Sunday 10 November 2019

Guess who’s coming to dinner: ruminations on the ethics of cannibalism. Secondo Piatto.

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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