If my dearest wish is to kill and eat a fellow human being, and if your dearest wish is to be killed and eaten, and if we should chance to meet and confide our desires to each other, and if I should then, with your eager consent, go ahead and kill and eat you, has a wrong been done?

* If my dearest wish is to kill and eat a fellow human being, and if your dearest wish is to be killed and eaten, and if we should chance to meet and confide our desires to each other, and if I should then, with your eager consent, go ahead and kill and eat you, has a wrong been done? Such are the ethical conundrums of the early 21st century. In the particular case of Armin Meiwes, who killed and ate a person he had contacted via the Internet, recording the entire horrid process on video, a German court gave a verdict of manslaughter and sentenced Herr Meiwes to eight and a half years, of which he will probably serve about five. The mild-mannered anthropophage had methodically bagged, labeled, and frozen the flesh of his victim (collaborator? "partner"?), and consumed more than 40 pounds of it during the 21 months between the killing and his arrest. From the point of view of modern rationalist ethics, it is hard to see any objection to Herr Meiwes's hobby. As the video record makes plain, nothing happened that could not be fairly described as agreed transactions between consenting adults. In order to see the mutilation, killing, and eating of a fellow human being for what they are--appalling aberrations of the human spirit--you need to have some conception of that spirit as more than a mere bundle of carnal desires requiring satisfaction. Herr Meiwes has no such conception. To judge from the state of our culture, in fact, Herr Meiwes is in this respect, if not in his culinary preferences, unremarkable.