In 2001, German computer technician Armin Meiwes met up with another man to eat him. Meiwes had a sexual fixation on cannibalism and posted online ads to find someone with a corresponding paraphilia. After several weeks of communication, Bernd Brandes joined Meiwes at his home, where Meiwes chopped him up and kept him in the freezer over the next ten months. Meiwes was convicted of murder; he remains in prison. But the case raised uncomfortable moral questions. By all accounts, Brandes was a willing participant in his own demise and consumption. Indeed, he probably derived erotic satisfaction from it. To the committed believer in individual autonomy, it seems Meiwes and Brandes were seeking to mutually maximize their utility. Assuming all are consensual adults, why should we prohibit such exchanges?
This case does not appear in Moral Economics, the new book by Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin Roth. The author putatively deals with markets in morally contested products — drugs, marriage, babies, and the like. The topic is a worthy one, yet the book is frustratingly short on either serious moral consideration or, in many cases, substantive economics. Crucially, Roth seems unwilling to seriously interrogate the notion of repugnance, which leaves the reader eager for more.
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