There's nothing wrong with someone having sex with a dead pig

[jack]

Which things are not import about #piggate

I was completely unable to resist spending about 12 hours making puns about this. But I was probably wrong in that.

Which things are import about #piggate

The idea that the book was written by Ashcroft as an attack for not acceding to more of his influence over the conservative party. This seems likely, I hope it will quickly become apparent how certain it is, and who is to blame for the influence-peddling. But "not giving in to blackmail" is generally a good thing: even if I condemn Cameron for lots of other things, this isn't something I should criticise him for.

Which things are not important about #piggate

I think raising animals to be slaughtered is a bad thing AT ALL. But once the animal is ALREADY DEAD, I don't think it's harmed any more by being used for sexual purposes than for food purposes, it's just a matter of which penis goes in which mouth.

We should be critical of things that are harmful, not things we personally are disgusted by[1]. It can be hard to do that, our instincts often encourage us to be judgemental based on personal disgust, maybe for good reason. But we should avoid that. Lots of people object to being anything-other-than-straight mostly based on their "ugh" factor, even though they try to come up with good justifications for it. And for many other issues. And we don't accept that. But it's harder to accept things that we personally haven't emotionally accepted, or to say "I'll never personally like it, but I'll fight for other people's right to do it." And why shouldn't that extend to dead animals -- it shouldn't be a maybe, it should be a definite.

And that's not because I care about Cameron, it's because the accusation hurts other people who might be accused of it.

I don't know if that actually applies to many people! But shouldn't we practice being accepting whether we need to or not, so when we do need to, we're on the right side?

Except that, my argument sounds intellectually convincing, but I'm not sure I'm actually convinced by it. Surely there have to be SOME things we can mock people for? Or don't there? Am I right?

[1] Insert humorous exception here :)

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

I dunno, but I find the upper-class dude culture of 'put your penis in everything for LULZ' disturbing in the way that it:

- is often intended to create shame/disgust relating to percieved sexual performance, which ties up with weird masculinity things
- there are not many steps from 'we can put our dicks in any inanimate object we like' to 'we can put our dicks in any human we like' - including for explicitly shame-related purposes.

Secondly, animals are defined as creatures who cannot give informed consent but can be violated *while alive*. We identify and punish animal cruelty of a non-sexual nature, and are correspondingly disgusted by posthumous mistreatment of animals other than for food. Where the line is drawn relating to food varies: the whole point of cruelty-free farming is that some people at least believe it is reasonable to eat pigs but not to factory farm and slaughter them.

The other category of beings regarding which we have a concept of 'cruelty' and which we consider to be violatable but not able to give informed consent is (some: children, people past a certain level of mental impairment, people in comas, etc). Insofar as we discourage necrophilia with human corpses it seems reasonable to discourage it with the entire animal kingdom, on the basis that we (in most social groups) have a concept of animal cruelty and of cruelty to humans, but not of, say cruelty to plants.

[liv]

I agree with jack's OP but I also agree with this comment. I mean, in a lot of ways I would be less bothered if Cameron had put his penis in the dead pig because he actually got some kind of sexual gratification out of that kind of thing. But it's pretty clear that the allegation is that he did so as an initiation / hazing ritual and I agree with you that that whole culture of sexual disgust and masculinity policing is really really problematic.

About cruelty to animals, I agree that if it's morally wrong to inflict harm on living animals, it's also morally wrong to do disgusting things to their corpses. I don't think that anything that could be inflicted on the body of a dead animal is exactly equivalent to eating it. That is partly because of the analogy with humans who lack capacity for consent but still have moral rights, I think.

[highlyeccentric]

Put it bluntly, a man who will put his dick in a pig in order that his mates have some weird disgust/voyeurism experience is a man who would take a dare to hit on 'fat chicks' for similar ends.

[mathcathy]

I totally agree with this, it's more about what it says about his character than about what he did.

[jack]

'put your penis in everything for LULZ' disturbing in the way that it:

Right, I should have started from that point of view and I feel bad that I didn't. Thank you for pointing it out, and I am more aware what was bad about the incident.

Quite likely the ethos of those sort of events were terrible. So last night I should have said "it was wrong to pressure people into doing sex things they find disgusting and doing sex things seen as violating" which is true. And NOT made jokes implying "it was wrong for Cameron have sex with a dead pig" which is buying into the gross-out narrative.

[jack]

Insofar as we discourage necrophilia with human corpses it seems reasonable to discourage it with the entire animal kingdom, on the basis that we (in most social groups) have a concept of animal cruelty and of cruelty to humans, but not of, say cruelty to plants.

I sort of follow the logic, but I'm not sure. I tend to err on the side of more animal rights, but:

(a) Humans clearly care what happens to corpses. I think most animals don't (?)
(b) Defacing animal corpses, other than for food (and clothing) is sufficiently rare, if the food industry exists *anyway*, I'm not *more* angry that a few extra corpses are used for another purpose
(c) cruelty is bad even if it doesn't directly cause harm, because it often translates to being cruel against animals or helpless humans. But I'm not sure harming corpses is often like that: the pig incident sounded more like "treating the head as an object" which is pretty normal for meat, not deliberately degrading it.

I'm not sure the problem here is exacerbated by using animal corpses (more than it already was by eating them). But I'm not sure, I'm open to the idea I'm missing a big thing.

[redbird]

It's not just "for the LULZ": it's "to join a club of rich men who hope/expect to be running things and will be able to blackmail each other." That not only perpetuates various sorts of privilege (which rich white men who go to Oxford already have a fair amount of), it makes it harder for those men to break ranks.

