Is it OK to kill and eat someone simply because you and the victim both agree? As the German cannibal case makes its way through the courts, some have opined that there is no difference between cannibalism, homosexuality and murder, and that when one is allowed, all are implicitly condoned (on some theory of "act according to your desires") and hence Western Civilization is doomed.

Eugene Volokh links to this interesting challenge from Theodore Dalrymple:

The case is a reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy according to which individual desire is the only thing that counts in deciding what is permissible in society. Brandes wanted to be killed and eaten; Meiwes wanted to kill and eat. Thanks to one of the wonders of modern technology, the Internet, they both could avoid that most debilitating of all human conditions, frustrated desire. What is wrong with that? Please answer from first principles only.

So this is not intended for him to read.

Since when has absolutism become equivalency? If homosexuality is not immoral, how does that make murder not immoral? And, from where comes the idea that the only argument in favor of homosexuality based on individual desire?

Why is it that opponents of homosexuality argue that the prohibition of homosexuality is the glue that holds together all other prohibitions? That if homosexuality is tolerated, that it becomes OK to murder, rob or rape people? No one has yet been able to explain it to me. It simply defies logic, yet I hear the argument over and over.

If we assume for the sake of argument that homosexuality is immoral, how does that make it as immoral as murder? If it does not, then how does legalizing homosexuality render murder acceptable any more than lowering of criminal penalties would?

And why is it that no distinction is made between immoral and illegal? Certainly, there are plenty of things which might be considered to be immoral (cannibalism being one example), but does it necessarily follow from that that all who taste human flesh must be imprisoned?

From where do people get the idea that whether something is immoral (or just bad for you) must determine whether it is illegal? Plenty of things are bad or immoral, but we don't put people in jail for them.

Dalrymple and others make much of consent, and I could see the point in the case of cannibalism only, but not murder. In my view, consent cannot be allowed to a murder charge, for very good public policy reason: the victim is dead! If a defense of consent were allowed, then almost any murderer could swear that the victim asked to be killed -- and then the burden would be on the prosecution to prove a negative. John Wayne Gacy could have argued that his "victims" came to his house willingly, and asked to be tied up and strangled to death, as the best sexual high they could ever have experienced in their sordid lives as male prostitutes.

No way. It is not in society's interest to allow consent to a murder charge. Doubtless, Mr. Dalrymple would dismiss this argument as "utilitarian" or "pragmatic" -- but much of the law is precisely that. So, I have no problem with charging and convicting the German cannibal of murder.

As to cannibalism, it gets more complicated. Personally, I find cannibalism morally abhorrent, but I could envision limited situations where the government might not have any legitimate business enforcing criminal sanctions against it. Drinking placental soup under a doctor's orders would technically constitute cannibalism, and I doubt anyone would put someone in prison for it.

How about a "cannibal club" which you could join, and agree to donate your body to the club -- to be eaten by the other members after your natural death. This might be immoral, but how does it benefit society to make it illegal? No harm is done to anyone, save, the moral calluses which might result from partaking in human flesh.

Furthermore, while I am no Biblical scholar, try as I might I am unable to come up with any condemnation of cannibalism in either the Old or New Testaments. However, some have argued that the Bible condones cannibalism. (Can anyone help me?)

I have long been puzzled by the fact that moralists -- while often quick to condemn homosexuals for "harming" themselves (even though this is by no means associated with homosexuality per se) -- refuse to condemn mutual combat between two males. This despite the fact that boxing causes serious injuries, brain damage and occasional death. It is not harmless.

Boxing, a recently revived sport of ancient Greece and Rome, was illegal for thirteen centuries -- as well as in the United States until the early 20th Century. It is still illegal in some countries, such as Sweden. In England there is a serious movement to make it illegal.

Why no outcry from the American moralists about boxing being "a slippery moral slope"?

Beats me! (Although I guess if there ever is such an outcry, I'll have to defend boxing as another "Classical Value".)

What about bodily mutilation (now called "body modification")? Increasingly, people enjoy doing things like punching large holes through various bodily parts, even through cartilage, and amputation is not unheard of. This sounds decadent to most of us, although circumcision is still quite common.

