by Simon Smith
… or, how about the week after?
Halloween has come and gone: zombies shamble back into the night; witches return to their homebrew; ghosties slide, once more, behind the oak panelling in the library; and, without the least flicker of embarrassment, ghoulies are tucked back in. The streets, in short, no longer throng with over-sugared children and other ferae naturae.
Speaking of which, a quick message for any children joining us today:
Those people, they’re not your real parents. Get out of the house. Get out now.
Last week being the start of the
dark season, talk of cannibalism, especially funerary cannibalism, didn’t seem
appropriate. Instead, I made this very cool Zombie Meatloaf from
Chef John at Foodwishes.com.
Everyone agreed that it was the best pretend-living-dead-human-face-with-the-skin-torn-off
they’ve had.
When last we met, a curious
conclusion was in the offing: moral philosophy, it seems, may not be our best
guide when it comes to some of the more outré
moral highways and byways.
The
philosophical difficulty here is, I suspect, the same one that got us all
knotted up back in April
2018 when a certain deeply distasteful sex doll had us on the moral ropes.
It comes down to what criteria we use to determine whether or not something is
right or wrong. Whether we’re talking
about taking a bite out of Grandpa or dipping your bread in thermoplastic
elastomer,[1]
Mill’s ‘harm principle’ is too narrow and too vague. Nd if wonky liberalism[2]
can’t help, then Kant’s sterile
rationalism is no better. Does the Categorical Imperative apply to corpses?
That depends on your theological presuppositions, but in and of itself? Not
obviously.
The question,
then, is ‘what makes us so sure that this is a moral question after all?’ One
possible clue might be found in the attitude of those who practice it. According
to Malinowski, that attitude is a distinctly double-edged banana. On the one
hand, the Trobriand Islanders regard the practice of ‘sarco-cannibalism’ with
‘extreme repugnance;’ having a nibble of your dead relatives is, unsurprisingly,
‘usually followed by a violent vomiting fit’ (32).
That’s your moral clue right there.
Assuming that
funereal cookie-tossing isn’t a comment on the cooking, here’s where the
ambiguity kicks in. While sarco-cannibalism is clearly a thing of horror and
disgust, it is also, Malinowski tells us, ‘a supreme act of reverence, love,
and devotion.’ Indeed, it’s actually ‘a sacred duty that among the Melanesians
of New Guinea’ (32).
This ambiguity
makes me wonder whether cannibalism really is a moral issue for the
Trobrianders. Malinowski’s explanation of this mortuary munching suggests it
may not be. In such rites, we see both the horror of death and the fear and
pain of loss. ‘[T]here is a desire to maintain the tie [between the deceased
and the bereaved] and the parallel tendency to break the bond.’ The aim of the
ritual is, of course, reconciliation, ostensibly of the living with the dead,
but also of the those suffering the crisis with the rest of their society.
Thus the
funerary rites are considered as unclean and soiling, the contact with the corpse
as defiling and dangerous, and the performers have to wash, cleanse their body,
remove all traces of contact, and perform ritual lustrations. Yet the mortuary
ritual compels man to overcome the repugnance, to conquer his fears, to make
piety and attachment triumphant, and with it the belief in a future life, in
the survival of the spirit (32).
The need to overcome fear and
keep a firm grasp on the concrete personal connections that make us who and
what we are does have its moral dimension, of course. It makes, as Charles
Conti has argued, ‘personhood’ an essentially ethical reality.[3]
Malinowski might well agree, as he sees religion as a morally cohesive, social
force.
To be clear, I
understand the reasons for, as Levinas puts it, ethics as
first philosophy. After all, persons are constituted by personal actions
and personal actions are almost always moral actions. Also, I don’t want to
overstate any disagreement with Conti or Malinowski, or even Levinas for that
matter. But I do think that there’s more to metaphysics than ethics. For one
thing, to say an action is moral or immoral is an interpretation. And yes, all
cognition and recognition involves interpretation, we have no access to the
‘real’, ‘unvarnished’, ‘uninterpreted’, ‘truth’ or TRUTH. However, not all modes of interpretation are
necessarily moral. It seems quite possible that the most basic cognition or
recognition of something as something, of an event as an act, for instance,
while still being an interpretation of some kind is not inevitably a moral one.
Otherwise put,
if we want to find the fundamental truth (or ‘truth’, but not TRUTH) of what it
means to be a person, we have to account for persons in the round: good, bad,
and everything in between. That requires an overarching description, a wider
context within which morality can be
understood.
More simply
and yet at the same time more abstrusely, if your mother loves you, then she
loves you, not because it’s morally right to do so and certainly not because
she’s compelled by instincts or hormones or what have you. She loves you because she’s your mother, because that
love is, in a sense, who she is.
Although it’s probably not all she is.
Of course, if
she doesn’t love you, well, maybe you’re just unlovable.
But I digress. Again. My point
was just that Malinowski’s appeal to fear, piety, attachment, and the hereafter
suggests to me that cannibalism may
not be a moral matter per se for the
Trobriand Islanders. It may be a cultural or religious issue instead. That
would, to some extent, explain my immediate relativistic reaction. On reading
Malinowski, that is, my first thought was that, here in the West, we would
definitely regard these sarco-cannibalistic rites as morally problematic. But
is that judgement universalizable (as Kant would insist it should be)? It
might be wrong here, in leafy, middle-class Surrey, but does it follow that it’s
also wrong in Melanesia?
Okay, my first
thought was actually, ‘Ewww! Have these people never heard of ham sandwiches
and the mini-quiche?’ And then I thought about the moral stuff.
Oh alright,
somewhere in the middle of all this, I was also wondering whether they were
cooking the stiff and if so, how.
But I was
mostly thinking about moral relativism.
This, you will
no doubt be relieved to hear, takes us right back to the curious conclusion
with which this week’s rumination began. Ethics may not be our best guide here.
At least, it may not be the best place to start, especially if cannibalism is a
cultural rather than a moral issue.
Does that mean
the discussion, such as it is, is at an end? Ha! You should be so lucky. Anyway,
who ends a meal without pudding?
Next week, we finally
(probably) get to the philosophical pudding. Which hopefully will be more than
just a piece of fruit.
[1]
Not to mention that siren of the 70s, Inflatable Ingrid; or, for that matter,
every teenage life-saver’s one true love, Resusci Annie.
[2] To
be fair to dear old J.S., On Liberty was a valiant attempt to
do what philosophers, in the Western tradition, have been trying and largely
failing to do since Thales of Miletus popped his tackle out and invented
philosophy. Mill was trying to reconcile the needs of society with those of the
individual: the one cum/contra the many. Like most western philosophers,
however, he began with a vastly overinflated sense of the individual’s
importance and so banjoed the whole thing. Result: a lot of meandering old toot
about dead dogs, and why banging it out on the pavement isn’t actually a
legitimate experiment in living after all.
[3]
See Conti, C. C. Metaphysical Personalism.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
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