Taboo
And just a little more. I’m like a dog with a bone, you know. There’s a rather Kassian argument in comments on an older post (combined with some vituperation to make it go down more smoothly). It’s interesting.
One doesn’t need to be a Christian, or even a theist, to be extremely alarmed at some of the directions that secular ethical thinking seems naturally inclined to go in – especially in its common utilitarian and more generally consequentialist forms…The concept of human dignity is central to any attempt to articulate the strong feeling shared by many (including many atheists) that something has gone badly wrong with this sort of ethical thinking….It’s difficult to say what’s wrong with necrophilia (if anything is wrong with it), or with leaving one’s mother’s corpse out for the garbage collector, without appealing to this concept or something very like it.
Maybe so – but then I don’t think anything is wrong with those two things, given certain stipulations (no one else harmed, etc). These two items would fit perfectly well in ‘Taboo,’ which used to be on B&W as well as TPM (and for which I wrote an essay) but got taken down when the hacker struck, and which is now in the briskly-selling Do You Think What You Think You Think? which I see in good bookstores everywhere. I think necrophilia is obviously disgusting, but that doesn’t make it wrong, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong. Mother’s corpse is interesting, because if you think about it, corpses are basically taken away by garbage collectors, just in a cleaner and more polite manner. Don’t get me wrong, I find the idea repellent and painful, but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. (Leaving aside the law, and sanitation concerns.) Suppose a situation of total isolation, suppose the mother doesn’t know and neither does anyone else, suppose the offspring is untroubled by this arrangement and never regrets is; why would it be wrong? Wouldn’t it be Yuk rather than wrong? Taboo? It’s okay to heed taboos like that (some of them – others are about, say, untouchables, or people of Other Races), because the feelings matter, but if they’re not there and no one else is harmed…?
Now I really am going to have to read that Kass thing…and will in a moment. But so far from your quotes I think he’s reaching for something that’s really not odious. It’s the idea that a human being is a certain kind of thing, and we need to be clear about that, and not treat a human being as a different kind of thing. He strains to say what that kind of thing is with all the Kantian and religious language. I don’t care for the religious language (soul, image of God, etc), and there’s such a thing as saying “dignity” too many times…but still. The thought that humans have a certain kind of special value is not stupid.
One of Kass’s problems is that he doesn’t recognize there are problems with the way we treat animals that merit the same type of analysis. When you treat a human as an animal, you’ve messed up, but when you treat an animal as a thing (as we do in modern factory farms) we’ve also messed up. I’m perfectly happy to say putting a lion in a cage for its whole life violates its inherent worth, or even its dignity. Actually, “its” is the wrong word–symptomatic of our problem. Lions really are hes and shes.
Putting a corpse out with the garbage is another case. A corpse is something that used to be a human being…and so “handle with care.” In images of concentration camps after liberation, there are corpses strewn every which way. This is not a trivial thing. it shows a failure to put corpses in the right class of things.
OK, so now I will read Kass–if I must! He seems like a master of purple prose and a book of his I’ve been reading (“The Hungry Soul”) strikes me as two-thirds nonsense, but I do think there are interesting things in his famous article on cloning–“The Wisdom of Repugance.”
Jean K: “A corpse is something that used to be a human being…and so ‘handle with care.'”
I can understand why, for various emotional reasons, people might feel like this BUT I’m not entirely sure that not feeling like this is wrong.
I think I’m fairly indifferent to what happens to my body after I’m dead. I won’t be around to care. (If someone wants to “pay their respects” to me, they should do it now, when I’m around to appreciate it. Anything someone does after I’m dead is, I think, more about making themselves feel better: not that I have a problem with that, either.)
I suppose you could argue that people who don’t care about what happens to “things that used to be humans” lack some basic quality but I’m not sure I’m convinced by that.
Some thought experiments (so bear with me):
Say that I am a playwright and write one in which I accuse elves of snatching children and using them in blood sacrices. Have I liabelled, and more importantly incited violence against, elves? No, elves do not exist.
Now say I write an anti-semitic play, in which I liable Jews and incite violence against them. I am clearly in the wrong here for inciting violence against people.
Say now that the play is written by anonymous and is performed at Oberammegau. Clearly it is to be condemned (even if you do not think it should be censored).
But now add the condition that pertains in Oberammegau, that there are no Jews (I read somewher the last Jew had left, I assume chased out, in 1923), so that in effect the Jews are now mythical. Have the Jews been liabled?
