This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

That's W. W. Now I'm a vegetarian but even when I was a meat eater there were some meats I were coiled from tasting.

I never much like the idea of guinea pig, horse or dog for example.

Had it ever been offered, human flesh is another meat I'd have shied away from.

A number of philosophers have addressed the morality of meat-eating, but Catalan Avramescu of Bucharest University has written specifically about cannibalism.

Cannibalism elicits almost universal the pugnance.

What interests Professor Avramescu is how the idea of cannibalism has been used by political theorists

from Hobbs and Locke to Russo to test their theories to the limit.

Catalan Avramescu, welcome to Philosophy Bines. to the the idea of cannibalism. You've said one of the great forgotten figures of philosophy is the cannibal.

What on earth did you mean by that? I'm not referring to the cannibal as it is as travelers have encountered in the forests of say 16th century America but rather as

the cannibal as it was imagined by jurists by philosophers by moralists, by theologians.

It's really mostly the object of a thought experiment.

What would happen, for instance,

if the state would be absent,

that the authority would crumble, and we would do as we please.

So in philosophy the idea of the state of nature that you've just been alluding to, we know that

through, for instance, John Locke's work, but I don't recall John

Locke talking about cannibals. Well, he does in fact in a rather oblique way because if you read the first,

and you did of course, the first treaties of government, you see that there

is a critique there of Sir Robert Philmon's idea of absolute power.

And one of the arguments that John Locke uses is exactly this.

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