Related in some ways to paraphilic cannibalism, but not identical with it, is sadistic cannibalism. A sadist is someone who derives pleasure from inflicting pain on others, and at least as often as not, the pleasure sadists feel is a sexual pleasure. In such cases—and, again, I would include both Dahmer and Fish in this category—cannibalism is undertaken as a means of further degrading the cannibal’s victim. Which is to say that such cannibals do not torture and kill their victims in order to eat them, but eat them as a way of further demonstrating the contempt they feel for them, which contempt inspired them to attack their victims in the first place. In these cases, then, sadism is the paraphilia and cannibalism is merely the means by way of which the killer derives his pleasure. But we can imagine a different sort of cannibalism, one that is not related to sexual pleasure, but the pain and suffering caused by which are pleasant to the cannibal—who practices cannibalism precisely in order to bring about that pain and suffering. I think many of us who are familiar with Hannibal Lecter see something of this sadism in him; certainly, those closest to him—Clarice Starling, Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Lady Murasaki, Bedelia du Maurier, and so on—see something of the sadist in him, and sometimes diagnose him as such. And to be fair, there is more than one instance of Dr. Lecter engaging in what seems to be purely sadistic behavior—the coerced self-disfigurement of Mason Verger, for example, or the murders of the five men who killed and ate his sister in Hannibal Rising. Yet . . . he does not cannibalize Verger, just tortures (and eventually causes the death of) him. Nor does he cannibalize Rinaldo Pazzi, although he kills him and uses his death to produce a tableau worthy of Renaissance Italian art. Although he does eat the cheeks of Grutas and his crew, he does not kill them in order to eat their cheeks—he kills them to get revenge for the death of Mischa. Which is to say that, in these instances, Hannibal Lecter isn’t really acting as “Hannibal the Cannibal.” He’s exacting revenge, acting in a genuinely aggrieved albeit sadistic way.
This leaves us with the very last category within the very last kind of cannibalism: recreational cannibalism. Recreational cannibalism is just what it sounds like: consuming the flesh of other human beings for no reason other than that one enjoys it. Sometimes we eat the things we eat because we’re hungry and they’re all that’s available; sometimes, we eat what we eat because we think it’s good for us; sometimes what we eat is determined by familial or social expectations. But sometimes we choose to eat the foods we eat solely because we like how they taste. And this is precisely what is going on for the recreational—or, we might say, “culinary”—cannibal. Recreational cannibals do not especially require the nutrition that human flesh provides, nor do they participate in cultures where such tastes are encouraged or expected. In addition, recreational cannibals do not derive sexual or sadistic pleasure from cannibalism. They are not, in our somewhat antiquated sense of the term, “perverts.” The pleasure they derive is purely gustatory: they’re foodies. They love to eat.
The thing about recreational cannibalism in this sense of the term, however, is that there don’t seem actually ever to have been any such cannibals. Recreational cannibalism may be exclusively present in myth (the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey), legend (the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”), and fiction (the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Even if there is no evidence that recreational cannibals actually exist, the idea of human haute cuisine fascinates and repels us in a way little else can—and one such cannibal stands head and shoulders above the rest. Once again, as Mads Mikkelsen notes, Hannibal Lecter is “the icon of all the cannibals.” Whereas paraphilic and sadistic cannibals appear to act on forces and motivations that are psychologically out of their control—they are mentally ill, and require treatment—Thomas Harris always presents Lecter to us as far more lucid, far saner, than those other (perhaps more realistic) cannibals ever are. Whatever Dr. Lecter’s ailments, his passion for human flesh is never presented to us as satisfying any need—just a desire. Hannibal Lecter may kill people because he is a psychopath possessed of an irrepressible urge, but that isn’t why he eats people, too. He eats them because he likes it.
Is Cannibalism Morally Wrong?
