It will probably surprise many people — some of them agreeably — to know that it is not illegal in Germany to eat a corpse, providing you can find one of course. Last year, Armin Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter after he cut off the penis of a man called Bernd Brandes, the willing partner to an unusual banquet. Meiwes sautéed the appendage lightly, and dined on it along with the amputee. Thereafter, Brandes climbed into the bath, where he slowly bled his life away, until Meiwes delivered the coup de grâce with a carving knife. Thereafter Meiwes ate most of Brandes over a 10 month period.
The case continues to test the limits of the principles of justice in Germany, for, as many people point out — even those who find the episode in somewhat bad taste — the ”worst” crime that Meiwes could have been charged with lay in assisting a suicide, since Brandes had asked to be killed (and eaten). The German prosecution is trying to push the charge against Meiwes up from manslaughter to murder. How humiliating for those secular humanists among us to discover how profound the power of taboo remains. Taboo is based on deep, unexamined and often irrational fears. People are entitled to their taboos, but in any society striving to push back the limits to freedom, how appropriate is it to continue to allow taboos to remain enshrined in legislative procedures?
Incest, for instance, is a taboo which remains forbidden under common law in South Africa. But why? Why should taboos often having their origin in religious superstition play any role at all in the domain of law? Most people recoil in horror at the mere thought of incest. This is fine. But there is obviously a minority that doesn’t. Shouldn’t they be left alone to practise the relationships they prefer?
In respect to the age of consent, minors are protected by the law. If that law is not strong enough, we should do something to strengthen it. But if consenting adults in the same family want to have sex, that’s their business. It doesn’t mean that you or I are either forced to do the same, or encouraged to do the same. To say the law exists to protect against the conception of genetically defective children is untrue. Parents have the untrammelled right to conceive when the prospects of other kinds of genetic or congenital disorder are sky high, and they certainly have the right to conceive as many children as they want.
What’s the difference? In any case, who is to say that the practitioners of incest want to bear children? They do have the option of birth control.
The increasing incidence of same-sex marriage, and the acceptance by the state of the ”legitimacy” of such marriage creates a fascinating precedent that may prove to be unbearably challenging for some. If same-sex marriages are now ”legitimate”, can we with any consistency prohibit same-sex marriages between siblings? And where there is marriage there is sex. But take away the procreative function, and the notion of a physical relationship between homosexual siblings or the closely related may well provoke less outrage than a physical relationship between heterosexual siblings. This is odd.
The point is that it remains the job of the criminal courts to interpret and reflect the mood of public morality, but why should this be the case when the morality being adjudicated is strictly the morality of consenting adults? What happens when popular moral feeling is retrogressive, as it was in regard to homosexuality? The extent to which moral view can change is reflected in the fact that adultery was illegal under common law until 1914.
There is another taboo that will probably go right to the top of most peoples’ revulsion list: bestiality. Why? One might say because the animal is not a voluntary party to the arrangement. But since there’s no legal impediment to slitting the animal’s throat after the act (for instance), such a concern for the rights of the animal is selective in the extreme. To suggest that an act of bestiality is an indignity for the animal is anthropomorphic, and if the dignity of animals is to be our legislative guide, we would have to ban animal acts in circuses and the like. It does seem illogical that thousands of bulls can be tortured to death in bull rings every year in Spain, with the full protection of the law, but that a sexually tumescent shepherd on a Spanish hilltop is forbidden to shag a sheep, presumably to protect the alleged interests of the sheep.
I am not advocating cannibalism, incest or bestiality. Why me! My pathetic bourgeois sensibility prevents me from eating veal, I feel guilty when I kiss my second cousin, and to waste my dwindling libido on a sheep when I remain obsessively attracted by the female member of Homo sapiens would be wilfully ovine. But I do care about totalitarian infringements of our rights, one of the most important of which is to exercise our sole discretion in respect to matters of private morality.