[naath]

I against killing animals for teh lulz much more than I'm against killing animals to eat them. Eating animals has historically been necessary for people to obtain a reasonable balance diet; no-one has ever *needed* to fuck a pig. If pig-fucking was a common practice and animals were being killed in order to fuck them, and then not be eaten, then I think that would be a bad thing.

On the other hand I pretty much don't give a shit what happens to corpses, so long as the risk of disease isn't too great. I don't really understand people's moral feelings about "what should happen to me when I die" and a *really* don't understand people's moral feelings about "what should happen to the corpse of an already dead pig".

Also I think blackmailing someone over "this stupid thing you did at university" is very very bad, and standing up to that is good. I never fucked any pigs, but I did do some stupid things whilst drunk, and I wouldn't really want them on the front page of the Mail...

[ptc24]

There's this way of thinking about morality that works by thinking about moral norms; in particular that people acting on moral norms entails them having such norms and thus knowing about such norms. See Kantianism, some modern formulations of Rule Consequentialism, etc. So if I'm disturbed about the prospect of something happening to me, even if I don't actually get to experience it, then I could be harmed by the mere presence of a norm allowing it, therefore such a norm is unlikely to be good, therefore such conduct is likely to be forbidden. In particular "no-one will ever know" never applies because people will know about the norm.[1]

The thing about pigs, I'm prepared to accept that if you prod them with sharp objects you hurt them, and if you arrange their living conditions so that they end up lonely or bored (or whatever) then you harm them that way too, but I'm much less prepared to believe they have the cognitive skills to think about norms among humans.

So if the arguments above go through (I'm not fully committed to this, but I sort-of lean in those sorts of directions) then we can have moral responsibility to dead humans and live pigs without having responsibility to dead pigs.

[1] In particular, if you allow "no-one will ever know" to be categorically dismissed like that, then all of Haidt's "moral dumbfounding" scenarios (which are highly relevant here) stop working, or at the very least become strange hypotheticals, of deeply questionable relevance to the real world.

[ptc24]

Mockery: some people seem fairly happy with the "Punch Up" rule for mockery. I'm not.

I suppose there are two dimensions here:

1) "Friendly banter" - if the target is actually your friend and the mockery is actually good-spirited and you both trust each other implicitly, then mockery can be an expression of that trust. Hint: make sure the person you're mocking really is OK with it all.
2) Something to do with hypocrisy and relevance. The trouble is that with enough spin, you can come up for reasons for everything to be relevant to everyone else (see Meehl's observation of everything correlating with everything else in "soft psychology", six degrees of separation, etc.), you
can come up with principles that make people seem hypocritical[1] too easily, etc. But nevertheless, assuming you're doing it right, then maybe. So the Tory ministers who got caught in sex scandals when they'd been peddling the Back To Basics campaign, maybe. For Cameron, on the other hand... there doesn't seem to be anything relevant.

[1] It always annoys me when people complain about people who are pro-death penalty and anti-abortion being inconsistent, and I'm pro-choice and anti-death penalty. There's this thing some moral philosophers like to talk about called the Innocence Principle, which says that you don't kill or harm the innocent; this covers their position quite well. OTOH it doesn't let them claim to be "pro-life".

[beckyc]

I wonder if this is a topic that veg*ns and non-veg*ns with otherwise similar views about ethics and morality have different takes with veg*ns being paradoxically more meh whatevs (at least based on my veg friends who are almost all non-evangelical)

If you are operating from a viewpoint that unnecessary killing of animals is wrong/bad/wanton/unnecessary/unethical/immoral/ewwww/similar, then it may well be quite reasonable and consistent that this specific ick case does not seem a qualitatively worse abuse of animals. Sure, it's gross, but if you think about things in terms of grossness then it's pretty gross to put corpses in your mouth too and we are socially conditioned not to respond to that or judge others for doing it no matter how gross one finds it conceptually.

Whereas if you *don't* view killing and eating animals because they are tasty and convenient as a regrettable thing to minimise and discourage and yet you also (otherwise) love animals and don't want them to suffer, then I bet it seems pretty abhorrent to go around defiling their corpses, but not at all gross or bad to create the corpses in the first place. I'm kinda guessing a bit though.

[ewx]

With due deference to the possibility that it may never have happened:
Some reasons why you might engage in compromising behaviour in the context of an exclusive society:

(i) You're drunk and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Not great judgement (especially if you're planning to be a politician) but mine wasn't perfect at that age either; then again I never got as far as buying pigs heads just on the offchance, ditto the people I drank with.
(ii) It's an unpleasant bit of hazing but you think you'll get something out of it in the short term (reliable drinking buddies or whatever) so you go along with it. I don't think I'd have gone for it even had the possibility arisen.
(iii) It's an unpleasant bit of hazing but you think you'll get something out of it in the long term. I don't think I'd have gone for it but the question never arose.
(iv) Mostly a special case of (iii), it's an informed precommitment to other members of the same organisation not to tread on their toes in your expected high-flying future public career (because they subsequently have juicy blackmail material), and they do the same as a quid pro quo [and now one has reason to believe retaliation will not happen/will be ineffective/is an acceptable loss]. Again I don't think I'd have gone for it but in the event the question also never arose.
(v) Something I haven't thought of.

The subtext, which is really a bit too blatant to deserve the 'sub', to (iii) and (iv) is that most of us never get the opportunity to make deals involving disgusting and/or embarrassing activities and life-long elite support, but by this point the argument has very little to do with pigs.

[ewx]

…incidentally I doubt my judgement is anywhere near perfect at this age either.