It is almost certainly our gut instinct to say, without delay and without question, that cannibalism is morally wrong. Certainly everyone who learns of Dr. Lecter’s cannibalistic proclivities dubs them evil—if not also evidence of insanity. But as we’ve seen, cannibalism is a far larger and more complex phenomenon throughout human history (and prehistory) than many of us realize. And that complexity should give us pause, if only for a moment, during which time we can reconsider our thinking about one of our greatest taboos. Is every instance of cannibalism morally wrong—or is it just that we find the thought of eating other human beings to be so revolting that we refuse to allow ourselves to consider the possibility of a morally permissible cannibalism?
Central to many philosophical discussions of the ethics of cannibalism is a distinction borrowed from the ethical discourse about euthanasia, and first employed in the examination of the ethics of cannibalism by the philosopher William B. Irvine in “Cannibalism, Vegetarianism and Narcissism”: the distinction between active cannibalism and passive cannibalism. Generally speaking, active cannibalism is the killing of other human beings in order to eat them; passive cannibalism is the consumption of human flesh from already deceased individuals whom one did not kill for food (p. 12). Since every instance of active cannibalism is an instance of murder, and no one really wants to question the moral wrongness of murder, we can say right off the bat that every instance of active cannibalism is morally wrong. Of the kinds of cannibalism delineated in the previous section, it seems that most of them can occur in either active or passive forms. Only sadistic cannibalism—one of the subtypes of hedonistic cannibalism—seems not to admit of a passive variety.
Passive cannibalism, on the other hand, is more complicated, morally speaking, since it’s really about the ethics of corpse disposal, really. Does a corpse have the right not to be eaten? Almost certainly not, since a corpse is no different in kind from any other dead body, and dead bodies don’t seem to be able to have rights. There are of course numerous non-philosophical arguments against corpse desecration—that it is sacrilegious, or obscene, forbidden by God or the gods. These arguments are interesting, for what they’re worth, but they fail to compel us precisely because they require us, in advance, to subscribe to a single religious or cultural system of beliefs—and we don’t all have the same religious or cultural backgrounds. We might also of course argue that allowing people to butcher, cook, and eat the bodies of their dead fellows, while not itself murder, might encourage many people in our society to become more comfortable with causing harm to living human bodies, too, by way of a kind of desensitization and a gradual loss of respect for humanity as such. But, as Irvine notes, “there are documented cases in which people have practiced passive cannibalism for generations and have nevertheless maintained respect for their fellow humans” (p. 12). Montaigne, in his conversations with a South American cannibal who had traveled to France, certainly found him to be no less human or humane than his fellow Frenchmen (in fact, as we’ve already seen, Montaigne believed the French could learn a thing or two from the cannibals—although not about fine cuisine, one imagines). And while one might wish to raise all sorts of objections to cannibalism on nutritional or sanitary grounds, it remains the case that these are not moral objections. Many things that are bad for our bodies (such as eating raw eggs or getting no exercise) are not for that reason evil.
Thus, beginning again at the beginning, with starvation cannibalism, we see immediately that there is a huge moral difference between passive starvation cannibalism and active starvation cannibalism. An active starvation cannibal is really starving, but—like Alferd Packer or Vladis Grutas—kills to eat. While we might sympathize with their hunger, as well as their willingness to do anything to avoid painfully starving to death, we cannot condone murder, and Packer and Grutas are murdere
rs. At the same time, however, this seems to give us grounds for suggesting that passive starvation cannibalism, however disgusting, is nevertheless not morally wrong. If you are starving to death, and if the only nutritious food source available to you is corpse flesh, I think you are on safe moral grounds preparing yourself a meal.
