Cannibals
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Why did Rick Gibson decide to eat a human’s tonsils?
It
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 or 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 to this day i decided to eat them instead
Christina 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. 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 some of his work and tell me what you think of it.
Alright, 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 real bacon.
And then there's one more.
Oh, very. Right. So apparently Rick was given two preserved human fetuses and 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 how you dispose of the body after the murder really isn't that important.
Rick 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 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 you're causing pleasure, and you're doing something morally right when you're promoting pleasure in the absence of pain.
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.
How do utilitarian philosophers justify eating human flesh?
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 a 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 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 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.
From Slate, this is HiFi 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?
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Rick Gibson decide to eat a human’s tonsils?
0:01–3:29
2
How do utilitarian philosophers justify eating human flesh?
3:29–7:44
3
What is the theological problem of cannibalism and bodily resurrection?
7:44–10:12
4
How does Aquinas’s thought experiment address a cannibal’s resurrection?
10:12–14:00
5
Why is the indestructible “lutz” bone crucial for resurrection debates?
14:00–19:25
6
Can God simply replace missing body parts in a resurrected cannibal?
19:25–23:30
7
What do modern ideas like cryonics reveal about ancient cannibalism concerns?
23:30–27:30
8
What broader lesson does the cannibalism debate offer to believers today?
27:30–32:39