Hi everyone,

I'm a bit pressed for time today, so this has to be quick.

>On Mon, 09 October 2000, Paul Kirby wrote:
>
>> More generally, where is it written that cannibalism is wrong?
>

John Foster responded:
>There are some things that are so wrong that they do not need to be
>written down as instructions for the simple and naive.

Not to pick on John here, but R.E. Ewin criticizes the view that John seems
to be expressing here, i.e. that "some things are so wrong" that they are
not open for philosophic discussion.  In a 1972 paper titled, "What Is
Wrong with Killing People?" (cite below), Ewin faults certain philosophers
for an unwillingness to argue the point about why killing (murder,
cannibalism, etc.) is wrong.  He says these other philosophers employ an
argument, he says, "which I find difficult to pin down with certainty but
which I have come across in conversation.  It is a sort of paradigm-case
argument which could be used in discussion of murder, and I think that
there are traces of it in the writings of Anscombe and Geach."

He continues, "If somebody questioned the wrongness of killing people then,
according to this argument, we should simply reply in some terms as these:
'Anybody who doesn't realize that it is wrong to kill people does not
understand what morality is; he has a debased conscience, and I have no
desire to argue with him.'  Compare what Anscombe says: ' .  .  .  if
someone really thinks, *in advance*, that it is open to question whether
such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should
be quite excluded from consideration--I do not want to argue with him; he
shows a corrupt mind' "* (132).
*(Ewin cites Anscombe "Modern Moral Philosophy" in *The Is/Ought Question*,
ed. Hudson 1969, at p. 192.)

Ewin goes on to say that Anscombe probably isn't really arguing what he's
making her out to be arguing--just as there's a possibility that John's not
really saying cannibalism is a paradigm case of immorality.  Nonetheless,
she and John serve a useful purpose for Ewin to make the following point
about remaining open-minded:
	"Be it Anscombe's argument, one related to it, or even one
completely unrelated to it, the paradigm-case argument that I have
described is one that could be used to argue about killing people. 'Killing
people is a paradigm of wrongness; if you fail to recognize that killing
people is wrong then you have a corrupt mind and no understanding of what
morality is.'  This .  .  .  [embodies] the rejection of the idea that
argument is possible, or, anyway, appropriate.  This is a dubious, and
indeed dangerous, claim about anything to do with morality" (132).

And it seems to me that this is the claim John is making in response to
Paul Kirby's question about cannibalism.  It's not about needing
instructions for the "simple and naive."  Again, I'm not faulting John
personally for making this response; I'm saying that his response is
insufficient for saying *why* cannibalism is wrong.

FWIW, Ewin makes the point that the intentions behind the killing is what
matters morally in evaluating the act--not the consequence (death) itself.
It's a very interesting argument.

For example, Ewin observes, "Were euthanasia legal in the society, a man
might make an appointment with his doctor to be killed and thus put out of
unbearable pain, but if somebody knowing nothing of this were to break in
and shoot him, anticipating the doctor out of the sheer joy of killing,
then that act would be a murder and wrong even though it had the same
consequences as an act to which no objection would have been raised.  We
have no need to wait for the consequences before we judge a killing to be
murder and thus wrong; the consequences may be good or bad, but either way
they are incidental to the morality of the act" (129).

Ewin takes pains to distinguish between the mere act of killing and murder
. . . just as we might take pains to distinguish between "cannibalism" in
different senses: for example, as (a) practiced by the Pueblo Indians (see
"Colorado's Cannibals" at http://www.nature.com/nature/fow/ , Sept. 7, 2000
*Nature*), (b) Paul Kirby's use of "cannibalism" to describe survival on a
crashed plane in the Andes, or (c) the surely figurative use of the term
"cannibalism" Ted Mosquin uses to describe anthropogenic extinction of
African primates.

Ewin writes: --"Now, I did not say simply that the consequences are
incidental to the act; I said that they are incidental to the *morality* of
the act.  Whether they are incidental or not depends on how the act is
described.  If it is described simply as killing, then the consequences may
not be incidental to the act: they may be exactly what the killer was
aiming at, in which case they are anything but incidental.  But the
morality of his act does not depend on his having killed, it depends on his
having murdered.  To put it another way, his act is not wrong *in that it
is a killing*, it is wrong *in that it is a murder*" (129, emph. orig.).

Ewin concludes provisionally, "So, if an act of killing is wrong, it is
wrong in itself and not because of its consequences" (130).  In other
words, intentions matter:
"That is why there is still equivocation about the child-killer if he can
really prove that his victim would turn out to be another Hitler; one
really feels uneasy about taking either side in the dispute, which is to
say that the concept is difficult to apply in such cases.  But what gives
rise to the equivocation is not the consequences of the killing .  .  .  .
That he did spare us another Hitler is irrelevant; that he intended to do
so is not.  His intentions, though not the consequences of the act, affect
whether or not he has committed a murder; whether his intentions were
realized is incidental" (130).

This I think helps further explain why John's response to Paul is
insufficient, and also to show why Ted needs a whole lot more analysis to
explain why his metaphoric use of "cannibalism" bears any resemblance to
the ordinary use of the term.  I think it's relevant to ask important
questions like: has there been actual *intent* to make African primates go
extinct?  Why do we think that the conseqence of extinction is morally
wrong or evil?  Why is the use of the term "cannibalism" here relevant at
all?  etc.

Jim T.

p.s. for what it's worth, Ewin himself concludes that even though there
doesn't seem to be any truly effective or knockdown argument that
establishes why an act of killing is wrong in itself, one might still say
in response to his argument: "I am more certain of the truth of the claim
that killing is wrong that I could be of any statement used as a premiss in
an argument to prove or disprove it" (131).  This of course relates to the
themes of practical versus theoretical certainty that we have discussed on
this list previously.

the Ewin cite is:
Ewin, R. E. "What Is Wrong with Killing People?" *Philosophical Quarterly*
22, no. 87, April (1972): 126-39.