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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - LessWrong
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Ethical generalizations check: Do you care about Babyeaters? Would you eat Yoda?
Nope (can't parse them as approximately human without revulsion). Nope (approximately human).
Would that allow absorbing some of his midichlorians? Black magic! Well, I might try (since he died of natural causes anyway). But yoda dies without leaving a corpse. It would be difficult. The only viable strategy would seem to be to have Yoda anethetize himself a minute before he ghosts ("becomes one with the force"). Then the flesh would remain corporeal for consumption.
The real ethical test would be would I freeze yoda's head in carbonite, acquire brain scanning technology and upload him into a robot body? Yoda may have religious objections to the practice so I may honour his preferences while being severely disappointed. I suspect I'd choose the Dark Side of the Force myself. The Sith philosophy seems much more compatible with life extension by whatever means necessary.
It should be noted that Yoda has an observable afterlife. Obi-wan had already appeared after his body had died, apparently in full possession of his memories and his reasoning abilities; Yoda proposes to follow in Obi-wan's footsteps, and has good reason to believe that he will be able to do so.
Sith philosophy, for reference:
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Actual use of Sith techniques seems to turn people evil at ridiculously accelerated rates. At least in-universe it seems that sensible people would write off this attractive-sounding philosophy as window dressing on an extremely damaging set of psychic techniques.
If you're lucky, it might grant intrinsic telepathy, as long as the corpse is relatively fresh.
I wouldn't eat flies or squids either. But I know that that's a cultural construct.
Let's ask another question: would I care if someone else eats Yoda?
Well, I might, but only because eating Yoda is, in practice, correlated with lots of other things I might find undesirable. If I could be assured that such was not the case (for instance, if there was another culture which ate the dead to honor them, that's why he ate Yoda, and Yoda's will granted permission for this), then no, I wouldn't care if someone else eats Yoda.
In practice? In common Yoda-eating practice? Something about down to earth 'in practice' empirical observations about things that can not possibly have ever occurred strikes me as broken. Perhaps "would be, presumably, correlated with".
In Yoda's case he could even have just asked for permission from Yoda's force ghost. Jedi add a whole new level of meaning to "Living Will".
"In practice" doesn't mean "this is practiced", it means "given that this is done, what things are, with high probability, associated with it in real-life situations" (or in this case, real-life-+-Yoda situations). "In practice" can apply to rare or unique events.
I really don't think statements of the form "X is, in practice, correlated with Y" should apply to situations where X has literally never occurred. You might want to say "I expect that X would, in practice, be correlated with Y" instead.
All events have never occurred if you describe them with enough specificity; I've never eaten this exact sandwich on this exact day.
While nobody has eaten Yoda before, there have been instances where people have eaten beings that could talk intelligently.
I share Qiaochu's reasoning.