by Zack Beauchamp
Justin Smith makes a provocative point:
We might, finally, recall the stunning sex scene with a catfish in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's wonderful 2010 film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Here, the catfish is a reincarnation of a dead loved one, and the sex is an act of love if there ever was such a thing. This is an act of love, moreover, that neither Santorum nor Corvino can fathom: they've got the wrong metaphysics for it. As Wittgenstein would say, they are telling themselves different things. The Buddhist metaphysics underlying Weerasethakul's tale is one according to which species boundaries need not be so rigorously maintained as in the Western tradition flowing from Aristotle, which eventually engulfs Christianity, and, finally, comes to define the secular ethics of the modern world in terms of which same-sex, intraspecies sexual activity has been compellingly defended.
Now Uncle Boonmee is a work of magical realism, a fiction, and should not be taken as representing the sexual norms of any real culture. But the part of our imagination to which this fiction appeals is one that might also help us to maintain a greater flexibility when it comes to assessing the real-world beliefs and commitments of others, and the way these beliefs and commitments lead them to pursue projects that might seem peculiar, or even perverted, to us. And this in turn would enable those of us who are sure there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships to respond to a Santorum-style slippery-slope argument about men-on-dogs with something more subtle than indignation.
This line of reasoning seems directly self-undermining. In response to a commenter who brings up the salient issue of consent, Smith quotes Dan Savage's maxim "better screwed than stewed." But, if we deny a clear moral distinction between animals and humans, then the justification for stewing animals also falls apart. If animals have human-ish moral status, then it's hard not to say animals have rights against being either killed or screwed nonconsensually for human pleasure. That our society conventionally allows one class of injustice against animals is no reason to tolerate another.
The Dish 