Guess Who's Coming as Dinner?

Columnists at FindLaw and City Journal take it as self-evident that German cannibal Armin Meiwes should go to jail, with the latter calling the case "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."

Me, I'm not so sure. The "victim" in this case, Bernd Brandes, was willing, even enthusiastic. And as City Journal's Ted Dalrymple notes, while the desire to have someone munch on him is, shall we say, suggestive that perhaps Brandes might've been in less than optimal mental health, it would be circular to insist that this odd preference itself establishes that he must've been mad absent other, independent reasons to think he was incapable of making a rational decision. So is it so clear cut that there's a crime here? Maybe Brandes' eagerness to be Meiwes' snack is bizarre, self-destructive, and kinda gross… but then, plenty of people say the same about smoking cigarettes. The obvious riposte is, of course "but this is really, really icky." And I'm inclined to agree. But to paraphrase an old lawyers' slogan, icky cases make bad law.

Comments

[Madog]

I used to jokingly say that I'd try anything once - even human as long as I had their permission first. I never thought a senario might actually present itself.

[brendan]

The real problem with cannablism, as philosophers have noted,is that it will cause too much confusion when the resurrection comes.

How is God to restore our earthly bodies when the same atoms are being used for two different people? If I take out an ad in the City Paper and then proceed to ingest someone, then his atoms become part of my body. Does God bodily resurrect the first person to be comprised of the atoms or the second?

It's all too confusing.

Ban cannabalism.

[junyo]

There are things that seem crazy, things that mark one as eccentric, things that might lead one to believe that one is crazy, however... if agreeing to let someone kill and consume you doesn't automatically get you a bust in the Raving Loon Hall of Fame what, exactly, does?

And just one more weird tidbit. "Brandes spoke good English, [Meiwes] said, and since eating him his English had improved."

[Warren]

Maybe Swift had the right idea after all.

[Jesse Walker]

I was disappointed to see Dan Savage setting aside his usual embrace of sexual liberty and endorsing a ban on consensual cannibalism. Who shall we turn to now to defend the sexually outre?

[OL]

Let's not forget, Brandes JOINED Meiwes in snacking on, um, one of his extremities. But the real question is: Did they SMOKE afterward?

[ed]

I hear we taste like pork.

[thoreau]

I'll worry about the right to be eaten alive after we've ended taxation, gun control, drug laws, foreign adventures, economic regulations, the ban on ferret ownership, oppression of blue-skinned druids, and every single other problem caused by the government.

Until then, however worthy and urgent the right to be eaten alive may be, I'm sad to report that I simply do not have the time to defend cannibalism.

[brendan]

Is Ed refering to that really awful Heinlien novel?

[Evan McElravy]

Brendan: I think the better term might probably be "theologian." I know Aquinas anguished over this very problem; do you know of anybody else?

I think Montaigne wrote a defense of the south seas cannibals, where the question was not entirely one of personal choice. Never read it, though.

[brendan]

I'll go with theologian.

[bigbigslacker]

I'm with Wesley Clark on this one. Pro-choice right up to the end...

[ed]

Brendan,

No, I discovered it within a fascinating documentary about 19th century Portland, Oregon. Unwitting bar patrons were dispatched through trap doors and kidnapped for duty on sailing ships to the Far East ("Shanghaied"). Crewmates learned of their deaths by the galley chef's announcement: "Long pork tonight, maties!"

[Ignorant Law Student]

My feeling is that eating someone alone should probably not be illegal. But still, I think any modern-day cannibal should be prosecuted just like anyone else who has an unlicensed abbatoir in his house.

If you're going to do consensual cannibalism, do it hygenically.

[ed]

I'll say it again:

Cannibalism means never having to say you're hungry.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Make the cannibal eat his own dick, maybe that'll give him second thoughts.

[ed]

I'm sure he tried.

[Gene Berkman]

If you eat an insane person, aren't you likely to get Mad Human Disease? And whoever would take a chance like that is probably insane himself.

Perhaps we need a new organization to promote vegetarianism - PETAH - People for Ethical Treatment of Animals and Humans.

[cw]

Gene,

Biologically speaking, animals include humans

[steve]

Am I to understand from this post that allowing someone to kill and eat you is a rational decision akin to the choice to smoke cigarettes?

[ed]

More like the choice to eat steak.