There is an interesting libertarian-type discussion of body modification here, and at this site, there is extensive discussion of the arrest of a well-known body mod artist on charges of violating new laws against female circumcision. Here is a site dedicated to eradicating the practice, while here, incredibly, is a web site for eunuchs!

(I should warn you that some of those web sites contain some pretty gruesome, pretty disgusting stuff.)

I haven't heard of any movement to prohibit cutting of body parts or castration, and the prohibition on female genital mutilation appears to be directed against parents who do that to their girls. Male circumcision remains legal, and as to laws pertaining to castration, I think all the authorities have are laws against practicing medicine without a license. Last April, a Detroit man was sentenced to four years in prison for performing unlicensed castrations on his kitchen table.

Here's one site offering castration services for parents.

Hey folks, Hadrian started a war over this stuff!

In fact, in view of the decline in circumcision rates coupled with the apparent decline in standards of sexual "morality" one could argue that there is a statistical correlation between the decline in male circumcision and the decline of public morality....

Did people in the old days know something?

Let's see....

How would the argument go?

1. Masturbation causes homosexuality

2. Masturbation can be prevented through circumcision

3. As circumcision decreased, homosexuality and immorality increased!

Right?

Wrong, actually.

According to this study, circumcision was associated with a higher incidence of masturbation, a higher incidence of oral sex, and even a higher incidence of homosexuality! (Of course, these statistical associations can be seen as running afoul of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. One would have to isolate other factors, such as income, race, culture, etc.

Hadrian felt strongly enough about this stuff that it triggered a war.

"The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all."
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/freud.htm

http://www.geocities.com/psychohistory2001/TheExile.html
I can't wait to read Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism:

Freud, who was at odds with Kant on other issues, reinforced Kant and neo-Kantians in their resistance to technique. Kantians are reserved because they participate in a two-world metaphysic that depreciates the embodied character of human being. Freud does not accept this metaphysic. But he shares that reserve. One reason, doubtless, is those intensive “memory traces” that reach back to primordial times. They do not possess a form appropriate to intellectual concatenation. Freud’s critique of the hubris of intellectualism is well taken, in my judgment. But, on his reading, memory traces are also extremely resistant to modification by tactical means. You can at best try to control them. Which is why Freud, by the time of Moses and Monotheism, at least, thinks of ethics on the model of intensive instinctual renunciation and skimpy sublimation. According to him ethics at its highest rises above crude instruments such as image, rhythm, ritual, trance, hypnosis, magic and the like, some of which form the very material of film. Moses, “the great stranger” introduced a more spiritual God to the Jewish people, “one as all loving as he was all-powerful, who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice.” [i] This means, first, that the intellect is engaged to control the lower instincts and, second, that corporeal tactics or gymnastics such as ceremony, ritual, hypnosis, image and magic are avoided or minimized.

What Freud admires most about the effect of the Mosaic faith upon Jews is how it “formed their character for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism by encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations.” [ii] Why? It “signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.” [iii] The “athletic virtues,” Freud says, are associated historically with cruel, military cultures. I agree that intellectual regulation of socially developed instincts forms one dimension of ethics. But Freud’s syncretic urge hesitates just when it might have drawn more sustenance from practices endorsed by generous, nonmilitary, nontheistic pagans such as Epicurus and Lucretius. Freud’s depreciation of paganism may have encouraged him, first, to invest too much therapeutic efficacy in the talking cure (even though lying on the couch is a corporeal tactic), second, to draw the line of distinction between therapy and ethico-political life at the wrong place, and, third, to depreciate the profound significance of multimedia arts to political and ethical life.

Does film theory in the psychoanalytic tradition continue to manifest this reserve? I cannot answer that question authoritatively. Here I will illustrate an approach in which technique provides a critical nexus between film and politics.

Dalrymple cites Edmund Burke for the seeming proposition that morality must be imposed from above:

"Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free."

UPDATE: http://andrewiandodge.com/archives/001375.html