Some Comments on Cannibalism

In 2005, a provocation in a philosophy newsletter led me to write about cannibalism, a practice to which I am not attracted. The issues raised in that discussion have not gone away for me.

 

I wanted to respond to the reprinted newsletter piece on the
fellow who solicited a young man to be his dinner.

As I read the piece on cannibalism in the Philosophy newsletter through to the admonition to respond from first principles only, I could see in ghostly form the debate shaping up. Someone suggests a principle that renders this strange meal out of bounds. Someone else says: but that principle would also forbid ____, and we feel pretty good about doing____. Responses: 

(1) maybe we shouldn't feel so good about doing ___.
 

(2) Maybe we can tighten the principle to include cannibalism and exclude doing ______. 

Someone else weighs in that we are just crafting an ad hoc principle to fit the case, now. A new participant suggests that we try a different approach, and proposes a new principle according to which the eating is also wrong. A similar progress ensues with respect to that principle.

This is the game I have played almost all my life, and I like it, and I think there is something important about it, but I wonder sometimes whether it might be ok to say that some things people do are just yucky and they shouldn't do them. One could imagine a legal code with 7 basic principles and then a list of 30 yucky things that no one should ever do. One might imagine that someone would then say: what about just eating say a foot, leaving the person alive? Does that come under yucky thing number 8? One might think that one could only decide that by asking about the principle underlying yucky thing number 8, so that we would be on our way towards having 8 basic principles and a list of 29 yucky things nobody should ever do. But perhaps the conversation could go some other way, rather than searching for an underlying principle.

My worry is that we will get stuck as ethicists in the position of saying that we can't condemn anything unless we can derive our condemnation from a principle that doesn't also condemn something we approve of. And I think that is a bad position to get in. It is likely equally bad to get into the position of saying we can't approve of anything unless we can derive our approval from some principle that doesn't endorse something we disapprove of.

One way out here is to say: well, if we can't find a good principle, then we have to say our approval/disapproval is provisional, pending further thought. But our disapproval of yucky things like eating other people is something we are very sure of; it isn't phenomenologically provisional at all. And lots of folks would say: if killing and eating somebody isn't wrong, I don't know what is.

I think there are some assumptions about when we have said enough that go into the call for an account of cases like the cannibalism case, and I think we need to worry about those assumptions.

Later, responding to the objection that "That's yucky" may simply be an expression of prejudice
 

 I'd agree that, if "yucky" and its more dignified synonyms mean nothing more than "the sort of thing lots of people find distasteful," then the judgment "That's yucky" has no place in moral discourse * it just registers a prejudice, more or less widely held. But I am inclined to think that "yucky" has a richer grammar than that, and that it is for that reason more promising as a term for moral evaluation.

But, before going into that, I want to make it clear what is at stake for me in this matter. I am unwilling to limit my moral approval or especially my moral disapproval to those objects I can bring under general principles, general descriptions involving standard moral considerations. I don't want to get backed into this sort of corner: "you can't say in any general way what's unacceptable about eating people, so clearly you cannot disapprove of it morally. Your disapproval of it must be a kind of personal distaste, like disliking peanut butter." That feels like an unacceptable impoverishment of my moral conception. Others would disagree. This is a major point of potential moral controversy, on which a lot rides.

Ok, back to "yucky." Children often find the idea of intercourse yucky when they first hear about it. They also find coffee and asparagus yucky. One can respond to that perception in various ways. My impulse is to say: "No, these things aren't yucky, though I can understand how you might find them yucky, from your present standpoint." I'd say something like that also to folks who find lesbian sex yucky. My general point is that there is room to argue about what is yucky, and that argument will proceed differently than an argument about whether a moral principle is well grounded. And people do change their minds about yuckiness * witness the continuance of the species.

But surely if there is something in "yucky" to argue about, in a morally relevant way, then it must be some subclass, "moral yuckiness". Even the most devoted friends of asparagus would not take disliking it to be a moral matter. That seems right. But it is a feature of most moral predicates I can think of that they also have a broad non-moral use. Our moral vocabulary is a lot of subsets of broader vocabularies. That seems to be how it works.

I think that this issue is important because it is a boundary issue for moral discussion, moral argument, the whole idea of moral conviction.