[Dan]

What, though, is the evidence that he was mad? Well, the fact that he wanted Meiwes to eat him. And why did he want Meiwes to eat him? Because he was mad. There is a circularity to this argument that robs it of force.

That's NOT a circular argument. Example:

What's the evidence that the wound is infected?
Well, the fact that it's leaking pus.
And why is it leaking pus?
Because it's infected.

Saying "X is a sign of mental illness; we know you're mentally ill because you exhibit X" is perfectly valid scientific reasoning. The only point of argument is that people can disagree over the classification of "X" as a sign of mental illness. Once it's accepted that "X" is, in fact, such a sign, then it becomes a valid basis for diagnosis.

I'm perfectly comfortable saying that "the desire to be killed and eaten" is, in virtually all cases, indicative of insanity. The burden of proof is on the would-be lunch to demonstrate he's mentally competent.

One question I have is: did Meiwes screen his would-be meals for mental illness? When you put an ad in the paper saying "contact me if you want to be eaten", it goes without saying that virtually all of the people who will seriously respond are nuts. Did Meiwes make an attempt to determine if Brandes was competent to consent to his own murder?

All of that said: if Brandes really did have rational reasons for what he did (even such as "I'm dying anyway, and thought it might be a cool way to get in the papers"), then I don't really see why Meiwes deserves jail time.

[TM Lutas]

Put aside the idea of whether the State should have the right to prevent it. Anybody who wants to kill himself by pieces either self consuming or being consumed by another human being is off their rocker and needs help. That help is quite probably cheaper than the theologians, lawyers, judges, medical ethicists, and interested laymen spending their time debating it because in the real world German taxpayers have to pay for the consequences of this depravity.

[Mona]

Let them eat the one guy's, um, you know. Just so long as they were not smoking marijuana. Smoking cannabis is the most vile, evil thing known to mankind, and those two did not do that, apparently. So, let the survivor be.

Not that I *literally eat...those things either, nor do I smoke weed. But I do have my moral priorities in order.

[Rick J.]

If I'm not mis-steaken' the one who was eaten actually only consented to the cooking and consumption of his own genitals. The subsequent killing and consumption of the remainder is both murder (as being non-consensual) and predictable... anyone who offers himself to be eaten has to know that the dining public does not, in a condition of good mental health, have a taste for "the long pork", and that therefore there's a certain assumption of risk that goes with the offer.

[thoreau]

Rick-

If I'm not mistaken, the victim sold all of his possessions before going to the "meal", so he knew he was going to die. And apparently several other aspiring victims showed up but changed their minds at the last minute, and the cannibal let them go. This guy made darn sure to get consent.

But consent is only meaningful if it comes from a competent person. People can call me a statist, accuse me of "forcing my values on others", or whatever, but anybody who consents to having his dick removed, then eating his dick, and then being killed so another guy can eat him, is clearly NOT competent.

I may be a closed-minded prude, but everybody has to draw a line somewhere. I feel pretty comfortable drawing the line at cannibalism.

[Gabriel Hanna]

WHEREVER the line is drawn, if it is drawn so as to include consensual cannibalism and smoking on the same side of it, that line is drawn in the wrong place.

Can I prove this, a priori? No. Neither can anyone prove, a priori, that whatever is consensual is not wrong.

EVERYONE draws a line somewhere.

[brendan]

"EVERYONE draws a line somewhere."

I suppose that's right. I saw something I didn't like in a John Water's movie once. I'm not even sure what they were doing, but it was vaguely sexual and very disturbing. So that's where I'd draw the line.

[Jigga Wha]

I remember reading someone comparing transexualism to people who wanted their limbs chopped off for no good reason. I had never heard of the latter condition before.

I would say that wanting any perfectly normal, functional, and useful piece of you body chopped off (not talking foreskin here) has got to automaticaly get you a trip for the private room in the loony bin.

Any takers?

[Gabriel Hanna]

Going back to a point made before, that you can't say that someone is crazy, only for doing something that is defined as crazy...

I know it SOUNDS like a circular argument.

But what about this one:

When I let go of the rock, it fell to the floor.
It did this under the influence of the Eath's gravity.

I know this because the rock fell when I dropped it.

The definition of "gravity", at least the Newtonian definition, refers solely to the gravitational force between masses--which is known to be gravity only because we're taking about "mass" and not "charge".

Gravity is what attracts masses. You know something has mass when it's affected by gravity.