Suppose that the Nazis had won and there were no more Jews. Say that I am a Nazi playwright and write one in which I accuse Jews of snatching children and using them in blood sacrices. Have I liabelled, and more importantly incited violence against, Jews? No, Jews do not exist.
There has to be something wrong with this argument. The final thought experiment is plausible, I should think.
I know I have not advanced the debate here, but hope that there are useful comments and soemone can advance the debate.
Another take on one of G’s points was nicely encapsulated in a BBC programme earlier this week about Hugh Everett, who was a quantum physicist who developed the ‘parallel worlds’ idea. He was what we now are encouraged to call a ‘fundamentalist atheist’ and asked that when he died his ashes be put in the trash. After keeping them in a filing cabinet for a few months this is what his widow did.
repugnance is a learned response How do you know? It seems very probable that some forms of repugnance are, in fact, instnictive, or at least have a genetic substrate (eg a genetic predisposition to be learned). I agree that that does not mean that it has “a pure intuitive connection to moral truth” but that’s because I think the idea of moral truth is incoherent.
The willingness of a person to cook an infant mammal in the milk of its own mother displays something about that person’s character: It reveals a degree emotional callousness, a distinct lack of empathy with one’s fellow creatures, and even a casual indifference to natural relationships and the bonds of family What you mean is that you have a sense of disgust or equivalent for a person who is willing etc. Don’t elevate your own moral intuitions to the status of moral truths. I do not, myself, share that particular intuition; indeed, I find it sentimental in the extreme. Would you claim that you are more right, or more moral, than I?
“The thought that humans have a certain kind of special value is not stupid.”
No, indeed not – but the way Kass makes the case is.
“In images of concentration camps after liberation, there are corpses strewn every which way.”
Absolutely – but that’s why I stipulated all those conditions, in particular, no witnesses. If there is no impact on anyone else, then is it ‘wrong’?
Now I find myself persuaded by both G’s and potentilla’s arguments. Oh dear…
If there is no impact on anyone else, then is it ‘wrong’? No. (Do you think that the fact that some of us seem to have different intuitions lends some credence to Jonathan Haidt’s suggestions about the various (possibly partly genetic) issues underlying ‘morality’? I don’t have the energy to go and link the Edge piece.)
To persuade you further….I, as you probably know, think other species are just as important as humans. However, I think they are different, both from humans and from each other. They don’t care about all the things we care about, and they do care about other things. There is lots of overlap between some pairs of species, and little between others. We should treat animals in accordance with what they care about, not what we care about. Worrying about seething kids (note not calves, cows and goats are different species) in their mothers’ milk rather than worrying about (certain aspects of) factory farming of cattle seems to me entirely illogical. (I am not making any claims about G’s views on factory farming of cattle, about which I know nothing).
I find it somewhat irritating (had you noticed) to be accused of emotional callousness etc because I know more (I state boldly) about animals than G does.
I am in a bad temper for quite unrelated reasons, so apologies in advance to G and all if this is an over-reaction.
I think the thing about mothers is that, without knowing any more detail, one would suspect a person who did that of also being a person who would break promises to the living, and/or of being a person who would break promises casually. I think it would be quite easy (but I don’t have the gumption right now) to extend the thought experiment to provide the promise-breaker with impeccable moral reasons which would dispatch your emotional discomfort.
It’s surprising (or not) how often philosophical thought experiments are unsatisfactory because they contain too little detail.
Donate your corpse to medical science, so that the students can learn about anatomy properly. A minot upside of our move is that this will become feasible for me, if I get organised.
Oddly, I had the opposite of the mother-in-the-bin problem. My father, who died two years ago, always used to say “put me in a black plastic sack and put me out with the rubbish”. He would certainly not have wanted any religion in his funeral. However, various other persons after his death wanted both the funeral and the god bit. Did I, as his executor and at the time (for various reasons) the person with the greatest standing to make the decision, have any duty to stop them having what they wanted?
Very true about philosophical thought experiments – I can get hugely frustrated with them for exactly that reason. There was that one of Jeremy’s at TP about the children who were kidnaped and taught ‘the scientific method’ and whether they were dogmatic or not. It turned out on questioning (on the phone! this never emerged in the actual discussion) that he meant something quite specific – he meant basically a kind of recipe, a how-to guide, a set of rules for doing a craft, not anything broader about inquiry etc. But because there was too little detail, this was by no means clear – and it made all the difference to what was at stake.