As for cultural cannibalism, we can again say right away that all active forms of cultural cannibalism—the religious cannibalism of the Aztecs, the political/military cannibalism in Liberia and the DRC, the nutritional cannibalism of the Neanderthals—are morally wrong, at least on any moral belief system that prohibits murder. The passive forms of cultural cannibalism are, however, more difficult to judge. Some religions encourage what anthropologists call “endocannibalism,” the eating of the bodies of deceased members of one’s own community, as the preferred funerary ceremony. While the Greek historian Herodotus noted that there was no amount of money so great that you could pay a Greek to eat the bodies of his dead parents, he also noted that the Callatiae (an ancient tribe from India, who practiced funerary cannibalism) could not stomach the thought of burying or cremating their dead in the manner of the Greek religion (Herodotus, Histories III.38). While it is more difficult to make sense of a passive form of political or military cannibalism (what is sometimes called “exocannibalism,” exclusively eating the bodies of members of other communities), we might return to the example of Montaigne’s South American cannibals, who do not kill their prisoners of war in order to eat them (they execute them for engaging in war against them), but who do eat their bodies after they’ve been executed—which isn’t to say that the practice is morally right, just that it’s not the cannibalistic aspect of the practice that makes it wrong. And one might have a more sympathetic understanding of Neanderthal cannibalism if the Neanderthals had only resorted to eating corpses. All indications are, however, that they killed whole families for food—and this, one probably doesn’t need to add, is wrong.
Perhaps the most difficult form of cannibalism to adjudge with any degree of confidence, however, is hedonistic cannibalism—despite the fact that we do live in a culture that would seem to teach us that doing anything solely for our own pleasure is at the very least selfish, if not outright wrong. As we’ve already seen, all forms of sadistic cannibalism require that the person being eaten be tortured while they’re alive—and, thus, are morally impermissible. Paraphilic cannibalism is in most known cases so closely associated with sadism that it is difficult to imagine someone whose anthropophagic paraphilia did not also involve physical (including sexual) abuse, as well as murder. In fact, it seems most known cases of paraphilic cannibalism are in fact instances of anthropophagolagnia, a sexual desire to both rape and cannibalize the object of one’s desire. This was certainly the case for Dahmer and Fish. But we are all aware of another paraphilia—necrophilia, the desire to have sex with corpses—and there is no necessary connection between necrophilia and rape, sadism, or murder (we might say that most known cases are in fact of “passive necrophilia”). And it doesn’t require a great feat of the imagination to conceive of a comparable sort of paraphilic cannibalism—one that took sexual gratification in the eating of corpses (whether associated with necrophilic desires or not), but was not engaged in murder. Thus, we can say that, if it exists, passive paraphilic cannibalism is morally comparable to necrophilia—which may be illegal and sacrilegious (insofar as it typically constitutes corpse desecration), but is not clearly immoral (since no one is actually being harmed).
By the same token, passive recreational cannibalism—simply taking pleasure in eating corpses, or parts of corpses, and eating them for the pleasure it gives—is not immoral, at least not insofar as it’s cannibalism. If corpses are someone’s property, then passive recreational cannibalism might be wrong insofar as it’s stealing; if it’s wrong to desecrate corpses, of course, then passive recreational cannibalism would be wrong on those grounds—but, again, the eating is not what would make it wrong. (For an interesting counterargument that rests upon conceiving of cannibalism as a sort of disrespect, see Lu’s “Explaining the Wrongness of Cannibalism.”)
Active recreational cannibalism of the sort conducted by Dr. Lecter is decidedly evil, however; there’s no two ways about it. While some kinds of killing—self-defense, war, capital punishment—might be morally justifiable in at least some instances, they are justified in every case by the fact that the good brought about by the act of killing justifies the use of lethal force. That one prefers the livers of census takers to the livers of calves is no such good.