I guess I think it's the same with a man consenting to be another man's dinner. He is exhibiting a behavior of people we call "crazy"...

[Evilcor]

Only 'kinda' gross?
Guess we learned something about Julian today.

[yelowd]

Evan-
Yes, Montaigne wrote "Of Cannibals". It is essentially pointing at the hypocrisy of Europe calling the "Indians" of S. America savages.

An excerpt from the piece that is eerily prescient:

Each man brings back as his trophy the head of the enemy he has killed, and sets it up on the entrance of his dwelling. After they have treated their prisoners well for a long time with all the hospitality they can think of, each man who has a prisoner calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the prisoner's arms ... gives his dearest friend the other arm to hold in the same way ... [they] kill him with their swords. This done, they roast him and eat him in common and send some pieces to their absent friends".

On the prisoners he says:" they treat them very freely, so that life may be all the dearer to them, and usualy entertain them with threats of their coming death".

He also adds: "So we may well call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity".

- Complete Essays of Montaigne. (a classic read)

[fyodor]

Cannibalize me if you will, but I say that Julian has a good point that a bizarre desire by itself, however bizarre or to the rest of us self-destructive, is not reason enough to claim lack of competency. OTOH, I do wonder about what other precedents and needs there may be for someone to be responsible for knowing their accomplice in an act is competent in certain circumsances. I see implications in this both for unusual sexual practices in general and for assisted suicide. Of course, most people would sooner relate to wanting to be killed because you're in great pain and gonna be till you die anyway than because you think it would be neat to be eaten. But the claim that the person desiring assisted suicide is ipso facto incompetent to decide their fate is part and parcel of the argument against it. But then, perhaps there is some necessity for someone performing assisted suicide to determine the assistee's competency, a step Meiwes most likely skipped over!

[Ben]

There are two fallacies I see with the argument.

First off, part of being an "inalienable right" like the right to life, is that it is not something one can sign away. You cannot give someone permission to kill you, let alone eat you.

Second, related to smoking, we have guys in their 60's and 70's suing tobacco companies, because their smoking since an early age has ruined their healthy. Think about this. If a guy who has been smoking since he was 14, for 50 years is still alive to sue a tobacco company, cigarettes are ineffective means of suicide. Therefore the cases do not compare well.

Third: sanity. It is a mark of insanity to do something destructive to one's own life and well being. Whether it is mild, as in the form of smoking, (and even then, there is the argument that the pleasures enjoyed from smoking outweigh the shorting of one's life) or severe as in the case of giving someone permission to kill and eat you, its still self destructive and still indicates that something is severely wrong with one's mental wiring.

At the very least, it is highly unusual enough to point out that it is well outside the range of normal behavior in humans. And that gives one cause to suspect that it is a sign of insanity, severe depression, or some other mental dysfunction.

The fact that there is no German law, one way or the other, shows just how rare this behavior is.

The rationale I had heard from reports is that the victim's girlfriend had dumped him because she thought he was gay. This left him depressed, and then he consented to being eatened, then killed, then eaten again.

Fourth: One thing that is not brought up is whether wanting to dine on one's fellow man is a sign of mental illness. At least it poses a potential threat to other folks. This time he took an ad out in the papers, and reports suggest that he has acted consistently with regards to consent. However, this does not preclude that he would continue, or will continue in such a vein. Do we want to wait until he kills an unwilling victim before we deal with him?

[Gabriel Hanna]

I didn't imagine that even Julian Sanchez would actually take this position on consensual cannibalism. It's like self-satire or something.

Next topic: laws against incest between adults. More government interference in private consensual activity? Acceptable or no?

(Yes, I've read all of Robert Heinlein's books, you can skip all those arguments.)

[fyodor]

"Do we want to wait until he kills an unwilling victim before we deal with him?"

I think that's how we deal with most crime. Crime happens, THEN we punish. I know he's already done something real, but your argument here still sounds very much like: "He's such a scumbag that we KNOW he'll do something bad in the future (or is more likely to)!" No, we don't know that. Should we lock up anyone who admits to murderous fantasies, for one for example?

As to your first point, sounds like you're against assisted suicide as well. Pity.