Very interesting question about your father. The obvious (on the face of it) question is whether you think he would have minded – but since the reason we don’t think it’s ‘wrong’ is because he wouldn’t know, that’s not the question after all. So I would say no. (But you might have wanted to stop them on your own account; or you might not have. And the normal thing to do in such circumstances is to use the ‘it’s what he would have wanted’ argument even if one doesn’t oneself believe that it’s a good argument. It’s convenient – unless all one’s opponents think it’s a bad argument too. But if they did they wouldn’t want the god bit. Or maybe they would, for various vagueish reasons – just in case, that kind of thing.)
Why is kidnaped spelled kidnaped? It always looks so stupid…
Hmm. I think you’re missing my point, potentilla. I didn’t say I believed that account: I was simply trying to make it plausible how someone could think that cooking a calf in its mother’s milk is a moral issue at all. I’m with you that such tender concern for one’s dinner is probably overly sentimental. Or at least, that it’s a matter of personal judgment rather than moral truth. (And as to what the animals care about, didn’t I note myself how wildly unlikely it is that the cow would or could know or care?)
More to the point, I simply did not elevate my moral intuition to the status of truth. I suggested a plausible causal psychological connection between such an action (cooking a calf in its mother’s milk) and [1] the feelings and attitudes underlying such an action (i.e. the display of one’s character), [2] the cumulative impact of such actions on one’s feelings and attitudes (i.e. the development of one’s character), and [3] one’s subsequent actions (which spring from one’s character).
I deliberately chose the mother’s milk commandment as a difficult case: If I could at least make the reasoning seem somewhat plausible and clear in that case, surely anyone can see how parallel reasoning applies to tossing grandma’s corpse in the trash, or necrophilia. In fact, I chose the mother’s milk example to separate the reasoning as far as possible from our ordinary *eeuw icky* reactions – because, really, who has an automatic emotional reaction to cooking?
Now I can see why you might think I failed to make that particular example very plausible, and I can even see how you could read the psychological account sketched so loosely in the part you quoted as being just a moral intuition (although it isn’t even really my intuition). I can even see how my “pick the tough case to make first” presentation strategy might be less than ideal. But you had to have based your judgment solely on that passage and completely pre-judged my position without really reading through the rest of my post to miss the fact that my account – actually, the virtue theory account – isn’t about ascribing moral value based on intuitions at all.
Virtue theory is based on the psychology of character and identity development. To think in character terms is just to recognize the rather obvious truth that my actions not only spring from who I am – my beliefs, attitudes, habits, etc. – but that my actions also contribute to shaping who I am. Even actions with no direct moral component in and of themselves can have indirect moral import because those actions over time shape one’s character, and one’s subsequent actions – many of which DO have direct moral import – spring from one’s character.
OB’s deathbed promise example is a classic case, for the reasons she stated: If no one else knows, and if breaking the promise does no one any actual harm (and keeping the promise would do no one any actual good), there is clearly no consequentialist moral reason for keeping the promise. But what kind of person breaks a death-bed promise? Although that sounds like just a rhetorical question, actually it’s an honest question about that person’s character: And the answer seems to be, such a person is not the kind of person I would want to associate with or trust. Such a person is not someone I would expect to keep ordinary promises to me, without some guarantee or enforcement (in which case it’s not really a promise, but a contract). That is a character judgment, and seems to be a perfectly reasonable sort of moral judgment. Further, I think potentilla’s suggestion extension of the thought experiment to provide the promise-breaker with impeccable moral reasons wouldn’t simply dispatch emotional discomfort, it would provide a basis for re-evaluating the character judgment.
P.S. I think that we agree a lot more than we disagree, potentilla. Especially regarding thinking animals are important but different, and those differences are relevant. :-)
Yeah it’s pretty easy to come up with impeccable moral reasons. The promise could be to take revenge on someone, to harm someone – it could be given purely to calm the mother. It’s funny…the mere word ‘promise’ seems to set us up to think that it must be to do something good or at least harmless. Or perhaps it’s promise + mother – so it must be affectionate and thus good. But it could be something terrible – mother could be not in her right mind – etc.
Oh look, here we are back with the killer at the door while the innocent children are hiding in the back room again; do you lie when the killer says ‘Are they here?’ No, you promise to go find them at the library, which is not a lie but merely misleading. Thus we learn that promise-breaking is not always wicked.
I was going to contribute to this discussion, but now I’m too upset about the spelling of “kidnaped.” What? It’s got to have two “p’s” but I just looked it up and it doesn’t. That’s unattractive… in fact repugnant.
