Germany sentenced to another 50 years of probation before it can return to Western Civilization.

Clayton Cramer notes that Germany managed to scrape out a manslaughter conviction agaainst a German man who advertised for a person to butcher and eat, received a response and a proceeded to butcher and eat that person. Cramer notes:

Oddly enough, while the article admitted that Meiwes had done this for sexual gratification, it neglected to mention that this was a form of homosexual activity--and that there were hundreds of others who had volunteered to be Meiwes meal.

The story is indeed chilling, as Kramer notes. Hundreds of others had volunteered??? That's chilling indeed. Hundreds of people believed that the destiny of their lives was to be an appetizer for some moral leper's sick form of 'sexual gratification'; that after millenia of human evolution and all the myriad chances that were required for them to live, they were called to be the momentary diversion of a human pustule. And all the German law could manage in its majesty is manslaughter? The Cranky Professor views the verdict more positively than I do; a sentence of something like 8 years is hardly an expression of undying loyalty to the idea the importance of human life. Moreover, the fact that apparently the decision took into account the alleged legal complexities arising from the fact that the victim wanted to die, doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in German civilization.

Of course, this tragedy has been used by some to as a whip to hammer Christianity with its alleged hard hearted attitude toward the unloved. Check out the comment to and this Mark Shea post to get a flavor of the argument. Of course, it is Christianity that defines each human being as ontologically unique and infinitely priceless; modern culture, to the contrary, considers human beings to be animals with overdeveloped cerebrums who can be exterminated before birth on a whim. A whim like killing and cannibalizing someone.

And speaking of the modern culture, Aramvirique makes this point about the Dutch euthanasia law which could be applied as easily to the "complexity" of a person willing to enslave himself to the perverse appetites of another man:

What I mean is this: that by legally sanctioning euthanasia we at the same time sanction a view of human life that is superficial at best and morally repugnant at worst. At bottom, it is a view of life that reduces the good to a calculus of pain and pleasure. Life is held to be worth living to the extent that its pleasures outweigh its pains.

One problem with this philosophy of life is that it erases the claims of everything whose reality is not susceptible to the pleasure-pain calculus. Considerations of honor, of virtue, of patriotism, of the sanctity of life: such values are what make us human. And all such things are either ruled irrelevant or are redefined in such a way that they no longer exhibit their original weight and density. (If we try to define honor in terms of pleasure and pain, as some philosophers have done, we wind up with someone that has precious little to do with honor as traditionally conceived.)