Cannibal sentence touches raw nerve
By Michael Cook
Courier Mail (Melbourne), 4 February 2004

The concept of human dignity has become eroded

The absurdly lenient sentence handed down in a German court last week to a computer technician who killed, butchered and ate a man he had met on the Internet highlights the shaky status of human dignity among lawyers and philosophers.

In March 2001, Armin Meiwes struck an extraordinary agreement with Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, a engineer from Berlin. It was a win-win pact which would gratify both of their kinky fantasies.

Meiwes severed Brandes's penis after administering a primitive anaesthetic of 20 sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps. They ate it as an entree, although Brandes was bleeding to death.

Meiwes, pictured, finished Brandes off with a few thrusts to the neck. He then dismembered the body in a DIY abattoir and froze the flesh. Eventually he ate about 20kg, washing it down with a South African red.

Many people were so revolted by reports of Meiwes's crime that they could not bear to read about it. Even the judges were nauseated by the stomach-churning descriptions of the night of horror. The case was reported around the world and from around the world came a gasp of incredulous horror.

Here was evil beyond the imagination of the most lurid pot-boiler, evil not seen in Germany since the depravities of the Nazis.

Cannibalism, especially the haute cuisine cannibalism practised by an educated German, is not simply a primitive taboo. It is an obscene obliteration of human dignity, worse than the foulest rape. It strips a human being of every vestige of personhood and reduces him to a frozen steak.

And what punishment did Meiwes receive for his literally unspeakable crimes?

Eight-and-a-half years in jail. Within four years, if he is well behaved, he might be free to sip his favourite South African red in a sidewalk cafe.

They could even be four very profitable years. Several producers are already jostling for the rights to make a film from his memoirs. Meiwes might end up earning more money for being a real cannibal than Anthony Hopkins did for playing the fictitious Hannibal Lecter.

The crimes of the cannibal from Kassel constitute a test case of whether criminal lawyers and ethicists are capable of defending human dignity against the depravities which erupt through the crust of social convention.

The German legal system failed the test. Cannibalism is not a crime in Germany. And in mitigation of the murder, Meiwes argued that Brandes was quite sane and asked -- even pleaded -- to be killed. This succeeded in reducing the charge to what we would term assisted suicide.

Fortunately, assisted suicide is not legal in Germany. If it were, Meiwes might have walked out of the courtroom a free man.

But we have no right to claim smug moral superiority over the Germans. The concept of human dignity has become so eroded among English-speaking bioethicists that Meiwes would have no lack of academics to testify on his behalf.

Even in the US, defenders of cannibal rights would not be hard to find.

Leading American bioethicist Ruth Macklin recently sparked a debate in the pages of the prestigious British Medical Journal. She claimed that ``dignity is a useless concept in medical ethics and can be eliminated without any loss of content''. As an example, she said that it made no sense to talk about the dignity of a dead person.

Although many practising doctors indignantly rejected her arguments as ivory tower fantasy, she was strongly supported by the most quoted bioethicist in America, Arthur Caplan.

``There is no inherent property that confers dignity on a human being -- it is a social and cultural decision to confer this status,'' Caplan wrote in Macklin's defence. ``If you look to see what inherent properties generate dignity you will not find much.''

Unfortunately, we might have a chance to test the reality of human dignity. Meiwes told German police that there are hundreds of Internet geeks with cannibal fetishes in Europe. Sooner or later they may surface in Australia. Perhaps we should decide now whether to lock them up or to entertain them on breakfast TV shows.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge, an e-mail newsletter on bioethics. mcook@australasianbioethics.org