I would worry about someone who just couldn’t see any issue about boiling animals in their mothers’ milk, unless they gave me reasons not to worry about them. I have plenty of reasons not to worry about potentilla. Well, actually, I do worry about her…but not because of the mothers’ milk issue. (potentilla–good luck with you move. Now I won’t be able to think of you in the moors, Jane Eyre-like.)
Big relief. Now I’ve looked up “kidnapped” and it’s OK too.
Jane Eyre-like?! Cathy Earnshaw-like! Or Catherine Linton-like.
Heh, about kidnaped. It’s okay with two, but one is first – I think that’s bad enough. I always feel kind of cowardly when I use the second-best two – as if I’m not man enough to use an ugly spelling.
snicker
OK, wrong novel, that’s better.
Next time I write “kidnapped” I will feel bold and brave..maybe even manly.
I’ve never looked up the spelling, so I didn’t know that it was not only o.k. but “proper” to spell kidnapped with one P. That just seems horribly, obviously wrong. Looks like it should read [kid-nayp’d] instead of [kid-nap’d]. What? What would one mean by “with a nape like a kid”?
Also, these things are usually governed by the accent: ‘Canceled’ rather than ‘cancelled’ because the accent is on 1st syllable instead of the 2nd, and ‘repelled’ rather than ‘repeled’ because the accent is on the 2nd syllable instead of the 1st. Now why would the arbiters of English spelling want to go messing that up with ‘kidnaped’? That spelling, by the way, is not recognized as legitimate by my laptop’s thoroughly American spell-checker – which makes my spell-checker smarter than the arbiters of English spelling, in my opinion.
;-)
G
I know, it just seems utterly wrong; that’s why I hate it. And yet it is so.
What is ‘Taboo?’ It sounds fun. Where can I find it?
How about leaving an urn containing your mother’s ashes for the garbage collector? Sounds creepy, but doesn’t seem half as bad as tossing a corpse out the door. Does this mean that ashes have less inherent dignity?
Dare I suggest that ashes are a less weighty matter than whole corpses?
I’m in agreement with Tingey’s comment here.
The word ‘taboo’ comes from Polynesia, in New Zealand Maori the word is ‘tapu’. This is is a concept not fully understood outside the Maori world and even many Modern Maori tend to look at tapu/noa and a dichotomy. “When people speak of ‘tapu’ and interpret it as ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ that is the influence of Christianity. We had the word tapu long before Christianity arrived. – my definition of the word is restrictive, which involves discipline too. All principles have a purpose, and are underpinned by respect and a balance between all things. (Mihinui in Kawharu, M (2002). Williams’ Dictionary of Maori Language give the meaning of tapu as ‘restriction’ and noa as ‘ordinary’ or ‘without restraint’. All this is explained fully in my thesis “Ethics and the Contemporary Archaeology of Human Remains in the Pacific Region’ which, fortunately, few will probably ever get to read!
jakob – here
g – yes, sorry, in fact I already apologised at the end of my comment at 19:45:17 above. In fact, I read your original comment again (honest, I did read it the first time) and decided that, although it still wasn’t quite clear from the wording whether you were merely proposing the thesis that people who didn’t care about seething kids in their mothers’ milk were necessarily a bit morally dodgy as an illustration or actually accepted it yourself, I had enough info about you from elsewhere not to worry that you might really think something so silly (see Jean’s comment at 23:56)!
O – you’re right about the obvious question and why it is in fact the wrong one, in relation to my father’s death. I decided that his wishes were entirely irrelevant (and, conveniently, as he was a man who went through life subordinating his own preferences to other people’s, it wasn’t entirely clear what they would have been, anyhow). I let them have their funeral (a green burial, with some disorganised praying) but I didn’t attend it myself. This was thought somewhat weird of me, but nobody Dared to demur.
On the spelling of ‘kidnaped’ – has anyone looked up to see whether it has, in fact, changed its pronunciation? I don’t have a complete OED in the house any longer. I will set my mother (not in the bin yet) onto it, if I remember. Meanwhile, you can all use ‘kidnapped’ in homage to RLS.
I’m not sure I want to be anybody from WH, but I haven’t read it for a very long time.