Regarding your third point(s), the first paragraph seems to reinforce Julian's concern that anything considered self-destructive by others could be called a sign of mental incompetency. Did you intend to say that? As for the rareness of the act in question, I don't see how that matters. People who do very unusual things are insane? I sure hope not! Regarding his having been dumped by his girlfriend, well okay, this could surely fit in the "independent reasons" to determine incompetency that Julian alluded to and therefore could possibly be quite relevant. But I would say the question remains regarding whether certain consensual acts require a determination of competency rather than simply an assumption of such as in the vast majority of situations. I'm not sure where I stand on that yet.

[moller]

I mean, in a world of perfect information, and no administrative costs/errors, sure--theoretically, perfectly consenual agreements between a psychotic cannibal and his victims shouldn't be illegal. But, the reason this is and should be illegal in the real world is because in most fact patterns involving psychotics who eat people, the eating is unlikely to be fully consensual, and--given the nature of the transaction--it is administrativiely unfeasible for a judicial system to parse the totality of circumstances in each circumstance of cannabilism in order to cull out the fully, uncontestibly consensual situation. I mean, the legal world is full of a wide variety of laws whose overinclusivity reflects that we live in a world of imperfect information about people's sanity, volition or other relevant factors etc.: a world of predictable, fair, and administrable laws often requires that the freak fact pattern won't be recognized. E.g., Epstein's argument for strict liability in tort as opposed to a standard like/consider-all-factors negligence rule.

[martin]

thoreau:
Ok, you can of course be as prude as you wish, but would you support public laws to declare someone incompetent to let himself be killed and eaten and if so, where do you draw the line as to what, in general, constitutes consent? Whose line should be drawn where in the determination of competence and consent?
By the way, the dilemma of the German court consists of the absence of an applicable statute in this case. Nobody had ever thought of a situation like this.

[Will Spencer]

My life is the only thing which really belongs to me. If I choose to give it to another human, that is my right.

It is none of the state's business if or how I choose to end my life, or how I choose to have my remains handled -- provided that I do not leave them on someone else's property.

Or, as John Stuart Mill stated "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."

If I want to die, leave me be. It's not of your business, you nosy busy-bodies.

In the words of C.S. Lewis "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

[Andy D.]

Will Spencer, I mostly agree with what you've said and what you've quoted... but there's the question of how to ascertain what a person's "will" is. To take an obvious case: let's say I'm a doctor and the paramedics wheel in a guy on a gurney who's out of his mind on hallucinegenic drugs and is seriously injured. He thinks I'm an ogre with bugs crawling on me and wants to get away... he demands to be set free; but I know that if I let him go, he'll die of his injuries. I believe that I should treat him even if he resists my efforts. I can subvert his explicit "will" because it's safe to assume that he's not competent to make any life-and-death decisions. After he recovers, he'll most likely agree that it was right to treat him despite his protests.

And thus we have the makings of a slippery slope. An unavoidable slippery slope.

[Grumpy Bob]

Just because you would not support a law against "consensual cannibalism" does not ipso facto mean you support the idea of allowing someone to dine on your hide. We all agree that someone volunteering to be someone else's supper--and hors d'oeuvres, dessert, etc.--is obviously nutso. It's plain and self-evident.

The question is, should there be a law against it?

Well, for one thing, is there some kind of epidemic of people allowing themselves to be eaten? I don't think so. And let's not forget the unintended consequences that result from every new law.

The point is, the dinee VOLUNTEERED to be eaten (or so it appears). And the diner appears to have obtained CONSENT (or so it appears). This is how we sort out the gene pool, people. This is natural selection at work. If some deranged idiot actually forsakes the natural instinct of self-preservation by allowing himself to be eaten, let him. He deserves it. And as for the diner, natural selection will eventually eliminate him as well, considering the potential for disease that arises from cannibalism.

Now, having said all that, if the authorities are convinced that this was murder, then why don't they charge him with the crime and allow his guilt/innocence be sorted out in a court of law before a jury of his peers? The burden of proof would be on the state to convince the jury that this was indeed murder. Then let the jury make the determination. I mean, there are already laws against murder, right?

Do ya really need a whole new law that deal with a specific method of killing?

[VanVeen]

"Saying "X is a sign of mental illness; we know you're mentally ill because you exhibit X" is perfectly valid scientific reasoning"

You are, quite apparently, completely ignorant of scientific reasoning. I'll skip the primer (why bother?) and make an obvious statement: just how, pray tell, are we to measure mental illness objectively? Oh? We can't? Right, it's circular reasoning.

