This topic came up in a discussion I was having with a non-ethical "vegan." He was attempting to tell me that there's nothing better about consuming plants than consuming animals and telling me that "veganism" of the ethical strand is extremism. Somehow, "veganism" of the health strand is "the Middle Way" (he's a Buddhist).

Anyway, he brought up the popular misconception that the plane crash survivors who became cannibals killed for their food. This is not what happened at all. Most of the passengers died either in the crash itself or in an accident, I think an avalanche it was. The remaining people survived on chocolate scraps for some time before deciding to dig up the bodies of the dead. They agreed not to eat the relatives of the living. How's that for respect? I doubt they would've killed each other for their food at any point, at least the majority of them. This info is all in an article published shortly after the incident in the 1970s. But all you heard later on was, "Cannibals survived a plane crash!!!" leaving people to fill the rest in with their imaginations.

This popular misconception misleads people to think that were they in that situation, they would do the same thing. Maybe it even encourages people to do that, thinking that, "Hey, others did it before me!"

So I was thinking of the Holocaust, as I know the people in concentration camps were starving probably worse than the plane crash survivors. First thing that comes up is a post:

Tonight in class we were reviewing the topic of cannibalism in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Of particular interest to me was Wiesel's account of watching a fellow prisoner sit in the road, eating a raw piece of meat. Wiesel talked of how he stood there the entire time the man ate the meat, hoping the man would throw him a piece.

The next day, the man was hung by the other men in his bunker. He had eaten a dead human. As he was being hung, he yelled out, "I did no wrong; he was already dead!"

In cases such as these, does cannibalism become an acceptable method of survival? Or is it just a case of reduced culpability for an inherently evil action?

I am wondering this because particularly the man did not kill the other man.
I think he puts it well. Reduced culpability, IF they killed the person. If they're already dead, I'd say no culpability at all.