YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IT in all the Raelian cloning news, but Channel 4 of British television began the New Year with a broadcast about a Chinese performance artist who eats a baby’s corpse. Described by executives of Channel 4 as a “thought-provoking film about extreme art in China,” the documentary features a man named Zhu Yu, who displays photographs in which he washes a stillborn child in a sink and then consumes it. Just for luck, the program, called “Beijing Swings,” also features a man drinking the wine used to preserve an amputated penis and follows hard upon Channel 4’s showing last month of a live-action autopsy. Insisting he could not “find any law which prevents us from eating people,” Zhu Yu suggests, “I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it.”
We need a word for things that are so wrong, it is wrong even to report them–actions to which we somehow lend countenance just by entering into a discussion of why they are beyond all countenance. We saw some of this when Princeton University’s Peter Singer proclaimed that a baby is less important than a pig and that we ought to have a twenty-eight-day trial period before we decide whether or not to let newborns continue living. The problem wasn’t that we’d ever agree as a culture with Singer. The problem is that his position at Princeton made for a season the slaughter of the innocents a debatable moral question rather than an undebatable moral principle–the touchstone by which we are able to judge other moral propositions, like “eating the corpses of stillborn children is evil.”
