Before modification by Roland00 at 03/05/2019 12:08:39 AM
Insects are still animals, and therefore meat, and they are a more sustainable and cost-effective food supply. They're not as bad as they sound either.
I've had larvets and chapul bars before, and they were perfectly fine. That's seasoned deep-fried beetle larvae and protein/granola bars made with cricket flour, respectively.
I may get that phrasing a little off, but that is one of the survey questions Jonathan Haidt across cultures in one of his moral foundation questions. Haidt like David Hume and Adam Smith before him believes in something called "moral sentiments" except Haidt calls it Moral Foundations and we often have opinions on matters before we even know we had opinions on these matters for we have moral sentiment heuristics of what is fair, what is dirty, what is care, what is loyalty, and so on.
Thus people may think it is fine to eat a chicken but for some reason they are turned off we think it is wrong to fuck a chicken, even though we can't give a "rational" reason for why this is so, in fact the reasons we often get are not rational but instead motivated reasoning based, we search for the answers for it does not jive well with our moral sentiment heuristics.
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Of course people can change our minds and we can create new heuristics, new habits, for specific behaviors that are different than our general moral sentiments but often this is an uphill battle and you have to demostrate a cold cognitive benefit like it will make you money where we can justify ignorning one moral belief in order to further another aim of ours.
What is special about maggots compared to other insects? Well nothing besides we associate maggots with decay in a way we do not do so for beetles and ants.
Of course we can figure out a way to create an alternative habit stream but often this is very hard to do. How easy this is able to do is actually different for each person and we know there is a loose correlation with big five measures such as openness to experience, agreeableness, neurotic, etc. Our moral sentiments are like kites where we can move them, but also it is hard to move them and they still stay in a general semi permeable state.
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Haidt wrote a book about his research involving our 5+1 moral foundations plus his opinions on this matter, called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (2012). It is a very good book but I would also like to point out people with "theory" noticed these patterns earlier such as Hume and Smith, and Haidt talks a lot about Hume, it is just he did some hard social science data that further backs up these peoples thoughts.