One last note of interest: perhaps the most horrifying contribution to the discourse of cannibalism made by the Hannibal Lecter series is not, in fact, Lecter’s recreational cannibalism itself—but the fact, noted in passing in the Thomas Harris novels, depicted only once in the films (in the prologue to Red Dragon), but ubiquitous in the television series, that Dr. Lecter not only eats human beings: he butchers them, cooks them, and serves the meat to other (typically unsuspecting) people. Hannibal Lecter is renowned for his wonderful dinner parties in the world of the Baltimore elite, and he seems regularly to serve “long pork” in more traditionally consumed meats’ stead. While Lecter himself is engaged at these dinner parties—as he is elsewhere—in active cannibalism, his dinner guests are cannibals too, just unwitting ones. In Dinner with a Cannibal, author Carole Travis-Henikoff calls this “benign” cannibalism, “because the diner has no knowledge of what kind of meat he is eating . . . or has already eaten” (p. 25). So long as one is unaware of what one is eating, and has reasonable justification in leaving the source of one’s meal unquestioned (one has no reason to distrust the chef, for example), then benign cannibalism—as horrifying and disgusting as it might be—is perfectly morally acceptable. But ignorance is only an excuse to a certain point . . .
Once Will Graham and Jack Crawford become suspicious of Dr. Lecter, and specifically, begin to suspect he is a cannibal, then they have every reason to believe that he might be serving them human meat when they join him at table. Over the course of the series, Jack and Will make the transition from benign cannibals to passive cannibals—perhaps passive political cannibals (who eat people as a means of seeking justice), or perhaps it’s some new sort of utilitarian or instrumental cannibalism, but cannibals they are. Once they know that they might be eating human flesh—and the flesh of murder victims, no less—they become morally responsible for what they eat. Their purpose may be noble (capturing the elusive and destructive Chesapeake Ripper), and their intentions good, but they are eating people in full knowledge of the fact (in Will’s case, at least) that they are eating people. That kind of a meal has moral consequences.
And this, perhaps, is Hannibal Lecter’s ultimate goal: he would, were he given the opportunity, make cannibals—or canapés—of us all.
1 For more on Dr. Lecter’s sexuality, and how it might influence his actions, see Chapter 18 of this volume.—Ed.
3
What’s So Bad about Eating People?
BENJAMIN MCCRAW
Part of the enduring interest in the Hannibal Lecter character across the novels, movies, and television series involves the tension of the contrast between his highly educated approach to life and the more typical low-class serial killer found behind bars and stalking victims. Lecter’s diet neatly brings both tendencies together: high culinary skill and imagination paired with the knowledge that . . . it’s people! We tend to associate cannibalism with either faraway tropical tribes living outside the Western world or with clumsy, psychotic serial killers easily seen as sub-human monsters. But Lecter’s different: he’s high-class human plus low-class murderer: finally, a cannibal we can get behind.
We often take Lecter’s monstrosity for granted. He’s a bad guy and all—he kills people and eats them—but we quickly move past this to consider why he’s so engaging, how he reflects us and our society, and so forth. But I want to pause on the moral question too often taken as a given: that he’s a moral monster in his
cannibalism. If Lecter were to make a case for his actions, how could he go about it (assuming that he would go about it)? And how should we think about his cannibalism in light of his self-defense? Can we make good on our moral reaction of horror at his cannibalism?
Throughout the films and television series, we can count about ten of Lecter’s victims that he cannibalizes. We’re going to focus on them even though Lecter kills many more for various reasons: escaping capture, avoiding detection, derailing investigations, and so forth. But we can group the people he eats into three main groups: those he kills early in his life (primarily in the Hannibal Rising movie), those he kills only as dinner (mostly in the series), and a handful of major characters from the movies he kills for reasons in addition to a desire to eat them. I propose that we put on our “Hannibal Lecter hats” to consider each of these groups and how he might justify their ultimate end (in his stomach).
An Eye for an Eye . . . On the Dinner Plate
Lecter’s first instances of murder and cannibalism occur early in his psychological development (emphasizing the “psycho”). In Hannibal Rising, we see the horrors Lecter encounters in WWII—his flight from his home during the Nazi invasion, the death of his parents, and the murder and cannibalization of his favorite little sister, Mischa, by the soldiers holding them prisoner. After leaving the orphanage into which he’s been placed—and where he’s learned to defend himself and others with violence—he travels to France, to live with his uncle and his aunt. His love for his aunt sets the scene for his first murder and act of cannibalism.
Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Page 5
