The Moral Cannibal

I am reminded of the story about the cannibal who was appalled at the carnage that World War II had brought to his island. "What a shameful waste!" he lamented, "Don't those ignorant savages know that you should never kill any more than you can eat?" While most of us believe that cannibalism is immoral, this guy was conditioned by his culture to believe that it was immoral not to eat his slain enemies. The cannibal was not immoral, he just subscribed to a different moral code than we do.

A couple of posts ago, my esteemed colleague asserted that liberals were more moral than conservatives. I countered that neither side was necessarily more moral than the other, they just subscribed to different moral codes. I cited abortion and homosexuality as examples. Each faction accuses the other of immorality when, truth be known, they are both being perfectly consistent with their own moral codes. While Uncle Ken sort of agreed with me about the abortion thing, he asserts that homosexuality is not a moral issue because the only moral code that condemns the practice comes from the Bible. Although a typical Christian or Jew might say that the fact it comes from the Bible is precisely what makes it a moral issue, I would like to try a different tack. There are lots of things in the Bible that have not been taken seriously in Euro-American culture for a long time, but this is not one of them. While homosexuality has been around since forever, it is only recently that public approval of the practice has become fashionable. I remember when it used to be illegal, then it became a sickness, and now we are expected to believe that there's nothing wrong with it. The conservatives did not abandon the moral code, the moral code abandoned the conservatives.

If you think about it, there is no logical reason to prohibit cannibalism. Well, you wouldn't want to allow people to murder other people just so they could eat them but, if the guy is already dead, what's the harm in it? I don't think cannibalism is even mentioned in the Bible, probably because it wasn't a common problem in Biblical times, and still isn't. Cannibalism just seems to go against human nature in most, although not all, cultures. A logical argument to legalize cannibalism in this country wouldn't attract many converts because, for most people, it's not a logical subject. If cannibalism was to somehow gain popular approval, either spontaneously or because of a deliberate propaganda campaign, there would still be many people opposed to cannibalism. If you asked them to justify their position, they would probably cite common sense and common decency, in spite of the apparent lack of both in their contemporary culture. They may not be able to stop cannibalism, but that wouldn't mean that they had to like it.

 "Very broadly I think the left wants to have the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, which is still pretty vague, but an equal amount of goods for everybody and equal rights for everybody is probably a good approximation." - Uncle Ken
I can agree to "equal rights", but not to "an equal amount of goods". That has been tried and has never been successful on a national scale, although it has succeeded in voluntary associations, which were usually formed around religious beliefs. The only way to enforce this principle on an unwilling population is to confiscate goods from some people and redistribute them to others. A certain amount of that is already being done but, if it's pushed all the way, some people are going to push back, and with good reason. Why should anybody work hard and save his money if he's going to end up no better off than anybody else? There is no guarantee that excessive wealth will "trickle down", but I'm pretty sure that equal wealth will never trickle up. You know, the old lowest common denominator effect.

I have been told by a number of people that smoking around computers shortens their lifespan. It has something to do with the ionic charge that the smoke imparts to the internal parts, which causes them to accumulate dust particles faster. My last computer lasted eight years with me smoking around it. This one has lasted seven years so far with me not smoking around it. I have been smoking around myself for about 50 years and I'm still here, so maybe computers aren't tough enough to take over the world after all.