd rather have a formal system where people are exhaustively examined and certified as being "sane and intelligent enough to make stupid decisions" and then let them do as they will. I'd hope that's the default assumption for most people, we already let people drink more than is good for them or eat themselves into obesity, and while attempts to regulate that or reduce negative externalities by things like banning drunk driving exist, most people are against societal meddling as invasive as outright prohibition or somehow making fatness illegal.
A society that only lets people make "good" decisions is a tyrannical one as far as I'm concerned.
I don't want to nitpick every way someone can off themselves. I'd rather have a means for people to prove that they're competent to kill themselves, and then let them choose how to dispose of the body (or the means of death) as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else.
Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!
We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.
There are often temporary conditions that can make people do things that cause a combination of permanent harm while being something they wouldn't want on reflection. But if someone who isn't otherwise mentally ill wants to be eaten, is able to articulate their preferences and reason about them, and can't be convinced to do otherwise over a decent length of time, I'm not standing in their way (unless legally and regulatorily obligated, which I am).
There are other points I could bring up, but I think this is the crux of our disagreement. I also want to both eat burgers and lose weight. I want to lose weight for all sorts of reasons (live longer, feel better, be healthier, look better, make more money) and have basically one reason to eat a burger--it tastes good. Any healthy person should be able to weigh these preferences and make a decision to diet. The fact that I don't do that means something is wrong with me, according to my own (and in my opinion any reasonable) set of values. A healthy society should also be able to weigh these preferences and come to the same conclusion.
There are second order effects that make universal government-mandated diet programs a bad idea, but I think it would be fine for the government to force me on a diet if I weighed, say, 450 pounds. At that point I've demonstrated an inability to abide by my own long-term preferences to any degree. If you take me, with my current values, and put me in a vacuum, I'd probably even agree ahead of time to abide by the diet because I recognize it's a good idea, even if in the moment I'd try to fight it.
Maybe you could go anarcho-capitalist with this and let people decide ahead of time which social contract they want to follow and how restrictive it will be. Some people can live in the forced-diet country and some can live in the eat-all-you-want country. But in my opinion this doesn't take things nearly far enough. If you take the veil of ignorance to its logical conclusion, there are people who now in this life have incorrect preferences. I think mentally healthy people, behind the veil of ignorance, would commit to protecting each other from these harmful preferences. It's reasonable to agree to some social compact along the lines of "we'll both do what's necessary to protect each other from class V obesity."
The preference to eat isn't wrong necessarily, but it is actually wrong to place it above the preference to live longer, and it's something I and most people do all the time, because we aren't perfect. If your model of people and human rights doesn't account for imperfection (or sin as I wrote elsewhere) then your ideal government will lead to a lot of suffering as people are enabled to pursue their worst impulses.
In short, there are two ways (relevant to this discussion) that preferences can be incorrect, and they bleed together. The first is that your priorities are wrong. This usually has to do with time preference--you logically know you shouldn't eat the burger, but dieting is long-term and the burger is right there. The second has to do with knowledge--maybe you simply don't fully understand what it means to die 10 years early, or how great being skinny feels. Either way, I'd say just about everyone has wrong preferences and that when they're wrong enough the government should step in and intervene.
When and where to intervene is another question. I'm fine with MAID, particularly for those already dying anyways, but I worry about the cultural effects of government (so society)-endorsed suicide. Same with cannibalism, if you make it legal sometimes, the taboo starts to unravel. I think culture warms up to cannibalism generally and people suffer unnecessarily. So on the object level, I'd still prefer cannibalism be illegal. If people really want to do it they can skirt around the relevant laws in secret, without the government stamp of approval. But I don't think that's where our disagreement really lies, and I could probably be persuaded otherwise about cultural dynamics.
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