The OED (under kidnap, vb) records only kidnapped, kidnapt, and kidnapping, and does not offer kidnaped, even as an alternative in US usage. (cf travel(l)ed.) If you are a member of a public library in the UK, you probably have access to the online OED. For benighted colonials, I’m pasting the entry below:
kidnap Originally, to steal or carry off (children or others) in order to provide servants or labourers for the American plantations; hence, in general use, to steal (a child), to carry off (a person) by illegal force.
1682 LUTTRELL Brief Rel. (1857) I. 183 Mr. John Wilmore haveing kidnapped a boy of 13 years of age to Jamaica, a writt de homine replegiando was delivered to the sheriffs of London against him. 1688 Lond. Gaz. No. 2360/3 John Dykes..Convicted of Kidnapping, or Enticing away, His Majesty’s Subjects, to go Servants into the Foreign Plantations. 1693 I. MATHER Cases Consc. (1862) 241 A Servant, who was Spirited or Kidnapt (as they call it) into America. 1723 DE FOE Col. Jack (1840) 266, I will kidnap her and send her to Virginia. 1809 J. ADAMS Wks. (1854) IX. 316 The practice in Holland of kidnapping men for settlers or servants in Batavia. 1849 JAMES Gipsy xviii, You go kidnapping people’s children, you thieves of human flesh. 1884 PAE Eustace 103, I am not a common seaman, to be kidnapped in this fashion.
fig. 1732 SWIFT Corr. Wks. 1841 II. 669 We [the Irish] have but one dunce of irrefragable fame,..and the Scots have kidnapped him from us. 1850 KINGSLEY Alton Locke x, The people who see their children thus kidnapped into hell.
Hence kidnapped ppl. a., kidnapping vbl. n. and ppl. a., kidnappingly adv.
1798 Anti-Jacobin 22 Jan. (1852) 47 Courteny’s *kidnapp’d rhymes. 1861 Times 10 July, Full freights of kidnapped Chinamen. 1878 GLADSTONE Prim. Homer 110 The kid~napped victims whom Phnician vessels brought from abroad.
1682 LUTTRELL Brief Rel. (1857) I. 187 The witnesses..were..to prove that there was..such a trade as *kidnapping or spiriting away children. 1769 BLACKSTONE Comm. IV. xv. 219 The other remaining offence, that of kid~napping, being the forcible abduction or stealing away of man, woman, or child from their own country, and selling them into another. 1830 SCOTT Demonol. iv. 127 This kid~napping of the human race, so peculiar to the whole Elfin people. 1867 FREEMAN Norm. Conq. I. v. 365 The kidnapping of persons of free condition was not unknown.
1887 Athenæum 19 Mar. 375/3 The *kidnapping grandmother..is not so repellent as might be supposed.
1838 Tait’s Mag. V. 206, I hold it to have been wickedly,..crimpingly, *kidnappingly done.
To briefly revert to the topic, as Why Truth Matters helpfully reminds us, Herodotus noted that the Callatians thought it moral to eat their dead fathers, and horrible to burn them. It wouldn’t be moral to put mother’s corpse in the dustbin in East Oxford, because the dustbin is only for waste that has to go to landfill. Not should it go in the blue recycling box for tins, or the green one for newspapers. It isn’t moral to burn the corpse either, because that’s a waste of valuable protein, and releases poisonous mercury vapour from her tooth fillings. Burying her in an organised graveyard is immoral too, unless it’s a neglected one that has become a nature reserve. In the wild woods is OK, preferably in bits here and there. Or, if it’s important to respect the corpse, stuff it, and keep it in her favourite armchair. Or let the flesh be eaten, but keep the skeleton in a glass case.
Oh pox, why didn’t I think of Herodotus? I wrote that bit, too (then shortly after the book went to press read it in four or seven or ten other items that were talking about the same subject and wished I had said something like ‘to cite the universally-cited Herodotus example’…). And it’s not just that the Callatians thought it moral to eat their dead fathers, and horrible to burn them, it’s also that the Greeks thought it moral to burn their dead fathers, and horrible to eat them.
“I’m not sure I want to be anybody from WH”
No – that’s exactly why I love that novel with a passion – it’s so unsentimental. No one is sure she wants to be anyone from WH. (But I said Cathy because one thing she did have was an intense feeling about being on the moors.)
re: funeral customs. It’s really strange watching movies that show Hindu cremations. (What was that movie…”Water”?) To me it just looks like they’re throwing grandma in a campfire. You see a foot sticking out, etc. Awful, awful, to my western eyes, which expect such things to be done cleanly and invisibly. Obviously there’s a lot of variation in what “handle corpses with care” means, from culture to culture.