Cannibals

Introduction to Cannibalism

0:00it just so happened that i knew a guy he had his tonsils removed he wanted them so the surgeon said yeah sure and he put them in a little jar of preservative and gave them to him and he knew me and he knew i was using some of this stuff in sculptures and he said here you want my tonsils and i said yeah sure so he gave me his tonsils thinking probably that i was going to freeze dry them and turn them into a sculpture for reasons still unknown to me this era forgotten

0:33to this day i decided to eat them instead christina van dyke co-host of our monster series

Philosophy and Cannibalism

0:43sometimes you never know how someone is going to be affected by reading a piece of philosophy oh yeah totally so i want to tell you about someone i met recently so he's an artist been around for a long time hi my name is rick gibson i'm an artist that lives in vancouver canada rick used to do this stuff in the 80s using freeze-dried body parts i'd like you to uh take a look at some of his work and tell me what you think of it all right the first thing that comes

1:14up is a piece called i own a uterus with a paint job which has a freeze-dried human uterus what about the other two pieces you see oh wow okay apparently when pregnant pigs are slaughtered their unborn piglets are harvested and sold to biological supply companies so he bought a preserved fetus and freeze-dried it and put it in a frying pan full of lard and strips of real bacon and then

1:45there's one more oh very i i right so apparently um rick was given two preserved human fetuses he rehydrated them and turned them into a pair of earrings i'm interested in moral problems particularly moral problems that are very much in the gray area of the law and there are no laws against cannibalism the crime in english law in particular has always been in murder and uh how

2:21you dispose of the body after the murder really isn't that important rick told me that a lot of his art

Utilitarianism and Cannibalism

2:31during this period early mid 80s was inspired by philosophy by a couple of philosophers in particular peter singer and jeremy bentham oh of course so jeremy bentham is a prominent philosopher in the 1800s who bases an entire moral theory on pleasure being a positive thing and pain being a negative thing not just aesthetically but morally so you're doing something wrong if you're causing pain more pain than

3:07you're causing pleasure and you're doing something morally right when you're promoting pleasure in the absence of pain right utilitarianism right and he thinks about it most typically in terms of human populations but bentham also talks about animals and the idea of animal suffering and that's where peter singer really picks up and runs with it peter singer who's this really controversial figure is controversial partly because he says that really what matters is the amount of pain or pleasure that

3:46a thing experiences and there's really no difference between a human fetus and a pig fetus one argument is okay what happens if you start treating people like animals does that mean we can start eating them and uh if you don't commit murder it looks like the answer is yes from a utilitarian perspective letting human meat go to waste doesn't do the most good and also from a

4:24singer perspective the moral status of humans and animals is the same or close to the same so his reasoning is why not eat human meat i mean you know most people might think so why eat animal meat it's a bold reaction

Interview with Rick Gibson

4:43from slate this is hi-fi nation philosophy in story form recording from vassar college here's barry lamb as part of our monsters in philosophy series christina i'm sure our listeners can guess what monster we're going to be talking about this week cannibals right so i talked to rick gibson who has eaten human body parts a few times we'll get back to his story in a second

5:15but what interesting philosophical issues are we going to connect to cannibalism we're going to be talking to dean zimmerman about a problem that originates in christian theology about how you can resurrect someone's body in the afterlife if that body is made up of parts that come from someone else's body which can happen if somebody's a cannibal this problem that we'll be talking about today it isn't just a problem with christian resurrection it's about the problem of personal identity right

5:51yeah there's this big problem in personal identity about if we're bodies and not just these immaterial souls then if our bodies are constituted by part of someone else's body then how do you make sense of these two different people who share these parts right how do you tell people apart if what's supposed to make them different from each other is that they have different bodies hi-fi nation will return after these messages

Art and Cannibalism

6:25what was your fascination with human parts with your art at the time because i got tired of working with animal stuff it's demoralizing because all of those animals have been killed against their will or unknowingly all the human stuff is legally obtained it's people donating their bodies or at that time back in the late 80s it was india picking up people off the streets

