Invisible Adjunct

Well, one message I got from the story is that penis probably should be cooked like tongue. Apparently it was tough.

I generally agree about the impact on libertarian thinking. Beyond that, I think it has something to do with the academic tendency (especially in analytic philosophy) to consider the ability to make a good case for absolutely anything as the acme of rationality.

And as I've said, an awful lot of people seem to be incredibly, incredibly bored in ways that I don't understand. Decline and fall of the Roman empire, etc.

After WWII Berlin, Popper, and others seem to have decided that since the Nazis had strong beliefs, and the Communists had strong beliefs, and both were bad, some sort of public emptiness with regard to belief (or an extreme secularity about everything) was the only way to go. I really don't think that this was a viable answer; in retrospect, it seems to me to have been a rather desperate expedient intended to deal with the chaos of the thiries and forties.

I think Tocqueville has analysis that is much better, and better=-informed, than what's above. Tocqueville (like Marx) sees stages between the primitive and the modern, and in particular the aristocratic (which he feels is a step beyond the monarchical) and the democratic. In a democratic society, with equality among people, "general ideas" prevail, since specifics (i.e., of rank) are less important. So society is going to be run by rule of law, and the "general idea" that things like cannibalism, slavery, etc., are bad.
But also, "mutual consent" implies contract, but a contract is invalid if it's against the law. I think this is also a basic legal principle.

I used to like Dalrymple until he had a thing recently (I think in the Telegraph) grumbling about crass American culture. He, I'm sure, would oppose cannibalism unless it was of Britney Spears.

People own their bodies; thus they have the right to do anything with those bodies so long as it harms no one else. The guy who chose to have his body eaten didn't thereby harm anybody else. So he had the right to make that choice.

So there is no problem with what happened in this cannabilism case - at any rate, not if you believe that people own their bodies and are permitted to do with them as they see fit so long as it harms no one else.

After my first comment, I checked with my wife, an attorney, who reassured me that a contract that is against the law is invalid. I assume that the agreement that incorporated the cannibalism also incorporated a murder. The legal principle would be that the agreement violated law and public policy (i.e., the general idea that cannibalism is a bad thing) and was invalid. If the eatee had backed out of it, it certainly would have been unenforceable.

There is actually little difference here between the case of "cannibalism" and Dr. Kevorkian, who is still languishing in jail. A number of Kevorkian's clients were found, on autoposy, not to have been suffering from the "terminal" illnesses they thought they were. The individuals who entered into the "victimless" agreement with Kevorkian were in fact entitled to a greater level of protection from society.

We may assume that anyone who chooses to be killed and eaten is probably not competent, the same as anyone who mistakenly believes he or she has a terminal condition and chooses to have Dr. Kevorkian end it for them.

After my first comment, I checked with my wife, an attorney, who reassured me that a contract that is against the law is invalid. I assume that the agreement that incorporated the cannibalism also incorporated a murder. The legal principle would be that the agreement violated law and public policy (i.e., the general idea that cannibalism is a bad thing) and was invalid. If the eatee had backed out of it, it certainly would have been unenforceable.

There is actually little difference here between the case of "cannibalism" and Dr. Kevorkian, who is still languishing in jail. A number of Kevorkian's clients were found, on autoposy, not to have been suffering from the "terminal" illnesses they thought they were. The individuals who entered into the "victimless" agreement with Kevorkian were in fact entitled to a greater level of protection from society.

We may assume that anyone who chooses to be killed and eaten is probably not competent, the same as anyone who mistakenly believes he or she has a terminal condition and chooses to have Dr. Kevorkian end it for them.

"People own their bodies; thus they have the right to do anything with those bodies so long as it harms no one else."

This is not in fact (ie, in law) the case, though presumably you think it should be. As John Bruce points out, a contract is invalid if its terms are against the law. For example, you are not permitted to contract yourself into slavery.

Obviously we are a highly individualist society with a strong rights culture. So we do have, speaking historically and cross-culturally, a good deal of autonomy. But our property in our own selves is not absolute: in certain areas the law or the state still has a kind of eminent domain.

