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,

0:32or I've forgotten to this day, I decided to eat them instead.

0:40Christina Van Dyke, co-host of our Monster series. Sometimes 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 take a look at

1:10some of his work and tell me what you think of it. All right. The first thing that comes up 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

1:44real bacon. And then there's one more. Oh, very. Right. So apparently 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

2:19been in murder. And how you dispose of the body after the murder really isn't that important.

2:27Rick told me that a lot of his art during 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,

2:59but morally. So you're doing something wrong if you're causing pain, more pain than you'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

3:31it. 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 a thing experiences. And there's really no difference between a human fetus and a pig fetus. One argument is, OK, what happens if you start treating people like animals? Does that mean we can start eating them? And if you don't commit murder,

4:07it 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 singer 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.

4:46From 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. Ha ha ha! 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. But what interesting philosophical issues are we going to connect to cannibalism?

5:21We'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.

6:32What 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 had 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 who 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.

7:08And 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. Oh 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.

7:44Okay, so it didn't look like a slice of pastrami, is what you're telling? No, 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. Oh, 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.

8:21I took them through progressive baths, where you slowly but surely remove the formaldehyde and 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, 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.

8:58On top of that, did 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 canapé, 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.

9:45And 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 about the underlying misogyny in his artwork. He used a human uterus in one of his pieces, and he's got these earrings and whatnot. And they began to think, oh, he's got this misogynistic bent about women. But that's never been the case. To

10:18me, 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. So 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

10:50testicle. 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. The 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

11:23and educational purposes. But they'll also sell it to anybody who's willing to pay the money.

11:33All right. So I got to 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 going to 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 decided to eat were not like, even if it was a regular

12:08non-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 completely ad-free by signing up for Slate Plus.

12:40Slate Plus gives you unlimited reading on Slate's website, access to every article and advice column, as well as bonus segments on your favorite podcasts like Slow Burn, Amicus, Political Gab Fest, Slate Culture Gab Fest, and more. You can sign up for Slate Plus at slate.com slash hi-fi plus, or click the link in your show notes. Now back to the show. The consumption of human meat preoccupied some of the earliest Christian thinkers, but not

13:12for 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 would be partly made up of their old cells.

13:43And 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 is literally no part of this person that is not composed of matter that used to belong to another human being. Cannibals seem to be a wrench thrown into the machinery of resurrection.

14:15This 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, if 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

14:51those 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 want to resurrect.

15:14Why 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. Christ's resurrection is supposed to be the first fruits of the new kingdom.

15:47So 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 world are superior. And anything that's material is always going to be changing, and it's going to be mortal.

16:23And 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 says the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, he means that literally, basically. He means that our spirits are superior to our flesh.

16:53And 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 just wasn't incarnated because this amazing, eternal, you know, perfect God would never take on this messy, sinful flesh.

17:25You 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 perfected life of Christ after the resurrection was still a life in which he ate fish. People could touch him.

17:55It 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.

18:13I had always thought that identifying a person 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.

18:43Everyone gets a brand new body. God creates a 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.

19:14And so the things that you do in 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.

19:46Exactly. There's got to be actual continuity 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.

20:16So no problem. What's wrong with that? The 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 just not going to go.

20:40Okay, next solution. If I ate you and part of my left hand and part of my right ear is made 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, you know, replace bits.

21:10That 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 new 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,

21:51in 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. He leaves a hole where my left hand and part of my right ear was.

22:23He 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.

22:54And it 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 about 33 years old.

23:26The age that 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.

23:44I got to 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 not 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.

24:22And so that's the core. There's a part that's essential. Anything you build around that is going to be the original body brought back. So a version of that shows up in Peter van Inwegen'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.

24:53So he proposed that maybe there was like a part of the brainstem or something 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 same ones that existed here.

25:29And 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 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.

25:59Yeah, 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 to bring us back. The hardest case of all is you have the person who dies in the cannibal soup pot.

26:39And 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 genetic 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, 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 because they ate their clone.

27:30And then what's God going to 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 and arranged them like so, it would resurrect one of them.

28:03Right, 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 going to 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, they're supposed to be resurrected indestructible and incorruptible.

28:36So once you have a cannibal that's been resurrected, he's not going to eat anymore. So the matter is supposed to not be fluctuating anymore. Well, okay, that's what they thought, but Jesus ate fish, you know? So I think they had an extreme view of the afterlife that makes our future bodies very, very different. And I just want to say on the record that all of this preoccupation with cannibalism has absolutely nothing to do with cannibals.

29:15Because, you know, fish eat people, other animals eat people, people turn into plants. Right. And then people eat those plants and eat those animals. So you still have the same problem. Right. What's the lesson you think Christians and non-Christians alike can learn from all this obsession in early Christianity over cannibalism and resurrection? It's not just early Christianity. It runs through the whole of Christianity. In modern day, it shows up with people's fear of death and trying to preserve the parts of themselves that they think are most important for the future via cryonics or the idea of kind of uploading consciousness.

29:58More than anything else, I think it's people really grappling with this idea of who they are. And the whole thing about cannibals is just the way of us thinking about flesh and blood and bone. And if we really thought seriously that that's what we are, we realize very quickly that it's the kind of thing that's eaten, decomposes, digested, and turned into a tree and other fish and other people. And I mean, one of the things that's interesting is that, at least in the Christian tradition, all of these people originally thought that body and soul were separable.

30:37And so our souls were going to continue to exist no matter what. But now there are plenty of people who are, you know, full scale materialists. And so the question of bodily resurrection or reduplication or whatever story you want to tell is the story of how, you know, material beings like us could continue to exist forever.

31:05This is the season finale for season five. In fact, we just had our five-year anniversary of the very premiere of this show. While you wait for season six, I want to invite you to listen to some of our best episodes from previous seasons, all available in your podcast feeds from the last five years of production. Like the episode we did on audio illusions called The Illusionist. Or our deep dive into the costs of the war in Afghanistan called The Forever War.

31:37Then there's our eight-part series on philosophy and criminal justice in season four. Or the four-part series on David Lewis at the beginning of this season. The best way to support Hi-Fi Nation in the off-season is to listen to episodes and share the ones you like best with friends, family, and students. You can keep in touch with me by emailing me from the website. See you all in season six. Hi-Fi Nation is written, produced, and edited by Barry Lamb, associate professor and chair of philosophy at Vassar College.

32:08Executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Elusha Montgomery. Senior managing producer for Slate Podcasts is June Thomas. Editor of Slate Plus is me, Chow Tu. Production assistance this season provided by Jake Johnson. Visit hifination.org for complete transcript, show notes, and reading list for every episode. That's h-i-p-h-i-nation.org. Follow Hi-Fi Nation on Facebook and Twitter, and at the website for updates on stories and ideas. Thank you.