6:57who were so poor they couldn't afford burials and in order to get foreign exchange they sold these street bodies to western medical schools and western biological supply companies and this included body parts coming from friends who just had surgery parts that rick decided he was going to eat rather than exhibit for utilitarian moral reasons describe what the tonsils look like

7:27oh boy how would you describe them maybe a sausage a small kind of cocktail party sausage but it has a vein going through it so there was a hole in the middle of it okay so it didn't look like a slice of pastrami is what you're telling no no no no no very tiny you know what it kind of looked like you take an olive that's had its pit removed and you take a slice out of it you know it would kind of look like that

7:58over the hole a little smaller and it was dark so it'd be like a black olive wait do they preserve tonsils and formaldehyde like what are they in that's exactly what the first problem is you can't just eat formaldehyde preserved human body parts you have to somehow get the formaldehyde off and so he comes up with soaking it in alcohol I took them through progressive baths where you slowly but surely remove the formaldehyde

8:28and replace it with the non-toxic alcohol and I did that for several weeks eventually I became pretty confident that the toxicity of the formaldehyde was very low and then I decided to eat them in public I wasn't going to do it in an art gallery in front of a small crowd no no I think what I was doing was legal let's go out and do it and declare myself as England's first cannibal to go public on top of that

8:59did you prepare it did you cook it no no no it didn't need cooking the alcohol would be preservative and so it was the formaldehyde it'd be like pickling it I wore a suit and tie I mean this is haute cuisine right I was dressed up even though I was in the middle of an open air public market I was taking this seriously and I wore a little sandwich board sign with a little shelf that could flip up I prepared it right there it was a little can of pay just a cracker a little bit of cream cheese two slices of human tonsil

9:31and a little sprig of parsley to go on it oh and I washed it down with some wine oh red or white a white wine and you wouldn't believe what happened after that do I want to know he had to do it again and the reason he had to do it again was by using human body parts for sculptures feminists were criticizing him

10:02about the underlying misogyny in his artwork he used the human uterus in one of his pieces and he's got these earrings and what not and they began to think oh he's got this misogynistic bent about women but that's never been the case to me it's never been about gender it's always been about species so I decided to set the record straight and eat a slice of human testicle okay that is a choice he made I wanted to clearly make a point that this was about species

10:33so I took a cracker and then I went to the grocery store I bought some sliced beef some sliced pork some sliced chicken and I put them as little strips on top of the canapé and sitting on the very top was the slice of human testicle so when I took a bite I bit through all of them because it's about species and it's about animal protein and could you tell the difference in your mouth what was what? yeah I could

11:03the store-bought protein tasted a lot different than the pickled testicle what kind of company sells a human testicle by mail? oh lots of them do they generally sell this material to schools you know for dissection and educational purposes but they'll also sell it to anybody who's willing to pay the money all right

11:34so I gotta ask did you enjoy it? did I enjoy it? you mean as a culinary experience? yeah no I don't like highly alkalized protein no no I don't at all it's not much fun the alcohol is overwhelming if you're gonna be getting already dead preserved things you can't get away from that if you can get it fresh off the hoof that's a different matter given that though the parts that you

12:04decided to eat were not like even if it was a regular non-human animal aren't like the preferred cuts independent of the art would you have any problem with consuming human protein? if it was legally obtained and ran through you know the health inspectors deemed it fine I wouldn't have trouble with it we will return to the rest of HiFi Nation after these messages you can get this show

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13:06of human meat preoccupied

Christianity and Cannibalism

13:09some of the earliest Christian thinkers but not for reasons you might think they weren't worried about whether it was right or wrong they were worried about what happens in a person's body when they consume another person if Rick Gibson's utilitarian vision comes to fruition and human beings are regularly consuming other dead humans that would mean that as we metabolized other people our cells

13:39would be partly made up of their old cells and how far can we take this? Yeah Aquinas actually he goes all the way with a thought experiment he's like suppose that you have a cannibal who's eaten only human flesh and his parents only ate human flesh so there's literally no part of this person that is not composed of matter that used to belong to another human being cannibals