Kevorkian is an interesting analogy. I agree with you, John, that Kevorkian's clients were entitled to protection from society (apparently at least three of them were not suffering from any physical illnesses at all, though they had histories of mental illnesses). And I also suspect that Brandes (the man who agree to be eaten by Meiwes) was not competent. But on this point, I think Dalrymple does pose an interesting challenge: what if Brandes wasn't mentally incompetent or mentally ill, but perhaps deeply depressed (which is not the same thing as being incompetent) and, well, deeply weird? Isn't it possible that had he been interviewed before the act, he might have been deemed mentally competent (as it is judged in legal terms) even though he still wanted to go ahead with the cannibalism agreement?

Yet another case where liberal theory producess an answer that makes most of us gag. My law is that all theories are only good up to a point and after that they produce weird (cannabilism) or even catastrophic (inter-ethnic violence) results.

"Not competent" may in fact be unnecessary. Society protects "suckers", naive people, or even unrealistic people (who may be fully competent) from various types of confidence schemes and frauds. I can think of various examples, one I think very apposite: take the 13-year-old, highly experienced, girl who seduces an adult. The adult may claim that the 13 year old was about as knowledgeable as to what she was doing as you can get, but the adult is still in a heap o'trouble. I don't see any difference between that and this cannibalism situation. No matter the eatee wanted to be eaten, the eater is still in a heap o'trouble.

Citing the case of a 13-year old won't do: the argument has to do with mutually consenting adults. Those who would argue that cannibalism should be legal would say that any law banning it is unacceptably paternalistic because it treats consenting adults as minors.

I think the cannibal is in a heap o'trouble because I doubt the mutual consent defense will fly.

The question of whether someone owns his own body is a little like the question of whether a thing is identical to itself. You get into metaphysical problems since a person **is** his own body but **owns** property (which is not him).

This came up during the foundational era of liberalism with the question "Can a person contract to sell himself into slavery?" The answer had to be no, or liberalism could not have survived. So liberalism is NOT just allowing people to do what they want to when they want to (ie., is not primarily oriented to individual wills, even all of them collectively). It is a system to protect and foster human freedom.

The issues here might be disentangled if someone planning to commit suicide sent a postcard or an email to a cannibal -- the cannibal then would not have to kill him.

The difficulty, which is, of course, Dalrymple's point, is that it's very hard to find a bright line between those things which people can do by mutual consent which don't harm anyone else and those things that people can't do, despite their mutual consent, which don't harm anyone else.

It is not enough to say that mutually desired cannibalism shouldn't be allowed because it squicks the rest of us. It's clear that anal intercourse squicks a lot of homophobes, yet we (good liberals that we are, plus of course we aren't personally squicked by anal intercourse) don't believe that's an adequate reason for banning homosexuality.

Daniels's (or Dalrymple's, since he's writing as that) challenge to us, the reason he calls for us to go back to first principles, is to find a reasoned basis why we're willing to permit some mutually desired, not harming others behaviours that some find morally unacceptable, but not others.

It does seem like there are two rather separate issues here: the ending of a life (by suicide, murder, etc.) and the consumption of a human being (cannibalism).

Regarding cannibalism, assuming that someone was either already dead or did voluntarily agree to be consumed post-death, it seems difficult to argue that cannibalism under those situations is always "wrong." One possible point, though, is that consuming human tissue does entail a much larger risk of disease transmission than consuming other species tissues. However, we clearly cannot ban all risky behavior, so I'm not sure where that leads ...

A small point I just thought of relating to suicide is that we seem to be viewing people as completely independent from each other. Might we say that every person has others that rely on them (e.g. children, parents, those who benefits from the fruits of the suicidal person's labors), and thus by killing themselves the suicidal person is harming others?

That to which the meal consented was so horrific that no person sane enough to consent could have so consented.

That which the chef requested was so horrific that no sane person could have acted upon the consent so given.

Chef's a madman; lock him in Bedlam until the Devil takes his own.

what if Brandes wasn't mentally incompetent or mentally ill, but perhaps deeply depressed (which is not the same thing as being incompetent)

Depression is a mental illness, quantitatively and qualitatively different from "feeling unhappy", and it most certainly does affect rational decisionmaking. If Brandes were sufficiently depressed to want to die, effective treatment of his depression (if possible) would almost certainly have changed his mind on that issue.

I don't know what impact that has on the legal issues (and it's worth noting that, as you said, he would have to have been both depressed and deeply weird, and we don't know what the weirdness might have prompted him to do in the absence of any depression).

Cannibalism should NEVER be accepted. It sets a precedent. There are enough dangerous people in the world as it is, there's no need to encourage more harmful behaviour. I feel sick.

