On the 3rd July 1884, four sailors aboard a yacht, the Mignonette, encountered a terrible Atlantic storm. The yacht sank, leaving them stranded in a tiny wooden lifeboat.With little food and no water, by their eighth day adrift they were desperate and so made the fateful decision to kill the cabin boy. For four more days until their rescue, the three surviving sailors fed on the cabin boy’s body.

When they returned to England and the story broke, it scandalised the nation and the survivors were charged with murder and made to stand trial.

If you were the judge, what would you do? After all, the story leads to two possible conclusions. The first is purely utilitarian: one person was killed, three people survived. And the cabin boy, unlike the older sailors, had no dependants; his death left no grieving children.

But I suspect few readers would agree with that option. Most of us have a more visceral reaction: what those three sailors did was fundamentally wrong, because they violated the cabin boy’s human rights and dignity… (Register to read the rest of the article)