14:10seem to be a wrench thrown into the machinery of resurrection this is Dean Zimmerman professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion so if you imagine that God's strategy for resurrection is to search around the globe in the biosphere somewhere there's the matter that was in Dean's body when he died get that back together and heal it

14:41if that's the strategy for resurrection if there's a cannibal who's been eating all kinds of people when God looks around to resurrect those people he doesn't have enough matter to do it because a bunch of it is in the cannibal's body if it's a general resurrection that happens all at once to people who've died at different times the material is not all freely available for each body that God would

15:11want to resurrect why is that God's plan for resurrection doesn't he just save all of our souls bodily resurrection became very important to Judaism and Christianity Islam Christianity is the theological tradition I know best and there it's connected up with the incarnation the death and resurrection of Christ Christ's bodily reappearance

15:42Christ's resurrection is supposed to be the first fruits of the new kingdom so the new kingdom is going to include bodily resurrection for everyone I think of it as sort of affirming the goodness of the physical world so you can see it as a kind of death blow to Gnostic interpretations of Christianity what are Gnostic interpretations the thought was that the immaterial and the spirit

16:12world are superior and anything that's material is always going to be changing and it's going to be mortal and that means you can't have eternal knowledge of it the Gnostics end up arguing that indeed our souls are going to survive our death but our bodies were kind of like prisons for our souls matter gets associated with evil so when Paul

16:43says the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak he means that literally basically he means that our spirits are superior to our flesh and that completely undermines the motivation for an incarnated God so the idea that Jesus becomes flesh in a Gnostic view doesn't make a lot of sense and so it gets dismissed as a heresy because a lot of Gnostics end up claiming that Christ

17:14just wasn't incarnated because this amazing eternal you know perfect God would never take on this messy sinful flesh you get a pushback in the development of ideas about the bodily resurrection that actually creation is good all of it was made by God God doesn't make crappy stuff Christ came in the flesh and he was resurrected in the flesh and the

17:45perfected life of Christ after the resurrection was still a life in which he ate fish people could touch him it has a really important role in Christianity in affirming the goodness of the physical world and the importance of it in the permanent plans of God I had always thought that identifying a

18:15person with their flesh and blood or even saying that having the same flesh and blood was needed to be the same person was a secular or scientific view of people but it sounds like the version of Christianity that survived after Gnosticism held this too which is why so many early theologians became preoccupied with the problem of cannibalism Christina here's one solution to the problem everyone gets a brand new body God creates

18:46a new body for everyone out of nothing leaving all of the earthly matter on earth so what's wrong with that? The problem with that option is that it seems like it won't be your body the kicker with bodily resurrection is that you've been promised not just a body in the life to come but your body this doctrine is based on the idea that you're not just your soul and so the things that you do

19:18in this life whether good or bad and kind of your fate can't just be tied up with your soul it's got to involve your body too is this connected to the idea that when Jesus is resurrected it isn't as simple as just God just recreating some new Jesus and saying that's Jesus right there has to be something about the incarnation of Jesus itself rising from the dead exactly there's got to be actual

19:48continuity in some way between the original body and the resurrected body in order for it to actually be Jesus again it would feel like a bit of a cheat if the original Jesus dies and then God just is like ta-da here's a new Jesus okay second solution no cannibal gets resurrected but everyone else does so no problem what's wrong with that

20:18the problem with not resurrecting cannibals is that they never get a final judgment then just because they happen to be cannibals and eat some human flesh they don't get to have either like eternal punishment or eternal reward that's that's that's just not gonna go okay next solution if I ate you and part of my left hand and part of my right ear is

20:49made up of your body then God resurrects both me and you but he leaves a hole in my left hand and my right ear because that matter is part of your body then he fills in the gap with some other matter he just gets from somewhere else God could replace bits that would be one sort of very conservative solution so the main problem with thinking that God's just going to replace whatever bits of you with