Zizka: own is not just a metaphysical problem it is a legal one as well. In the anglo-saxon law all ownership is relative. I may own this house, but if I don't pay my real estate taxes, the state can seize it and sell it. We say that the state has a lien (ownership interest) for unpaid taxes. If I own a hundred pounds of a toxic chemical, I still must store, use or dispose of it in compliance with EPA regulations. The question is not whether there are limitations on ownership rights, but what are they and are they reasonable.

"Depression is a mental illness, quantitatively and qualitatively different from "feeling unhappy", and it most certainly does affect rational decisionmaking."

In legal terms, what's at stake in the notion of competency is the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong and to evaluate one's actions accordingly. Depression may be a form of "mental illness," or it may be a "mood disorder," or perhaps it has to be placed on a spectrum ranging from mood disorder to mental illness. But while there are a range of conditions that might fall under the category of "mental illness," most of them will not render the sufferer "incompetent" as defined by the courts.

I can understand the impulse to define depression as a mental illness in order to destigmatize it as some kind of character flaw (stop moping around and just pick yourself up by the bootstraps). But I think we're on dangerous ground if we start proposing that people suffering from depression not be held responsible for criminal actions. If depression meets the criteria for an insanity plea in a murder case, the implication must be that people suffering from depression should be placed under some form of guardianship because they are not competent to take responsiblity for anything. For example, a person would would meet the "incompetency" criteria in a criminal trial is by definition an unfit parent to a child: a child should not be in the care of someone who does not understand that murder is morally wrong and that murder is against the law. Would we really want to say that a child should not be in the care of a parent suffering from depression? -- so that anyone who gets a Prozac prescription has to turn over his or her children to the care of the state?

I'm glad you mentioned this case -- it's something I've found interesting since it happened.

Meiwes exhibited good planning, preparation, and an appropriate covering of the bases insofar as the bases may be covered in a situation like this. I mean heck, there's videotaped consent, here, for what it's worth.

Problem is that said consent isn't going to be worth crap. There is a line drawn for competent behavior. I respectfully submit that agreeing to the statement "I want someone to cut off my penis, cook it, and eat it with me before killing me and eating the rest of me later" is going to be deemed a sign that you're way, way, way on the other side of that line even if you're not drooling, wearing your underpants on top of your head, or claming to be Napoleon. My guess is that Brandes will not be judged competent to give consent *because* he agreed to that. I'd go so far as to say that statement is a paradoxical thing, there... a statement that it is *impossible* to give consent to, because if you consent to it, you have shown you are incapable of giving consent. :)

I have to give Meiwes some credit, here. He did make an effort to find a willing victim. In my book, that puts him ahead of Dahmer, who killed and ate the unwilling. Puts him ahead of the Green River killer and Ted Bundy, too... men who killed the unwilling but didn't (so far as I am aware) eat them.

That said, I don't think there is room in this world for cannibal-murderers, even ones who get consent from their victims first. He's probably going to wind up locked away.

If we take the imcompetence gambit here, we're at risk of concluding that the victim's consent was invalid since he was incompetent, but that the cannibal was also not guilty because of his incompetence. And if cannibalism/willingness to be eaten are considered sufficient proofs of incompetence, without any other evidence, then this case has been defined out of existence. (I think of incompetence as a sort of fudge to sweep messy cases under the carpet, rather than a profound legal insight).

Back to the liberalism question -- the free-est (spelling?) individuals the world has ever seen, considered from the point of view of the individual will, did not live in liberal societies. They were the lords who lived in highly stratified societies wheren the aristocracy was bound by no law. Liberalism defines a world in which all individuals can be free, according to some definition of the word "free". So when Rousseau says that freedom is obedience to law, or that people can be forced to be free, it makes sense. (I had MAJOR problems with this when I first read Rousseau).

The kind of subject-based freedom based on the absolute liberation of desire and the interpretation of all whims and cravings as "needs" is pretty much incompatible with any actual or possible society. (Though of course, we can always stipulate a possible world in which such a society does exist).

I think the "first principles" business is a cheat: Dalrymple can assert the primacy of mutual concent and use it to dismiss anyone who asserts that contracts must be circumscribed by the law, mutual concent or no. One could turn it around on him, and claim that the critierion of mutual concent that he cites depends on the primacy of the law, i.e., the right of parties to make binding contracts between themselves only exists because it is a piece of our common law and the "first principle" of the rule of law.