"How do we know Dan is stupid?"
"He wrote that message."
"Why did he write that message?"
"Because he's stupid."
---------
"Can I prove this, a priori? No. Neither can anyone prove, a priori, that whatever is consensual is not wrong"

Which brings up a mighty fine point: why are you wasting your time arguing over these issues? Why not save us all a bunch of time and say, "I assign an ethical value of X to action Y because my meso-limbic system says that's a damn fine value to assign to it. Disagree? Too fucking bad!"?

[VanVeen]

"Gravity is what attracts masses. You know something has mass when it's affected by gravity"

We know the universe obeys certain invariant rules of transformation, one of which happens to have been assigned the dactylic appellation "gravity". We educed it by constructing hypotheses and testing them with experiments.

Discussing the tautological basis of the scientific laws is, as I said above, quite pointless given this thread's subject, but suffice it to say that the situations are analogous only insofar as the "ethical value" each person assigns to an action is as invariant with respect to each person as the laws of the universe are to the universe. Circular reasoning is not only permissible from an individual perspective - it's absolutely necessary.

[Gabriel Hanna]

You're right,VanVeen, what would I know about scientific reasoning? I'm just a graduate student studying physics, and I've only had one paper published in Physical Review Letters, along with four other people, and no doubt you've had dozens, so maybe I don't know scientific reasoning very well.

But if a blood test shows that you are postive for HIV and a doctor tells you you have HIV, even though you've no other signs of it but the positive blood test, are you going to tell your doctor he's arguing in a circle?

Crazy behavior is not being defined in an ad hoc
way as synonymous with cannibalism. Cannibalism is one defining trait, which in itself may be sufficient, in the same way that a positive HIV test may be sufficient to establish that one is HIV positive.

How do you know your parents love you? You can't measure love in an objective way.

You know it through their BEHAVIORS. It is the same with mental illness--at least those that haven't a biochemical cause identified yet.

And a man who wants to be eaten is crazy by just about any standard I've ever heard of.

No, it's not E=mc^2 but we can speak meaningfully of these things.

Maybe you shouldn't look at everything so simplistically. "There's no objective way to measure it so the definition of it is purely arbitrary." That's about what you're saying and it's bullshit. It's like saying words like "grey" and "bald" don't mean anything because people draw the lines in different places.

[dan]

I take issue with the manner of burial... Should a victim of cannibalism not have the same rights as any other deceased person compared to that of a goldfish?

[fyodor]

nibbler,

We have laws against striking people too, at least when it's assault. But some people enjoy being hit, at least under particular circumstances. Obviously the context matters, and no less so for murder, which is not merely "killing." This debate has zilch to do with so-called "victims' rights."

[dhex]

a large swath of the population of this planet believes in supernatural forces having some sort of play or say in the goings on of our lives. a smaller chunk of that specifically believe in a dead carpenter from a competing religious sect who, after rising from the dead a first time, will return after an unspecified number of years to usher in a new age where all who ever lived will be judged and separated into two camps. one of these camps will involve eternal, timeless suffering and the other will enjoy eternal, timeless bliss.

most of these sects and sub-sects practice a form of ritualized cannabalism, involving various bread type products and wine or grape related beverages. though most groups avow this to be symbolic, one sect in particular has a doctrinal tradition involving a magico-religious "transubstantiation" in which the unleavened bread and wine are transformed - in essense (an important doctrinal point) - by the officiating priest into the body and blood of the aforementioned dead carpenter/heretical rabbi.

how can this be any fucking more or less crazy than eating your own dick? WHERE'S THE YARDSTICK?

[Vigilance Matters]

As i've pointed out here before, this act was legalized in the U.S. under the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy decision.

It's just a matter of time before it gets called in as precedent.

[fyodor]

When my handbasket gets to hell, I'll know VM was right!

[nibbler]

Why does the guy's will matter? If the state has a law against killing and eating people, then the victim's attitude is not relevant. This is what happens when you let "victims rights" people yammer on TV too much. Law enforcement is not about victims, it's about criminals.

[World Long Pork Council]

Overpopulation.
World Hunger.
Two problems, one solution.

"Long Pork, the other, other White Meat"
(brought to you by the World Long Pork Council)

[Brittingham Smith]

EMAIL: [e-mail]
IP: 210.18.158.254
URL: http://preteen-sex.info
DATE: 05/20/2004 05:13:29
I like it very much, i should get one site like this too