21:20new flesh is where do you draw the line what if you also eat three other people you can see how it's going to work where like if you were a lifelong cannibal your whole body could basically be patchworks of pre-existing people's matter and so when God is doing the bodily resurrection all of your matter would belong properly speaking to other people

21:50in which case you look like you're out of luck another possibility would be God can't get all the matter that's in your body when you die because some of it goes to somebody else but God takes some matter that was at one time a part of your body and so it's sort of appropriate and fitting to use that because it's free and stick that in okay next solution so God resurrects both of us

22:23was he goes back in time and he fills in the gap with a hand and ear of the younger me so one of the main issues with that is it looks like you could end up with basically Frankenstein monsters in the afterlife you've got people running around with the nose you had when you were 20 and the legs you had when you were 60 and the arms you had when you were 10 it's just going to create all sorts of problems and

22:54it also raises the same kind of issues about vagueness that you had in the earlier case exactly how much of your past self can God bring forward and that also just raises all kinds of questions about what our resurrected bodies are going to be like anyway so how old are we going to be there's got to be a plan by God it isn't just like what we want right exactly I mean and the usual answer for this is that we're all resurrected looking

23:24about 33 years old the age Jesus was exactly and also Aquinas says it's the age where our intellects have matured and our bodies haven't started to decline yet I gotta say I really liked being 33 right me too it was a great age next solution we look at what parts of flesh and bone are

23:55not digestible it can't be metabolized by a cannibal so a cannibal might eat nothing but people but they never eat the bone Leibniz refers to this he says the rabbis of blessed memory believed that the luz bone or lutz bone L-U-Z is indestructible and apparently can't become part of somebody else's body and so that's the core there's a part that's essential

24:25anything you build around that is going to be the original body brought back so so a version of that shows up in peter van inwigen's famous body snatching god where he thinks that as long as there's material continuity between some important bit of your physical body that's going to be enough to guarantee continuity of your whole body so he proposed that maybe there was like a part of the brain stem or

24:56something that's essential for our existence the most ancient kind of Jewish view was the backbone I think by the time Leibniz was talking about it they were just kind of guessing and they were picking like the hardest bones and thinking probably this was the bone they had in mind because we can't break it and at the moment of our death God takes that bit and kind of pops it forward to the resurrection to guarantee that the people that God's bringing back into existence are the

25:27same ones that existed here and the main argument against that is it just makes God seem super creepy why is that because it makes it look like so you've got all the people gathered around mourning the loss of their beloved family member and and what they don't know is that God has secretly replaced part of that person and the real part of that person is already in a different time and space

25:57yeah you know what this reminds me of is okay secularizing it for a second it's all the people who freeze their brain right totally they think that this is the thing that's essentially them and then whatever thing it gets transplanted into in the future that'll be them surviving exactly like the modern day version of this is cryonics if we can just figure out what bit of us is most important and preserve that then someday in the future people might figure out a way

26:28to bring us back the hardest case of all is you have the person who dies in the cannibal soup pot and generations later by chance all of the bits of the matter in that person's body end up in the body of a single cannibal and in fact that cannibal just by chance has exactly the same structural makeup and we would say

26:58genetic makeup of the person who died in the pot and then that person dies then what does God do yeah you could run that for generations you take a genetic clone of me and my clone eats me and then you clone it and then its clone eats it right and then you run that again for like five generations and then you have five generations of people who are made up of their clone

27:28because they ate their clone and then what's God gonna do God could resurrect let's say the most recent one to die let him eat other stuff for a while come on get a varied diet you know try some vegetables and after a little while there'll be enough matter around to resurrect the next one and so on so you know it could be done it depends upon thinking that if God brought those bits back together

27:59and arranged them like so it would resurrect one of them right but then God can't resurrect everyone at the same time he has to wait a while before he can resurrect each subsequent clone well and I was gonna say it also assumes something that's really controversial in most discussions of bodily resurrection one of the reasons that people like Augustine and Aquinas worried about this in the first place when our bodies get resurrected

28:29they're supposed to be resurrected indestructible and incorruptible so once