I have to admit that I was not disgusted by this matter. I found it weird, but not revolting. From that lack of disgust, I couldn't find a reason to prosecute Meiwes, but now I'm swayed by IA's and Zizka's arguments; someone cannot give their consent to be killed. Admitting such a "right" would be dangerous to individual freedom both in principle and practice—to say nothing of the fact that the political rights of a citizen are not the same as property rights. I don't know how I could have been so obtuse about this, but there it is.

Had Brandes taken his own life and stipulated that the preferred method of disposal for his remains would be the Meiwes to eat them, the matter might be different.

Depression may be a form of "mental illness,"

I don't mean to be an asshole, I really don't, but I must insist: depression is a specific mental illness. Not "may be a form of". (Similarly, you seem to be using "mood disorder" in a sense distinct from mental illness, but the DSM-IV term "mood disorder" currently includes major depression, bipolar disorders, cyclothymia and dysthymia.) If one is depressed, one is mentally ill. I often think that the mental illness should go by another name, because the word "depression" has a range of everyday uses that simply do not apply to the illness.

But while there are a range of conditions that might fall under the category of "mental illness," most of them will not render the sufferer "incompetent" as defined by the courts.

I agree wholeheartedly. Not all mental illnesses will render the sufferer legally incompetent. It's a bit of a grey area, perhaps, but the law seems to be quite used to those. Speaking from both personal experience and study, I would say that only the most severe acute depression might impinge on competence (and such episodes are usually crippling, so that competent or not, the depressed person cannot actually do much of anything, much less seek out and be eaten by a cannibal!).

I can understand the impulse to define depression as a mental illness in order to destigmatize it as some kind of character flaw (stop moping around and just pick yourself up by the bootstraps).

That's a benefit, not a reason. It's important to lay out diagnostic criteria for the mental illness called "depression" for the same reasons that pertain to any disease. (But I suspect we may be saying largely the same things here.)

But I think we're on dangerous ground if we start proposing that people suffering from depression not be held responsible for criminal actions.

Absolutely.

If depression meets the criteria for an insanity plea in a murder case

But it doesn't, nor will recognising the illness for what it is make it any more likely that depression will be used to argue incompetence.

Hmmm. "People own their own bodies" yep. It's why I support the idea that prostitution should be legal, but regulated for public health, but that pimping should be illegal. Except that part of me truly believes that there are very few prostitutes that have made a conscious and informed career choice. My impression is that most people who work as prostitutes do it because they see no other alternative or because they have no other alternative.

Contracts must be made between consenting adults and according to the law -- agree with that one, too. In the case of both of these men, I'm not sure either had the legal competency to enter into a contract. The problem is, it's the same argument that makes me think most murderers are legally incompetant -- because I believe one has to be mentally or morally impaired to willingly take another life. It doesn't mean I don't think people should be free from punishment or absolved from guilt. Just that I think that people who murder are fundamentally damaged and we should treat them as such. The problem is, I guess, that I've created a circular argument for Brandes and his cannibal -- neither can be sane because society sees their actions as insane.

But that doesn't make it incorrect. In view of the comment on the hypothetical 13-year-old seductress, I think it may be even more right. The girl may be very sexually experienced. She may even want to seduce the adult and have manipulated the situation to have gotten what she wanted. But she is still a child, and there's all kinds of evidence out there that there are certain levels of understanding that juveniles have not yet reached, despite their apparent ability to do "adult" things. The average 5-year-old can manipulate and get what he wants -- it doean't mean that he knows that its good or bad or what the long term (or even short term) effects will be. He just knows what he wants and how to get it.

Perhaps in such cases as this, society acts in the role of the parent. We set rules and limits for the good of us all, because there are people who engage in damaging (damaged?) behavior unless we tell them no.

Sorry -- this rambled far more than it should have. Thinking on my feet is not always good!

Roger Kimball of the New Criterion has a sharp commentary on the Dalrymple articlehere. It metaporphizes nicely into an criticism of Mill(or the Mill of On Liberty), and broadly conceived libertarianism.

search for "cannibal"

I'm sorry, this entire thread reads like one of those loopy intellectual excursions we usually find in Chronicle-land; trying to ground a defense of cannibalism in libertarian social theory or some gobbledygook like that. Why waste time with Dalrymple at all? Cannibalism is one of those near-universal human verbotens, like incest, that exists because to violate it risks screwing up the entire species. I simply cannot believe that any of you are wasting time debating this! The guy who killed and ate the other man needs to be put away for a long time. End of story.

Sheesh, IA, you usually have more common sense than this.

Essentially, we are debating it because it's being debated. For most people here it puts a limit on the degree to which it is possible to go in the libertarian direction. Other points discussed include the insanity defense, the culture of whim and desire, and the analytic-philosophy / jailhouse-lawyer habit of "making a case" for pretty much anything.

So while I'm generally sympathetic with your conclusion, I don't think that the thread was a waste of time. For example, I've been able to argue that liberalism or freedom doesn't mean "letting everyone do whatever they feel like at the moment", not even if the "without hurting anyone else" limitation is added.

I like this thread, too -- it's a nice break from the academic morasse.

I have a question, based in part on an analogy: if an illegal contract cannot be enforced, and no court will uphold it, and the present case falls clearly under this heading, what of someone who enters willfully into a for-pay agreement with another to have Sadistic acts peformed upon them? In other words, if someone goes as a client to a dominator or dominatrix to be hit etc., and as a condition of the arrangement, there will be no sexual contact per se, can the person who performed the agreed to acts of violence and aggression be charged with battery or worse?

Let me try again.

Anthony Daniels, "Theodore Dalrymple", is a social conservative. He is not only against this form of sexualized cannibalism, he is against most forms of sexual perversion. He is against having children out of wedlock. Indeed, he is against cohabitation. He is against prostitution. He is against drugs. He is against public drunkenness. He thinks tattooing and body piercing wrong. I suspect he would prefer people not wear sneakers. He believes he is consistent. He thinks social liberals have simply legislated their prejudices.

In this piece, he challenges us to distinguish between the cannibalism he and we clearly find wrong and the other socially disruptive behaviours he finds wrong but we find unobjectionable. From first principles.

What is today legal is irrelevant. Over the last few decades, we have liberalized the law. We could do so further, if we wanted. "It would be legal if the law would allow it" says Pompey.

Merely asserting that cannibalism is wrong doesn't refute him. It confirms him in his opinion.

So can we give a reason that cannibalism is wrong that doesn't equally apply to a host of other socially disruptive, but "victimless" activities?

Jam, thanks.
I certainly did not mean to suggest that Dalrymple was arguing for cannibalism. To the contrary, his concerns, as jam points out, go something like this: Look, you liberals, you think you can have all these freedoms, no limits to your own oh-so- fabulous and interesting desires, and perhaps it works for you most of the time because you're affluent and belong to a cushioned elite, but it just won't work for most people, and look what your liberalism has done, now we cannot even agree on the wrongness of cannibalism.

I intended the Berlin quote as a sort of response to this insistence on first principles. As I see it: I understand that it's unsettling and sometimes downright scary (more so than most liberals want to acknowledge) but we cannot simply pretend to adhere in an inoccent fashion to principles to which we can no longer adhere in an innocent, which is to say, foundational or "first principle," way.

The condition of our modern liberties and freedoms is some form of pluralism in values and ends. And yes, it's scary. Sometimes it really is scary. But there's not much point in blaming it on the hippies or the yuppies when the whole thing goes back to Luther and Calvin -- both quite authoritarian each in his own way, of course, but the confessional divide between Prot and RC did a number on European belief, I mean it encouraged scepticism in all kinds of areas, not only theology, at least amongst the learned (don't tell the servants was the warning well into the 19th century, but the servants have been told, and not by the hippies and the yuppies but by Darwin.

The above is a rambling mess (foggy head, I think I'm getting that dreadful flu). But it's more or less how I would frame the issue (if pressed, I would refer to it as some sort of crisis of authority -- the seriousness of which liberals ignore at our peril, though that's not the same thing as pressing for a return to so many now outmoded kinds of authority.

And unlike you, Kevin, I do think it's worth discussing and debating such questions to see where we go and what we come up with. And I also think that despite their obvious differences on so many issues, Zika and Robert Schwartz did something interesting in this thread: the one prompted the other to say something kind of neat which then prompted the one to say something neat yet again.

I guess I'm just so repulsed by the notion of cannibalism that I find the idea of debating it in any context, even using it as an example for a more refined discussion of how we arrive at the concept of taboo, to be counterproductive. My problem, I suppose.